Perhaps because Boas, like other early anthropologists, was originally trained in the natural sciences, he and his students never expressed such anxiety.

'The peasants are conservative' view combines early anthropologists and Marxists in its supporters.

This systemic approach to a society shows the anxieties of the earliest anthropologists to capture the reality without reducing the complexity of a given community.

(Some early anthropologists subscribed to the now-disproven hypothesis that all societies move from matriarchy to patriarchy as they advance.)

Recently Le Gros Clark (1957) criticized the over-confidence of earlier anthropologists who were often prepared to draw far too many conclusions from a single specimen.

Paul Topinard, an early physical anthropologist, associated monogenism with backwardness and narrow intellectual horizons.

Unlike Todas, Kotas ate meat and were in good physical condition when met by early anthropologists.

Many of the matrilineal communities studied by early anthropologists changed very rapidly, allowing later anthropologists to believe that patriarchal or patrilineal relations were the norm.

Vere Gordon Childe said of the early cultural anthropologists:

As an ethnologist and early anthropologist, Powell was a follower of Lewis Henry Morgan.