Technologically primitive people were considered evolutionary vestiges of human descent from apelike ancestors. The displacement of such peoples by colonists from industrialized societies exemplified the survival of the fittest. With the later rise of genetics, the explanations were recast once again, in genetic terms. Europeans became considered genetically more intelligent than Africans, and especially more so than Aboriginal Australians. Today, segments of Western society publicly repudiate racism.
Westerners continue to accept racist explanations privately or subconsciously.
In Japan and many other countries, such explanations are still advanced publicly and without apology. Even educated white Americans, Europeans and Australians, when the subject of Australian Aborigines comes up, assume that there is something primitive about the Aborigines themselves. They certainly look different from whites. Many of the living descendants of those Aborigines who survived the era of European colonization are now finding it difficult to succeed economically in white Australian society. Here were two successive experiments in human development, in which the environment was identical and the sole variable was the people occupying that environment.