ABSTRACT
A major incentive to present this material is the fact that there is hardly anything published (either in English or in German) about this particular episode in the history of hunter-gatherer studies. German-language anthropology during the final decades of the nineteenth century was largely characterized by opposition to British and American treatises of social and cultural evolution. Even Adolf Bastian - who laid the institutional foundations for modern German anthropology and later became the evolutionist scapegoat for his diffusionist critics - could hardly be called an evolutionist, either in terms of biology or of sociology. For Grosse, the difference between lower and higher hunters seems to be primarily a quantitative one, that is higher hunters have much higher yields due to more advanced technologies and a richer environment. Some of the ethnographic monographs triggered by W. Schmidt's theories, however, remain relevant and useful up to the present day.
