Levi-Strauss' The Savage Mind
a book that "[takes] seriously the idea that early humans were our intellectual equals"
"his famous argument [in] The Savage Mind [is] that mythological thought, rather than representing some sort of pre-logical haze, is better conceived as a kind of 'neolithic science' as sophisticated as our own"
the "science of the concrete" (238)
see also his "[l]ess well-known [...] early writing on politics" (including politics among the Nambikwara in Brazil)