We are (or at least, most of us are) individually primitive. I don’t know how to make my clothes and shoes, how to gather food, how to build a shelter. I buy paintings, I watch on TV how other people do so many things and explore other worlds. Maybe ‘societally disabled’ is more appropriate then ‘individually primitive’?

Dependent as we are upon modern technology, what may interest us most about ancient Pacific Islanders is how they accomplished so much with so little. We may call them ‘stone age’, for they had no metals. We may call them ‘pre-literate’, for they had no alphabet. The Arabic system of numbers and the invention of the wheel did not reach them On islands without clays, the pottery skill of their Proto-Polynesian ancestors was forgotten. Yet without much of what we regard as essential to modern life, with only the meager material resources of their environment, they explored Earth’s largest ocean and progressed beyond mere survival to build a culture of surprising affluence and complexity. [...]

Their spaceship was the voyaging canoe. Built with tools of stone, bone, and shell, assembled with lashings of braided fiber, and powered by sails of plaited matting, it was the finest product of any culture that knew no metals.

H.B. Kane: Ancient Hawaii, Kawainui Press, 1998.

Each civilization has its own measures of civilization.