Andrea writes:
"Quite a few centuries ago, actually.  I think it was Tacitus in the 1st
century who started it, although I'm not sure if Herodotus, 500 years
earlier, bought into the noble savage myth as well.  Have to check that one
out.  At that time, though, it was the Pax Romana rather than the white
man's burden, as the Germans whom T. eulogized were blolnder than he."

Mythemes the world over create an 'in group' opposed to the rest of the
world. The People of the Book, the pernicious
Zoroastrian-Judaeo-Christian-Islamic mythological constellation, bifurcate
the world into two ontologically differing groups: those who've chosen the
way of skygod, and those who haven't. That results in a Chosen People in
group pitted against the evil rest of the world. And that's the most
dangerous myth threatening planetary survival. The Paleos, at least from the
Pyrannees to Lake Baikal down to Anatolia, were a culture of the goddess who
didn't put up with such nonsense (cf. Marjita Gambuttas works). 

Regardless of noble savage mythos, the sort Eliade deals with under the
rubric of the Golden Era, our discourse aims at more recent inflections of
that mytheme, ones stemming from the 18th century influencing some
contemporary thinking - and certainly, if you've in the last 35 years stayed
contemporary by reading the late Edward Said's seminal work, Orientalism, a
work having major influence on post-colonial discourse. 

We certainly can't speak for Paleo humans, and they spoke for themselves
indirectly only through the archaeological record. We can, in the best sense
of interdisciplinary method, combining perhaps ethnomethodology,
post-colonialist method, and post-modern method, avoid the pitfalls inherent
to idle speculation devoid of evidential basis, or projecting a contemporary
agenda by means of wild guess interpretation. Just the facts, man, just the
facts, as Joe Friday loved to say. And with that, summoning the traces of
18th and 19th century privileged white male European scholarship in service
to colonialist agendas must be exorcised. What persons prior to that time
might have said is of little impact on contemporary attitudes and
hermeneutical biases - remembering that between the fall of the Roman Empire
western culture spent ten centuries encumbered by the ideological domination
of non-sense by the Holy Roman Empire/Church, leaving notions of classical
learning well in the dust - most of which was censored, and most of which
was preserved and returned to the West due to the golden age of Islam.

best