Yeah I dunno, the Caddo and Wichita were pretty serious about folk science. They had real villages and farms and stuff. They weren’t just kinda camping out and going with the flow wherever ancestral memory took them.
Yeah, I'm not saying nobody outside of modernity thinks about "what" but that many cultures didn't/don't. And it's not even a matter of primitivism and in no way suggests some kind of meager culture. It just turns out that sophisticated cultures have gotten by without an exhaustive theory of "what", and that modernity's particular obsession is an idiosyncrasy rather than either an accomplishment or a universal.
(Edit: although, re-reading my comment from earlier, I can see what you responded to in it. I could have written it more clearly.)
