Yes, it is. With respect to the Yamomani, I've read a plausible argument that it was whites, giving them steel axes and even shotguns, that really caused their problems. But everything you read nowadays about primitive cultures is so politically charged that you've got to take it all with a grain of salt. (You're probably familiar with the
Darkness in El Dorado controversy.)
Obviously, in a forum where what we post is limited, not just by the technology but by others' patience in reading, a complicated argument can't be made in much detail.
That's why I referred to gas chambers and nuclear weapons, things which are products of advanced cultures, and used the phrase 'loosely coupled' to suggest that the connection between advanced technology and advanced morality is not some rigid, linear one.
So, for example, slavery is almost a human universal -- when tribes get advanced enough so that enslaving a defeated enemy makes more sense than just killing him. But as societies advance technologically -- and get the technology to put their enslavement on an industrial scale, as the Europeans did -- advanced morality comes creeping up behind. And eventually those Europeans abolish slavery.
Please note: I am NOT making a 'Europeans are superior' argument, and not even making the 'technologically advanced people are superior' argument, if by 'superior' we're talking about some innate essence. I think that the question of which peoples advance, and which stagnate, is largely due to historical accidents -- the English behind their channel don't need a monarch with a large standing army, and thus can develop the concepts of limited government. And as I said, even a minimal knowledge of history shows that advanced civilizations took root in several places outside Europe, while Europe stagnated.
Another point to note is that there are virtues cultivated in more primitive societies which are recognized as virtues by advanced societies, which themselves have them only in diminshed degree. I think these are mainly the group-above-self virtues, which individualistic capitalist society tends to undermine.
But then, as the industrial revolution progresses, illiterate peasants, or their children, become urban factory workers. Their children get sent to public schools. They absorb the idea that the world around them is understandable, not just an unchanging mysterious product of sky-gods. Such people are harder to treat like sheep, as witness Hong Kong and Sudan at the moment.
Of course all of this development is contradictory and uneven. But it seems to me that the trend is clear, even though, as someone put it, even among advanced peoples, "in the 21st Century lives the 13th".
I'm really making a quasi-Marxist argument, as you will probably recognize -- base and superstructure and all that . The question of the loose coupling of advanced social institutions and advanced economies, and the existence of contradictory tendencies alongside technical advance, was argued out by people much more clever than me back in the first part of the 20th Century, when some Marxists tried to apply the insights of Marx/Engels in a very mechanical way.