Anthropology has spent a century treating small-scale societies as windows into our shared past, but I think that framing is actively misleading. When I studied the Hadza or the Yanomami, I noticed how much their social structures are shaped by modern pressures like tourism, missionization, and even our own research presence. Is it honest to call them 'living fossils' when their current circumstances are so entangled with global capitalism? The label flattens their agency and ignores that they, too, are evolving in response to now, not frozen in some ancestral mirror. Maybe we need to rethink whether anthropology's obsession with the 'traditional' does more harm than good to the people we claim to understand.