In societies of hunters and gatherers (native Americans, Australian Aborigines and many others, present and recent past and distant past) scientists were vitally important. Didn't call them scientists, of course, knowing no Greek (and less Latin), but that is what they meant. They were the guys and gals who actually knew how things worked and what to do about them. Oh sure there were witch doctors and shamans, the kind of self-serving eye-on-the-main-chance people you get in every society, making use of 'religion' to pretend they had secret powers and to keep the populace in check with shock and awe. And the scientists went along with the nonsense of casting spells, and sacrificing virgins, and virgin births and sky gods and all the rest of the mumbo jumbo, but they, and other thinking members of the society knew that if you didn't actually understand the sequence of flowering plants, didn't know animal behavior, didn't know about tides and seasons, and soil moisture, and wind directions, and poisonous fruits, and how to work clay and metal, and how aerodynamics helped arrows and spears go straight, and all the rest of the environmental complexity, then you wouldn't survive. You wouldn't survive just because some priest cut the neck of a rooster, or prayed to the god of thunder, but you would if you carefully observed the world around you.
And so scientists have always been our protection against imaginary friends, and mythology, and 'common sense', and witchcraft, and 'life after death', and 'popular belief', and superstition, and astrology, and all of the other paraphernalia of religions past and present. And that is why they, and science itself, have been under such vicious and sustained attack by fundamentalists and their neocon fellow travelers. Smash science, silence scientists, and religious leaders can spout any nonsense they like free of challenge. And, not coincidentally, neocons can push on with their agenda, which requires the same superstitious belief as religion.
But as hunter-gatherers in the past knew, you can't survive unless you actually understand the real world. Imaginary worlds don't feed and clothe you and protect you from storms and droughts. Neocons would see those past societies as being primitive. But we are heading for a much more primitive society as the shamans take over here.