Brazil has confirmed the existence of what may well be the world’s last uncontacted tribe.
So many questions come up I don’t know where to start. Can they really have gone uncontacted all this time? And should we?
What are even the considerations about whether we should? Obviously there’s the danger of outsiders as disease vectors, but what else?
Could it be genocide not to contact them? Is the time coming soon when it will be beyond their ability to catch up and survive in the modern world? Is a gene pool of 200 individuals enough to maintain long-term health?
How can their diet possibly be adequate? I mean, it’s obviously adequate to get them old enough to procreate, but are we robbing each person of 30-40 years of life by not giving them vitamins and medical support?
That’s a tough one. It would be a hell of a culture shock for them at the least. I’d assume the children would adapt to whatever influx of foreign culture well enough but I’m not so sure about the adults. My vote would be to leave them alone. They’ve apparently managed on their own for quite a while; there’s no way of knowing how long they’ve lived there or how many members the tribe had in its heyday.
The inbreeding thing could be a problem due to genetic diseases, but what can you do about it.
Depending on the terrain, if it’s very mountainous or in a deep valley I can see where it would have been harder to get there by land than it’s worth, especially in dense undergrowth and forest.
Their diet doesn’t sound all that bad to me. Grains, fruit, peanuts for protein, and I’d assume that they hunt. Modern medicine and vitamins might prolong their lives, but no guarantee whether they’d take it or not.
It’s such an Americentric view to assume that they desperately need our help. If they’re anything like the Piraha people, they’re probably happier with life than you are. Certainly happier than I am. They should come help US for a change.
200 people is PLENTY to create a viable gene pool. A lot of those people are probably closely related, but we’ve had threads on this board that show that about 32 people is really all you need to repopulate safely.
Apparently, Casey Anthony needs a new place to live, and she could add a bit of much needed genetic diversity to the tribe in exchange for all the exotic Amazonian hallucinogens she could snort…
“Uncontacted” rarely means exactly that. They are almost certainly aware of and probably trade with other indigenous groups. But for whatever reason they’ve chosen to limit that contact. I can respect that.
In any case, it’s not like contact woud transplant them to a suburb of LA. What they’d have to look forward to is the life of a remote indigenous group im Brazil- a demographic that is notoriously famous for lacking access to basic services. I doubt shiny well-stocked clinics would be popping up any time soon. Being “uncontacted” doesn’t make them that much different than their contacted neighbors.
All that is really going to happen is that one way or another they will wventally lose control of their land, and they will probably end up working poorly paid jobs in crappy conditions. Or they may end up “resettled” ito what amounts to a camp, with predictably grim prospects. Indigenous people of any country rarely get much out of “progress.”
“Uncontacted” rarely means exactly that. They are almost certainly aware of and probably trade with other indigenous groups. But for whatever reason they’ve chosen to limit that contact. I can respect that.
In any case, it’s not like contact woud transplant them to a suburb of LA. What they’d have to look forward to is the life of a remote indigenous group im Brazil- a demographic that is notoriously famous for lacking access to basic services. I doubt shiny well-stocked clinics would be popping up any time soon. Being “uncontacted” doesn’t make them that much different than their contacted neighbors.
All that is really going to happen is that one way or another they will wventally lose control of their land, and they will probably end up working poorly paid jobs in crappy conditions. Or they may end up “resettled” ito what amounts to a camp, with predictably grim prospects. Indigenous people of any country rarely get much out of “progress.”
OMG, they NEED television. And I’m pretty damn sure they’ll need deodorant, at the least!
It’s not a matter of how much they need us, but how much we need them. They are an uncounted demographic. How will our marketers know what kind of shoes and shower curtains to sell them???
Not to mention: with that small a population, and without even the technology available to the Amish, any bad-enough traits have had a fair amount of time to die out because they were lethal and those kids didn’t live long enough to reproduce.
And the flip-side to that - if we ‘contact’ them a lot, we’ll share a whole bunch of viruses with them that aren’t a big deal to us, but might kill them.
I agree with this. That’s why I think it’s important to go in now, when their community is not yet falling apart, and learn everything we can about their history and their way of life. The stone age is over. It’s not coming back. Previous encounters with indigenous people on this continent have not focused on preserving their knowledge. We’re running out of opportunities.
This will probably destroy their culture, I know. But their culture is doomed anyway. Their only hope to preserve it is to get in the records, now.
Yeah, they need our help desperately. Just think, if most of humanity lived like that, the human race would have died out hundreds of thousands of years ago.
We should contact them with robots. That way they won’t get any diseases, and we can get valuable information regarding how crazy everyone will go if we’re ever invaded by aliens with super-advanced technology.
