Isolated Tribe in Amazon Found

[Kanastrous]

ghetto edit - if brandishing their (probably) deadliest and longest-range available weapons at people from our side, when they are just flying past doesn't look like sentiments in the mold of "get the fuck off our land,"* what does it take?


okay, "get the fuck out of our airspace;" same basic sentiment

[Rahvin]

ghetto edit - if brandishing their (probably) deadliest and longest-range available weapons at people from our side, when they are just flying past doesn't look like sentiments in the mold of "get the fuck off our land,"* what does it take?


okay, "get the fuck out of our airspace;" same basic sentiment

"Your appearance and sound are totally alien to me, and I am confused and afraid. I will prepare to defend myself in case you attempt to harm me."

Brandishing weapons doesn't necessarily mean "trespassers will be shot," not when the villagers have never before seen anything like an airplane.

[Straha]

That thought-process, that we know best and they should have no input, sickens me a little inside. We have the duty to give them an option, and then to respect their choice. Whether their choice is telling us to get the fuck off their land, a grateful acceptance of medicine and some anti-biotics, or the choice to try to integrate more with "western" culture. That's the long and short of it.

I doesn't impress me as reasonable, to suppose that a stone-age society can be given a sufficient grasp of what the outside world is like, to make an informed choice. And if you aren't enabling the making of an informed choice, you're doing them no favors.

You don't need to tell them what the outside world is. You can have increments. First, medicine and anti-biotics. Then a doctor. Then more. With them always having the choice. I'm not advocating we pick them all up and drop them in Rio or Cuzco here, but that we give them the choice to improve their situation.

If we're sending someone in to talk up the virtues of antibiotics, crop rotation and water-purification tablets, I hope we're responsible enough to make sure the pitch includes a detailed rundown of what has happened to so many groups like their own, once in contact with the larger outside world. Hearing that, I wonder how enthusiastic they'd be. Heck, I wonder if anyone on the first-contact team would make it out, alive.

Sure you can. Say "We'll help you with medicine and sanitation. If you want to integrate more, you can. But some people have 'progressed' too soon and they ended up regretting that decision very much, often times because it wasn't their decision. So be wary of doing too much too fast, but just receiving medicine, water pills and some medical help wont require anything more than either a man from a different tribe living in a house nearby or periodic visits from said man to the village."

And, for all the talk about antibiotics, clean water, etcetera, is that really the experience of tribes like these, post-contact? In nations where people in the urban centers can't rely upon supplies of medicine and clean water, it seems pretty dishonest to suggest that we can count on a small group of forest-dwellers being better cared-for.

Some medicine > None at all.

ghetto edit - if brandishing their (probably) deadliest and longest-range available weapons at people from our side, when they are just flying past doesn't look like sentiments in the mold of "get the fuck off our land,"* what does it take?

I take it for "HOLY SHIT WHAT THE HELL IS THAT THING AND WHAT DOES IT WANT!?! PROTECT THE CHILDREN!" (These people have to protect their village from predatory animals. It's instinct.) If I saw a UFO going up and down my street I'm pretty sure I'd flip out too. Doesn't mean I'd say no if the aliens then offered life extending treatment and drugs to help cure, say, the common cold.

[Kanastrous]

ghetto edit - if brandishing their (probably) deadliest and longest-range available weapons at people from our side, when they are just flying past doesn't look like sentiments in the mold of "get the fuck off our land,"* what does it take?


okay, "get the fuck out of our airspace;" same basic sentiment

"Your appearance and sound are totally alien to me, and I am confused and afraid. I will prepare to defend myself in case you attempt to harm me."

Brandishing weapons doesn't necessarily mean "trespassers will be shot," not when the villagers have never before seen anything like an airplane.

How far do we have to intrude upon them, before their "go away" behavior can start to be taken seriously?

[Gigaliel]

ghetto edit - if brandishing their (probably) deadliest and longest-range available weapons at people from our side, when they are just flying past doesn't look like sentiments in the mold of "get the fuck off our land,"* what does it take?


okay, "get the fuck out of our airspace;" same basic sentiment

"Your appearance and sound are totally alien to me, and I am confused and afraid. I will prepare to defend myself in case you attempt to harm me."

Brandishing weapons doesn't necessarily mean "trespassers will be shot," not when the villagers have never before seen anything like an airplane.

How far do we have to intrude upon them, before their "go away" behavior can start to be taken seriously?

When they understand we're a highly advanced 'tribe' and not evil demon birds? That'd be a good start.

I'm curious what the alternative to contact is. Are we going to set up culture reserves where they'll be protected? Is there any precedent for that? Most of the tribes I've read about have -some- contact with anthropologists, if anything. That's a bit of a 'duh' but still.

Someone needs to be talking to these people. How will we know if we're doing bad things to them if no one is going to tell us? Do we just let them die until we have an oops moment? A minimal amount of contact is needed if we just want to preserve them. Possible help is a bonus.

[Kanastrous]

They seem to have a decent handle on preserving themselves.

The alternative to contact, is no contact. Ideally, set up a militarily-enforced exclusion zone around them, with a couple hundred miles' buffer region, and let them be.

Although I'm not optimistic about resources being allocated, to a plan like that.

[Alyrium Denryle]

Don't strawman. With the proper method of approaching the tribe and contacting them we can reduce to next to nil the possibility of passing on communicable diseases to them, which renders the entire "We'll be forcing them into our custody, forever!" fantasy moot. And if done through another tribe they'll be insulated enough from western culture as to make any "cultural contamination" minimal, at worst.

Will this be done? The answer is probably no. You can keep your pie in the sky dreams of a perfect introduction. But that almost never happens, and it will not happen with the corrupt local governments and their business interests involved. Can you say "Merck Pharmaceuticals" and "bioprospecting"? Not that bioprospecting is bad, but it WILL be done to these people's detriment.

How pray-tell are you going to use another tribe to do this? A tribe that has already been partially westernized, does not actually speak the language these people use, and who just might be interested in their territory? Think this through.

Tribes that have successfully integrated with western cultures are typically the ones that traded with other tribes to start with, and even they have had to deal with a lot of crap. You know where tasty tasty tapioca comes from? Manioc root. It is the staple carbohydrate source for at least one tribe that I know of, one which does not actually own their own land and are in fact in constant debt to western landlords... That is the most likely result of even the most gentle disease-free introduction.

First, if contact really will make them go extinct without our help, then we'd better make sure it's a responsible entity makes contact with them and not, say, illegal loggers who wont give a shit for their welfare.

Well now we have an excuse to increase the size of protected areas of the Brazilian rainforest now dont we?

Hell, we can even take an action I have advocated for some time... slitting the throats of rainforest loggers in the night. (kidding...sort of... fucking vultures)

Namely taking charge of them and saying that we're the ones best informed to govern their future?

No. In this respect we are only taking charge of our own actions. ANd this is something you forget. They are not equipped to make an informed choice

In order for them to actually make an informed choice we have to expose them to more than just the idea we plan on giving them. To give them sanitation for example, or running water, requires the logistics train involved in each of those things. Or medicine? Actually, I will save medicine, food and such for later on in this post.

That thought-process, that we know best and they should have no input, sickens me a little inside. We have the duty to give them an option, and then to respect their choice. Whether their choice is telling us to get the fuck off their land, a grateful acceptance of medicine and some anti-biotics, or the choice to try to integrate more with "western" culture. That's the long and short of it.

You talk about this duty, while discarding and minimizing the massive risks involved.

You don't need to tell them what the outside world is. You can have increments. First, medicine and anti-biotics. Then a doctor. Then more. With them always having the choice.

Are you high? In order to make an informed choice they have to know the consequences of the choice. Of course, this gives me the perfect opportunity to rant on medicine.

Sidestepping the confusion on their part when we try to tell them (without knowing their language) that we can help them cure diseases, because that wont go over well until they have integrated to an extent, they simply dont need it.

Seriously, they actually have lower rates of disease than we do, because they live in small isolated populations with a limited number of pathogens which have placed their immune systems under tremendous evolutionary pressure to co-exist with. The ones they need medicine for, they have their own. Plant compounds FTW! Hence Merck and bioprospecting. We introduce antibiotics, and we kickstart natural selection on their pathogens, in addition to introducing OUR pathogens.

Now, a lot of "uncontacted" tribes have had contact with the occassional woodtapper, or somesuch, but that is a far cry from deliberate contact with the goal of introducing them to our technology, which requires concerted long-term interactions.

Now for sanitation and clean drinking water.

Flatly. They also, dont need this. God I love it when people think that these people are suffering because they dont have flush toilets or water purification tablets. They dont. Why? Because the rainforest has one of the most efficient sanitation systems you will ever see. Take a crap in the forest and there will be dung beetles feeding the shit to their offspring in a few minutes. Rolling it into little balls and burying it. To say nothing of bacteria and other insects. They are not wallowing in their own filth. As for water purification... same deal Their bodies have adapted to deal with the bacterial loads. If we drank their river water, or rain-collections we would probably die. But not them. They think that water is tasty.

Some medicine > None at all.

Again, the medicine they actually need, they already have.

[Alyrium Denryle]

I'm curious what the alternative to contact is. Are we going to set up culture reserves where they'll be protected? Is there any precedent for that? Most of the tribes I've read about have -some- contact with anthropologists, if anything. That's a bit of a 'duh' but still.

Someone needs to be talking to these people. How will we know if we're doing bad things to them if no one is going to tell us? Do we just let them die until we have an oops moment? A minimal amount of contact is needed if we just want to preserve them. Possible help is a bonus.

There is that. a lone anthropologist who spends 20 years interacting with without actually introducing tech and who's blood is a cocktail of antivirals I would be willing to accept. But the sort of invasive, almost victorian attitude I see displayed here in terms of "helping" them is another matter entirely.

But as far as the alternative to contacting them in a "helping way, is indeed to set up a protected area and enforce it.

[Rahvin]

ghetto edit - if brandishing their (probably) deadliest and longest-range available weapons at people from our side, when they are just flying past doesn't look like sentiments in the mold of "get the fuck off our land,"* what does it take?


okay, "get the fuck out of our airspace;" same basic sentiment

"Your appearance and sound are totally alien to me, and I am confused and afraid. I will prepare to defend myself in case you attempt to harm me."

Brandishing weapons doesn't necessarily mean "trespassers will be shot," not when the villagers have never before seen anything like an airplane.

How far do we have to intrude upon them, before their "go away" behavior can start to be taken seriously?

"Go away" is only one possible interpretation of their actions. It is still entirely possible that contact with another human being instead of a large noisy flying monster would be treated favorably.

You're acting as if defensive posturing towards a completely alien entity can exclusively be interpreted as hostility towards outsiders and an isolationist attitude. That is not necessarily the case.

What would your reaction be to a large, very noisy flying monster above your house? Would you attempt peaceful overtures, or would you more likely act out of fear and confusion? If the latter, would that preclude you from reacting in a friendly manner towards other human beings who are obviously unarmed?

The fact is, there is absolutely no way to tell whether this tribe would be friendly or hostile towards outside contact until contact is attempted.

[18-Till-I-Die]

You know...

I cant help but think that, somewhere lightyears away, some alien culture is having this seem discussion on some AI driven forum after a few of their ships buzzed too close to Earth and got photographed.

Grog: "Listen, we cant just waltz into their closed environment and expect them to react well. They've never even been exposed to Feklir, for all we know it may annihilate them as a species, and thats not even going into what will happen to their society when the Templars of Scrin have a go at them!"

Lurd: "Oh come off it Grog! These people are barely scraping out an existence on that rock, they don't even know how to get cold fusion working yet. Ethically we're obligated to at least try and give them some functional replicators or jump-drives."

Shrin: "You know...i wonder if they have this same problem with undiscovered tribes on their own world?"

Grog: "GTFO Shrin..."

Lurd: "Wasn't he banned or something?"

[Kanastrous]

"Go away" is only one possible interpretation of their actions. It is still entirely possible that contact with another human being instead of a large noisy flying monster would be treated favorably.

The records of previous first-contacts with rainforest tribes that I have read, uniformly describe hostile responses to outsiders, even when they were on foot and obviously human beings.

Do these guys break the mold? Maybe. But I would like to see evidence that they are so unlike other groups in the region, that they welcome the arrival of outsiders, rather than loathe it.

[Kanastrous]

ghetto edit - and, really, the whole "let's go in and ask them if they want to be contacted" is sort of pointless, unless we're going in under rules explicitly stating that anything less than an immediate welcome-with-open-arms means fuck off and don't ever come back.

[Oni Koneko Damien]

This whole argument is a massive fucking strawman. Pay some guy to live in a house by their village for a couple of years after learning their language, teaching them how to purify water and use alcohol for basic antiseptics. You've just massively improved their lives without all this bullfuckery red herring shit about "taking them and putting them in cages". Jesus, did you miss the entire point? We're not FORCING them into doing anything.

Oh yes, and even if this person somehow manages to learn a language that it's entirely possible no one in the world other than this tribe speaks, and is miraculously accepted into this tribe...

...exactly how are we going to be sure he's not carrying anything that, while harmless to us, is fatal to them? The only way to be sure about that is to *drumroll* ...innoculate them, which means pretty much putting them through everything I just said.

Look, I'm all for bringing better things to them, but at the moment, the evidence seems to indicate that it's not worth the risk of introducing them to the slew of diseases we're already immune to, and making them immune as well will involve, likely, completely shattering them.

[Rahvin]

"Go away" is only one possible interpretation of their actions. It is still entirely possible that contact with another human being instead of a large noisy flying monster would be treated favorably.

The records of previous first-contacts with rainforest tribes that I have read, uniformly describe hostile responses to outsiders, even when they were on foot and obviously human beings.

Do these guys break the mold? Maybe. But I would like to see evidence that they are so unlike other groups in the region, that they welcome the arrival of outsiders, rather than loathe it.

Evidence of any sort is difficult to establish with a tribe that has never been contacted. In the absence of data, no conclusion can be reached.

Caution would be an obvious necessity when approaching any isolated culture, of course, and initial hostility may be encountered even if the society will eventually welcome contact with other cultures once it is shown that the other cultures mean them no harm and may be able to help them.

[Kanastrous]

initial hostility may be encountered even if the society will eventually welcome contact with other cultures once it is shown that the other cultures mean them no harm and may be able to help them.

Does your reading of the history of contact between primitive groups and the larger technological civilization outside, lead you to conclude that the likely outcome will be positive, for the primitive group?

Can't we learn anything from the horrific experiences of other primitive groups plowed under by contact with he modern world?

[Boyish-Tigerlilly]

Are you suggestions, Kanastrous, that we have some sort of Start Trek-like Prime Directive, where we just let natives wallow out of fear of contacting them?

[hongi]

I find it amusing that all over the internet, such vigorous discussions are being played out, and the tribe is blissfully unaware that the entire world is debating whether to contact them or not.

[Bob the Gunslinger]

The records of previous first-contacts with rainforest tribes that I have read, uniformly describe hostile responses to outsiders, even when they were on foot and obviously human beings.

Do these guys break the mold? Maybe. But I would like to see evidence that they are so unlike other groups in the region, that they welcome the arrival of outsiders, rather than loathe it.

Why would a community of hunter gatherers just barely scraping by* want to welcome outsiders whom they could only understand as being competition for the meager resources available to them and possibly violent bandits. How could you miss the many tirades against humanity's instinctual tribalism on this board?


How else would you expect a tribe to meet outsiders?

Christ, haven't you ever seen Meerkat Manor?



*Certainly if they were prosperous, they'd have expanded to the point where they would have been discovered by now. Surely, a society with no birth control that isn't riddled with death and disease would have had numbers far too large to hide from civilization centuries ago?

[Superman]

Excellent. My plan of traveling to a primitive culture and declaring myself supreme deity will now go into effect.

"This is my boomstick!"

Primitives gasp in shock and awe.

[Superman]

Wait a minute, they fired at the airplane? Pfff... Those straw huts aren't going to provide much protection from napalm. Scramble the bombers, I say!

[hongi]

More info:

Anthropologists say almost all of these tribes know about western civilization and have sporadic contact with prospectors, rubber tappers and loggers, but choose to turn their backs on civilization, usually because they have been attacked.

"It's a choice they made to remain isolated or maintain only occasional contacts, but these tribes usually obtain some modern goods through trading with other Indians," said Bernardo Beronde, an anthropologist who works in the region.

"First contact is often completely catastrophic for "uncontacted" tribes. It's not unusual for 50 percent of the tribe to die in months after first contact," said Miriam Ross, a campaigner with the Indian rights group Survival International. "They don't generally have immunity to diseases common to outside society. Colds and flu that aren't usually fatal to us can completely wipe them out."

[ray245]

Just a question...is it possible for these isolated tribe to develop agriculture and slowly advance to a bronze age technology level?

It will be interesting to see an isolated bronze age level civilzation coming into contact with the rest of humanity...

[Master of Ossus]

Just a question...is it possible for these isolated tribe to develop agriculture and slowly advance to a bronze age technology level?

It will be interesting to see an isolated bronze age level civilzation coming into contact with the rest of humanity...

That seems highly unlikely. Agriculture and even primitive metal working is extremely difficult in such climates. Even the Inca possessed only extraordinarily rudimentary metalcrafting knowledge, and they lived in a region substantially more hospitable to it.

[anybody_mcc]

They're a tiny population which has a very old method of survival going for them. Who's to say that our methods for sanitation (they have a very large amount of empty forest to go shit in as needed) medicine (if they are like a lot of forest tribes, they have developed their own pharmacopeia, from the forest around them) agriculture (what does a small hunter-gatherer population need agriculture for, if they live in a forest naturally full of food plants and animals?) and...communication? I think those upraised bows are communicating something to us very clearly, if only we choose to pay attention...

This is the most insipid bullshit I have seen here in a long time. By all means show me how stone age living provides clean water, or that clean water is not in high demand at any level of society. That their own medicine is superior is beyond even defending, it is the same bullshit behind the idea that holistic medicine is superior to science. Agriculture lets them have food all the time rather then being dependent on successful hunts and the whims fo the seasons. Your communication example just goes beyond retarded and into "kill yourself you ignorant slut" range.

Does it occur to you at all that the entirety of human existance consists of us working our assess off to get away from the way of life you now look back upon fondly? That given the option of joining the rest of us or staying the way they are, some of them might choose to not be living on the edge of death all the damn time?

I mostly agree with you, but more people died of famine in agricultural societies than in hunter-gatherer societies, at least until recently. That does not really change your point, I just wanted to point out that agriculture in itself may not be such a great gift, the others on the other hand are.

[Mayabird]

Actually, before anyone tries to contact them, people should do what we're generally doing now, which is debate whether or not to do so and if so, how best to go about it. (I would prefer a more structured approach to an official first contact, but we're not going to be the ones doing it.)

I'm going to be honest. We humans, as a group, are absolutely horrible at first contact situations. We can hardly go up to a member of our preferred romantic gender, people of similar background and culture, to ask them if they want to get some coffee or go to dinner without having issues.

And here we're talking about a tribe of people who've been (at least mostly) in isolation from the outside world for generations, doing their own thing with their own culture and language and customs and we can hardly ask someone of our own culture on a date.

If there is going to be contact, I want it done by professionals who can figure out how to do it very carefully and safely without getting a bunch of them killed or having the whole tribe turned into a bunch of non-functioning alcoholics.


I'll also point out that for people who are supposedly starving, they do seem to have enough time and energy to entirely paint themselves.