On a related note, it's not quite forty years since the Pintupi Nine first directly encountered "the modern world":
> In 1984 a group of Australian Aboriginal people living a traditional nomadic life were encountered in the heart of the Gibson desert in Western Australia.
> They had been unaware of the arrival of Europeans on the continent, let alone cars - or even clothes.
> If you want to know how Australian Aboriginal peoples lived for 40,000 years, just ask Yukultji.
> She stepped into the 20th Century just 30 years ago.
"If you want to know how Australian Aboriginal peoples lived .." is a bit daft (I know you're quoting so I'm not attributing that daftness to you). Australia is a continent with a wide range of ecologies and climatic zones (we're not all hot dry desert!). There were some 500 odd indigenous language groups, living quite differently, despite having some level of continent-wide awareness (via trade routes and songlines). And they certainly underwent changes over those 40,000 years.
Sure, you can watch Milli Milli [1] (for one example) if you're seeking a contrast between Central to Northern Western practices:
> takes the viewer on a cultural travelogue through the three regions of the Kimberleys: the coast, the rivers and tablelands, and the desert.
and you're correct about the breadth of languages across Australia as a whole.
The point stands that this group were first hand direct testimony to Western Desert lifestyles prior to colonial invasion.
One of the more interesting thing about growing up in the less inhabited parts of Western Austrlia (ie. most it given its 3x size of Texas with a pop of > 2 million mostly living in the SW corner) is the direct interaction with many people that still directly connect to traditional lifestyles [2].
Thanks for the film ref. Like most Australians, my knowledge of indigenous folk is patchy at best - a few books and local interactions here and there. I have actually helped hunt/collect & eat goanna (not bad) and turtle eggs (yuck), which probably puts me a bit outside of the Australian norm. But in truth the indigenous world is an entirely 'foreign' culture to most of us. As is European culture to many indigenous folk outside the cities - I came here from the UK and I remember being asked in Cape York whether or not we hunted much Dugong where I came from.
We're in a time when only recently > 50% of the human population became urbanised.
Even in the UK and the EU you're barely a generation away from "what do you hunt" being a fair and reasonable question - hunting boar in a European forest in the 1940s was not altogether uncommon, catching birds, fish, rabbits, et al in the countryside to supplement scarce food was absolutely a wartime pursuit in the UK.
As a Kimberley kid I grew up spear fishing [1] from boats, jetties, reefs, and the shore as part and parcel of a life building radios to listen in on US submarine comms stations further down the coast and reverse engineer early NAVSTAR signals .. thanks to a lot of post war types that felt the need to stay in touch with world tensions and events in the region from Vietnam through to PNG.
Can't complain about a healthy lifestyle with plenty of fresh food :-)
For anyone who hasn't seen it, Aura is one of the most powerful documentaries I've ever seen. I mention it because it's also about Brazilian natives, but two that were taken in.
Their bond to each other, fear of the new world, confusion, and inability to communicate are heartbreaking. The way they try to smile at the camera alone is haunting.
Breaks my hear to see the indigenous tribes and cultures dying. We will regret Deforestation & forced-modernization of these forest based tribes. In Africa & India, some of the evangelical proselytizing has destroyed very old knowledge of the land. There was one tribe in Andaman & Nicobar island which had some indigenous knowledge about weather patterns, storms and earthquakes. It was found that the members of the tribe migrated to higher areas just before the Tsunami hit in 2004.
As much as it makes me sad to hear about it too, I think it's wishful thinking to say we will regret it. The entire history of civilization is the history of genocide and forced assimilation. Civilization is basically an ever expanding cultural grey goo meat grinder. The Romans did it to Europe and central Asia, the first caliphate did it to (ultimately) all of Arabia, the various east Asian civilizations did it to natives all across southeast Asia, Formosa, the Japanese islands. Every one of us that belongs to a civilization came to be here because it was done to our ancestors. Nobody really regrets any of it, save for some more recent examples and those too are usually just lip service. Give it a few more generations and nobody will even talk about caring anymore.
I, for one, am sad about those other assimilations too.
> Civilization is basically an ever expanding cultural grey goo meat grinder
In some ways, it was, in some ways, it wasn't. Civilization allows some ideas and some ways of life that aren't/weren't possible otherwise. An example cited in this thread is that of an aboriginal group (Pintupi Nine) that became artists after contact with civilization. Surely being a dedicated artist would be much more difficult without civilization support. Many civilizations were respectful of regional differences and even local religions and other beliefs (even e.g. Alexander). I mean, modern civilization essentially respects regional differences and has understood rights w.r.t. cultures. If you look at the consensus from social sciences it seems by far in the side of non-uniformization as being healthier and preferable choice for societies (and hence for policymaking). And of course and some of the absurdities of 20th century were ideas of supremacy and forced uniformity.
And most important, civilization is not static (and not a physical law), it's a system, maybe almost like an operating system, and we continually are making choices on how to build it. And studying how our design choices contribute to better, more fulfilling, more interesting existences.
I assure you, those choices are being made right now, and more active participation, in-depth study and science are important to assure to good future. (you shouldn't use the first few OS designs as a rule that all OSes will need to follow forever)
Unfortunately, I think you’re right. The genocide that accompanies deforestation is barely talked about even as it’s actually ongoing. It’s not just that people don’t care; I doubt most Westerners even know how bad the situation is. These days deforestation is mostly talked about in terms of global warming and loss of biodiversity – not the extermination of ethnic groups with their own distinct language and culture. I was shocked to learn that this man had survived not one, but two genocides (first in the 70s and then the 90s) followed by further documented attempts on his life in 2009!
For anyone interested in this topic, this organisation does a lot to empower and defend indigenous tribes against these practices: https://amazonfrontlines.org/
I wonder how the government officials were able to track him for decades? The Man of the Hole moved at least 50 times during that period in an area of 31 square miles (8,000 ha), which is one-third bigger than the land area of Manhattan. We see news reports about searching for lost hikers or campers, who want to be found, involving dozens of officials, volunteers, and dogs scouring the wilderness for days or weeks without success. Yet the Brazilians officials have been able to locate him many times.
I wonder if they are using some sort of aerial surveillance. Maybe looking for heat signature from a fire at night? (Assuming he knows about or even needs fire.) Or perhaps trail cameras placed all over his territory. In a YouTube video the officials are seen giving him an axe and other gifts. A GPS locator hidden in the handle of the axe? I don't believe that's the answer, but thinking about all the nature videos I've seen in which GPS trackers are attached to birds, whales, mountain lions, and even house cats wandering the garden, it is at least technically doable.
Hopefully there are some outdoorsmen here on HN who can shed light on how the tracking might be done.
The difference is that hikers die quickly and they are lost, randomly walking around. This guy was not lost, so he probably had preferred spots where he'd like to go for food, water, etc. Besides, he made large holes and possibly made other changes to his environment that made him easier to spot. Also, even if he was not spotted for months or a year, he'd be completely fine (maybe even thankful). So, time is always on the side of whoever is searching for him.
I've read somewhere that it's FUNAI agents with help of other tribes living in the region.
There is some hint to that in the Wikipedia entry: "They observed that he periodically moved his home, building straw huts for shelter. He hunted wild game, collected fruits and honey, and also planted maize and manioc. Over the years, more than 50 huts built by him were identified by FUNAI."
> I wonder how the government officials were able to track him for decades?
I can think of 2 major differences between locating him vs hikers:
1. Less time pressure as the government could wait weeks/months between locating him. Finding him once in a 3 month window is a success, finding hikers after 3 months would likely be for the purposes of recovering remains.
2. Hikers usually don't construct multiple semi-permanent structures that can be identified from the air (holes, animal traps, shelter)
He probably lit fires often. From the air, the smoke from a fire (even with a fairly large area of forest to search) likely wouldn't be too hard to make out.
Once, in a small town in Colorado I passed two people, a man and a woman, and there was something very strange about them. I mentioned it to a friend of mine and he told me about them: they were refugees from the far south, from a indigenous people that no one knew. No one spoke their language and they knew no other. Their home and people had been destroyed and scattered.
After that, I realized what was so strange about them. They were ghosts, but they still had their bodies.
What does one do, if you outlive all your relations and the world is full of man like monsters riding metal beasts?
One lifes day to day and digs a grave for oneself wherever the wind blows you. Hoping that at least in the afterlife, you will be together with the butchered.
The only way to stop poachers, is to provide the natives with area denial devices.. magnetic mines and drones. Nothing else will work.
Ironic though, that the genocide of the north, which stopped and was historically recognized as wrong, can go on in the present day south, without creating the same political fervor.
I suppose the state of Brazil is something that could be considered a settler colonial project and with it's continued existence this sort of thing remains doomed to happen.
IIUC, the mining operation was extremely illegal (independent of the genocide, which is obviously also illegal).
It happened on Brazil's watch so it's Brazil's responsibility, but I'm ill-convinced convinced that in its absence this wouldn't continue to happen (in its absence, there's no FINRA, no organization protecting these tribes... And there are still people willing to kill for mining profit).
In the absence of a Brazil, that work would have to include force projection. Do they have any experience hiring private military groups to protect the interests of the indigenous people they safeguard?
It's not impossible, but "holding Brazil accountable" is a strategy far likelier to succeed, I suspect.
We don't always have the opportunity to even do that.
And even when we do have the opportunity, there are cases where we can't, because the language is untranslatable, for example the North Sentinel islanders: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese_language
Yeah, you're right here. My point was more than it doesn't take biological successors to continue traditions. Was more meant to add a light of hope to an all around depressing situation.
If you look into traditional medicine in that area you realize that plenty of the plants they use and used never actually got a proper scientific research on them. It's basically getting lost in front of our eyes.
Probably differs a lot, but the Navajo have a massively developed story-telling tradition to pass on wisdom across generations. Iirc these are symbolic and has moral or philosophical contents, similar perhaps to fables and religious miracle-stories. Encoding information in narratives is highly effective for memorization, and I believe deliberate so. Literal interpretations can be fun, but a deeper semantic interpretation can really unlock ancient wisdom. It's fascinating.
Even if remembered perfectly and consisting only of valuable information, it's amount of knowlege that fits in a single brain. We are centuries past the point when such amount was significant.
You could distribute specialized knowledge among different people, so it's not as restrictive as a single brain. And to be fair, our most valuable knowledge today is probably encoded in few people's brain as well in the form of institutional knowledge. But I get your sentiment, writing down is an immense construction that expands the topology of knowledge by a huge factor.
I was mostly intetested in the kinds of oral traditions, and maybe other traditions to catch knowledge without writing, say, using sculpted / cut figures, etc.
For about half of its lifetime at least, the vedas were meticulously passed down orally with a priest present at its ritual to catch for any errors in word or deed.
A teacher I had of Jewish descent said something similar about his tradition.
It was a lot more common to memorize texts and cultural highlights. In the even recent past most people could recite complete poems and stories by heart.
So, philosophical question here: Human zoos are racist and wrong, right? How is leaving uncontacted tribes alone to live in isolation (but under remote observation) any different? Fun diversions include: the prime directive from star trek and potential diseases spreading from first contact being equivalent to genocide.
I think that in the end, none of debate will matter and that all remaining tribes will either be dead or clumsily brought into civilization without regard for ethics.
These people usually know exactly how to get to civilization if they wanted to. Many have "walked out" of the forest and into civilization, and they generally become what people would recognize as bums and layabouts since they have basically no skills that are relevant to city life.
And they're observed remotely merely to help ensure that violent people don't disturb them - making sure they aren't killed or driven to civilization unless they want to go.
Zoos are artificial environments constructed to put things on exhibit outside of their natural environment for the education and entertainment of others.
A preserve is an area carved out to prohibit the others from going in and screwing with someone or something.
If we had a nature preserve filled with human beings that are unaware of the modern world, left to their own devices and hard lives, the difference in ethics is the entertainment factor? Say their lives aren't broadcast for consumption, is that okay? What about 10, 100 or even 1,000 years from now?
The primary difference in ethics is whether you've forcibly relocated them. You're picking a really weird aspect of the human zoo thing to fixate on and ignoring the huge flashing sign that says "liberty". There's really no good reason to compare the scenarios. I'm a fan of Hanlon's Razor but this is the kind of obtuseness that raises genuine questions of whether you're speaking in good faith.
The liberty is in not being forcibly relocated. Try to focus.
Note how far the question has already drifted from human zoos, to just whether it's good to contact people or not. This is not an accident. It's because the human zoo comparison was never defensible; it was trivial to force you to move the goalposts.
Ha, fair point, sort of. Dropping a cage on someone in situ is a very specific form of liberty denial that doesn't really have a name because no one does it.
Nobody. I'm just trying to understand what makes a zoo, a zoo.
My intuition is more about not forcibly relocating but putting boundaries so that movement is restricted and safe observations can be performed for prolonged time.
How do you figure? Every day they make the choice to live like they do, just like you make the choice to live in your town doing whatever it is you do. If you wanted to live a different lifestyle, you could pick a direction, go there, and live like the people there. They choose not to. That sounds like liberty to me.
In the scenario you’re describing (a walled off preserve), said folks could decide to join ‘the space age’ by walking to the next valley if they wanted to.
And that is someone Stone Age folks did regularly, walk to other valleys.
In the real Stone Age, that means they see another group of Stone Age folks. In the space age scenario, that means they get exposure to some space age stuff.
So they’d be making the choice to stay, by staying, if they don’t do that.
No one is building a fence to keep them in, just like no one was working to keep ‘the man of the hole’ in. If someone does make a fenced off area around them that is impossible to escape, then sure that could be a problem. It’s a prison then.
But that’s not what anyone is proposing I can see.
They were just working to keep others from going in and screwing with him.
He knew there were others out there, he just didn’t want to be bothered - and they were trying to help him do that.
> In the space age scenario, that means they get exposure to some space age stuff.
But they don't, unless they actually get exposed to it. "They've heard a machine and it was loud and terrible and knocked over a tree" doesn't mean they're making an informed decision, because e.g. they don't know surgery or antibiotics.
> They were just working to keep others from going in and screwing with him.
And that's fine, but he's not making an informed decision to stay in the the forest because he prefers that way of life. He's doing what he knows and doesn't do what he doesn't know. That's not a choice. Before Fosbury developed the Fosbury Flop, other athletes weren't choosing to not jump that way.
By the criteria you seem to be using, I’m not sure it’s possible for anyone to ever make an informed consent about 99% of anything, since practically speaking there are near infinite possible options available for almost every action, almost all of them impractical or pointless to even discuss, and most of them more damaging than they are worth to even bring up.
For example, it doesn’t seem like a reasonable requirement that someone spends a bunch of time doing cocaine so they understand it, in order to not want to do cocaine.
If the tribe wanted to know more about the big scary machines, they are free to try to contact the folks and learn more.
If they want to stay away from the giant shitshow that is modern society, that’s fine too. I can’t necessarily blame them either!
They don’t need to spend a lifetime learning all the myriad reasons why just to not be exposed to all the myriad reasons why.
It's important because people started talking about choice. What they mean, I assume, is "let them live in peace", which I fully agree with. But this whole "no, they've chosen that lifestyle" is dumb. It implies that they know the alternatives and somehow arrived at that lifestyle as the one they preferred. That's nonsense on e.g. the North Sentinalese islanders. I dislike changing the meaning of words because it sounds nice, it ruins communication.
> For example, it doesn’t seem like a reasonable requirement that someone spends a bunch of time doing cocaine so they understand it, in order to not want to do cocaine.
And I would mostly agree with that, if it weren't for the fact that you can read about drugs and their effect and learn something about it. It's limited, and you should be very aware of the fact that you have a very limited understanding of the alternatives, but it's not comparable to "I don't know that cocaine exists, therefore I have chosen not to consume it". That's just ignorance, not choice.
Ignorance is a choice, when it requires action (or intentional inaction) to maintain it. I’m not sure why you seem to think it isn’t.
In the cocaine example, If I stay away from reading about recreational drugs, and don’t put anything that I don’t know what’s in it in my body, why should I ever have to know or care about cocaine at all? Is that not a choice with the same effect, but also without all the work and risk involved in doing all that research and potentially trying something that is more dangerous to me than would be obvious?
Forcing someone to know something is removing their ability to make those choices.
Having Agency/Self Determination means being able to make that choice, even when others don’t agree with it, or it causes potential problems for someone. That is the cost (and privilege) of ownership.
In a society, we infringe that for members of our society when the society overall thinks it justifies the costs. Vaccinations for kids before they go to school, to stop large scale outbreaks and death for instance. Or mandatory public education.
But that is for folks raised in and part of the overall fabric already, and impossibly intertwined with it.
Doing that for someone outside of it makes no sense.
For one (less extreme) example, The Amish (if they’re devout) aren’t being deprived because they aren’t being forced to learn how to program in C or whatever. They’re making choices to intentionally not go there, for their own reasons. They are free to change that if they want.
If you want to argue that their kids or whatever don’t get to choose, that’s all kids everywhere.
Unless they are offending us in some serious way that we can’t stand by and ignore, we’ve generally all agreed to let everyone live and let live, since otherwise it produces worse abuse and deprives them of their right to live the way they want.
But if you want to say that it’s societies obligation to ‘fix that’, you’re treading a very dark and dangerous path.
The same path that resulted in the ‘aboriginal schools’ in Australia, Canada, etc. and the reservations, missions, forced conversions etc. in the US and their massive and terrible abuses.
Not knowing about other options is neither a choice nor does it enable you to choose: if you don't have options, you cannot choose. If you don't know about options you theoretically would have, you don't have them and you cannot make a choice, because a choice requires more than one possible outcome.
If you don't share that understanding, we don't have enough common ground to communicate.
There are many differences but first and foremost: the purpose of human zoos was entertainment, in this case it was to protect (and potentially scientific enquiry)
Man of the Hole - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32703518 - Sept 2022 (3 comments)
'Man of the Hole': Last of his tribe dies in Brazil - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32638304 - Aug 2022 (14 comments)
Amazon activists mourn death of ‘man of the hole’, last of his tribe - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32633003 - Aug 2022 (2 comments)
Man of the Hole - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29445016 - Dec 2021 (6 comments)
Isolated man in Amazon Jungle - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12557052 - Sept 2016 (4 comments)