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Previously Uncontacted Amazon Tribe Photographed
ManicMechanic and other readers sent in news of a tribe of aboriginal people from the border of Peru and Brazil that has been photographed by helicopter for the first time. The images show huts in a village and people in red body paint shooting arrows at the helicopter. The outfit that released the photos, Survival International, works to end illegal logging in the rainforest in order to protect the uncontacted tribes living there. They estimate that 100 uncontacted groups exist worldwide, about half of them in the Amazon basin.
I for one would have loved to have been able to hear and understand the conversation that took place among that tribe after the helicopter passed over.
Interesting how the woman in the photo is painted entirely in black, while some of the men have their faces or entire bodies painted in red. Obviously it would be nice to know why they have those customs, but I'm not sure how to find out without disturbing them.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
I see some shiny belts and shoes, but really - I'd call it fake more on the basis of every single tribe member being head to toe in red, orange, or black paint. (You can tell the black is paint if you look at the hands - way different color)
I just don't see a bunch of natives hanging around in the forest all painted up with no where to go.
So they are going to be "protected" from contamination.
Yes I know that many tribes have suffered when the ran into civilized peoples but I wonder how they would feel about it if they knew.
Yes your child could have been saved with just a few pills but we didn't want to contaminate you.
Yes you could see what some of the lights in the sky really do look like.
You could meet people from far across the sea and you two could fly through the air.
But we don't want to contaminate you.
I wonder if they where given a choice what they would decide? Maybe it is wrong to not give them the choice.
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Let's not forget that these people represent a kind of norm. This biological form that we take right now more or less developed during the long Stone Age -- i.e. most of our unwritten history is in that way of life. It means that the roots of our culture, and perhaps the way our brains are organised, draw sustenance from this long period.
We need these people to be just who they are, unchanged, for our own understanding of ourselves.
The problem is the ethics of contact: do we withhold the benefits of civilization? Is modernization a fair process? It's easy to dismiss a preservationist approach as romanticizing the savage, from your abstracted armchair reality. But, live with tribal peoples for a while, and you realize that short of modern medicine and food surpluses, not only is it not so bad, it has distinct advantages as a lifestyle, and is not so different from our own.
Whatever. I expect them to be overrun, poisoned, shot, and assimilated, then held up as an example of the superiority of civilization.
Damn those pesky terrorists
These tribespeople are giving the rest of our species a valuable lesson in how to greet the aliens when they land.
None of this kumbaiyaa stuff that lets sinister aliens into our arms before we know they'll enslave us. Throw some spears at them to see how serious they are about making contact. If they aren't sophisticated enough to anticipate our violent reaction to their sudden appearance, they won't have anything worth learning that we can't get from just capturing some of their spacecraft. If they're really that superior, they'll take it in stride and calm us down.
And if they're really evil, we'll at least have a chance to fight them off, rather than falling for some kind of "To Serve Man" conjob.
That's exactly how this Amazon contact will play out. Why shouldn't we expect at least as much from our even more distant cousins when they arrive at our little backwater planet?
--
make install -not war
Actually, it does work like that sometimes.
E.g., "cargo cults." In the whole island-hopping in the Pacific, ground troops in the jungle were sometimes resupplied by airplanes paradropping crates of food and equipment. Well, some airplanes dropped their cargo wrong (remember, it was before GPS), some ran into the enemy and had to eject their cargo to escape, etc. At any rate, some of that cargo fell near some local tribes.
And the funny thing is, some of those actually started worshipping the big birds who dropped all that good stuff. And prayed that they'd return and bring them more gifts. And when that failed to happen, they built wooden airplanes and sometimes (those who were close enough to an airstrip to notice that those winged gods landed there and unloaded stuff) built whole wooden mock-ups of airstrips including the barracks and buildings around them. Some went to such effort as to even build mock-ups of the other stuff they saw there, such as "radios" with "headphones" made out of coconuts. Some stood guard or conducted drills with sticks instead of weapons, because they assumed it was some ritual to make the big winged gods come land there.
It wasn't the first time. The first well documented cargo cult, and undisputedly a cargo cult, was from 1919 from Papua. Those guys believed in the coming of a great ghost steamer to bring them tinned goods, tools, and stuff like that. That was their "messiah", so to speak. Furthermore, that they can communicate with the ghostly ancestors by raising and lowering a flag, on the flagpole a mocked-up office. Essentially they had looked at the stuff the Europeans did in ports, and how they communicated with their ships, and built a whole cult and ceremony around it.
But we have documented instances of such stuff from the 19'th century too. E.g., the Tuka Movement in the Fiji islands. On the whole it was openly hostile to the Europeans, and preaching the extinction or enslavement of Europeans by the natives, and using such visual metaphors as fattening a white pig representing the Europeans to slaughter it when the ancients return. But funnily enough, it also incorporated a lot of stuff which was mocking what the Europeans did. E.g., military parades, blessing water for their religious ceremonies, etc.
So, well, I don't care whether you find that outlook disgusting or not, but we have plenty of documented cases where it worked literally like the GP post said. If historical perspective offends you, so be it.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
"Previously uncontacted planet photographed"
Reading the article made me think if in the grand scheme of things, are we are the equivalent of these people to sufficiently advanced alien civilizations? "Spears against helicopters" might as well me like one of our Raptors going up against alien recon craft. Like this tribe, we'll probably think they're hostile (our literature, films are filled with alien war themes) but for all we know, they aren't really. It would probably be hubris to think something that advanced would go out of their way to invade us. (Like sending modern marines with automatic weapons against spear-wielding people, in terms of scale.)
Arrghh. Too much Civ!!! (One more turn...)
Not much better. They go on a helicopter over uncharted Amazonian jungle, and the best camera they bring is their cel phone?
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Can you imagine how annoyed the Christian God would be if you shot arrows at him? I mean, he even gets pissed if you don't kill your son when he orders you to.
I don't imagine any of the helicopter crew were particularly annoyed at being shot at.
Isn't it kind of odd that we're more forgiving than our deities?
During World War II, aviators experienced the effects of cargo cult beliefs
The most widely known period of cargo cult activity, however, was in the years during and after World War II. First the Japanese arrived with a great deal of unknown equipment and later Allied forces also used the islands in the same way. The vast amounts of war matériel that were airdropped onto these islands during the Pacific campaign against the Empire of Japan necessarily meant drastic changes to the lifestyle of the islanders, many of whom had never seen Westerners or Japanese before. Manufactured clothing, medicine, canned food, tents, weapons, and other useful goods arrived in vast quantities to equip soldiers. Some of it was shared with the islanders who were their guides and hosts. With the end of the war the airbases were abandoned, and "cargo" was no longer being dropped.
In attempts to get cargo to fall by parachute or land in planes or ships again, islanders imitated the same practices they had seen the soldiers, sailors, and airmen use. They carved headphones from wood and wore them while sitting in fabricated control towers. They waved the landing signals while standing on the runways. They lit signal fires and torches to light up runways and lighthouses. The cult members thought that the foreigners had some special connection to the deities and ancestors of the natives, who were the only beings powerful enough to produce such riches.
In a form of sympathetic magic, many built life-size replicas of airplanes out of straw and created new military-style landing strips, hoping to attract more airplanes. Ultimately, although these practices did not bring about the return of the airplanes that brought such marvelous cargo during the war, they did have the effect of eradicating most of the religious practices that had existed prior to the war.
Over the last seventy-five years most cargo cults have disappeared. Yet, the John Frum cult is still active on the island of Tanna, Vanuatu.
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In addition, the sight of a helicopter probably sent all the unpainted people going about their daily business into hiding. The red painted men probably were some sort of special guards for the village. They were relatively well armed.
http://notanumber.net/
*nods* that was my take on the post too.
That being said, many tribes in the amazon have immense amounts of freetime.. I could easily see some groups being bored enough to maintain body paint at all times.
I believe this guy was the last one to surrender. He lasted 26 years.
...sometimes, in order to hurt someone very badly, you have to tell that person terrible lies. - PA
(Since it had not been mentioned yet, thought I take the liberty)
I am a v1ral sig. Plse c0py me and h3lp me spread. Thank y0u?
So why is it that we assume that THEY are the previously uncontacted ones? Aren't WE equally previously uncontacted, by them? They never called, they never wrote, they never flew over me with a helicopter.
These are humans (thus the same species), so no problems. We can conquer, destroy and/or commit genocide like we have done with other aboriginal humans.~
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
To be fair, the whole human species is pretty inbred. Genetic data points to a common origin in the relatively recent past with not very many individuals involved. My figures might be off, but I believe it's something like the almost all the genes of our species can be traced to maybe 500 individuals 2000 years ago.
In any case, relative to a lot of other species, humans are way less diverse. By the time you get to breeding with second cousins, it's as though you're breeding with any random person, so as long as this group can maintain at least that much distance in their sexual relationships, they should be fine. And considering they've lived this long it's likely they will. Most cultures have taboos against incest and it's imprinted on the human brain not to breed with those you live with.
Oh, and by the way, the OP should be modded troll.
Look up the origination of the term "Cargo Cult". It's really really really fascinating. For those who won't FTFL, cargo cults are those who originated in uncontacted areas in the Pacific (and likewise anywhere else) when allied aircraft would drop supplies for troops or aid for islanders. When the war ended, the drops ceased, but many islands have their own religions having to do with airplanes as a result.
So... you're probably absolutely right. Merely observing them via helicopter will drastically alter their world-view if not their religion as well.
There are occasional references to a Captain Fumio Nakahira who was allegedly found in 1980 on Mt Halcon on Mindoro, Philippines, but they all repeat the same one-liner and appear to be based on a spurious reference. There were Japanese soldiers who were discovered later, but they had been aware of the end of WWII and settled down or joined local rebel groups. Nakamura is the last well-documented holdout in the strict sense AFAIK.
As a state gets corrupt, its laws multiply; the most corrupt states have the most numerous laws. (Tacitus, Annales 3:27)
There's a few books on the first contact in the New Guinea highlands (1930's) where explorers in an aircraft found a large number of people with no contact with the outside world. To sum up - being a different colour to anybody they have seen before and having aircraft was not "sufficiently advanced technology" and after a while the crowd got bored and went back to what they were doing. I think the response was something like "how do you make all that cool stuff?".
I agree, but the GP's skeptcisim is misplaced. The women of the never use water to wash themselves. Rather they go about their day-to-day activities covered head-to-toe in body paint made from clay and animal fat. They also smoke in a very unusually manner. :o.
However you don't need to look at exotic tribes, many women from western societies will not leave their hut without first applying their face paint (also made from clay and fat). When you look around, "decorating" ones own body is not only a basic human trait, it' also a very common cultural obsession.
As for time and religion, a remote amazonian tribesman surrounded by food and water probably has much more spare time than your average slashdotter.
Disclaimer: I will go and have a look at the photo now....
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.