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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.
Helicopter versus spearmen?
The f#*&ing spearmen.
The Blaster Master Fighting for Truth, Justice, and Evil Pie since 1979
quick, drop some XO's for them, THEY NEEDS THE INTERNETS
like phosphorescent desert buttons singing one familiar song
Well said !!
I am going to stop loggin into Amazon too. Why let them have my cc# on file ? Each time I am going to type it in!! Be green!!
I like how Slashdot linked to the smallest picture available. The actual pictures are surprisingly good.
"Greasy inbred savages"? Columbus, is that you?
Feel better?
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
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.
You're right, the picture that the summary links to does look fake, 90x57 dimensions are high def enough for me to tell that this is all CGI.
Disclaimer: I am not god.
We may not be created equal
But we can be treated equal.
Those cameras are watching everyone now!
Someone setup a jungle expedition. Those tribesmen need tinfoil hats!
That helicopter is probably some sort of god or devil beast to that tribe now... Thats how religion works you know. You see something you don't understand, (try to) kill it, worship it.
news.google.com ... search for amazon ...
http://www.ctv.ca/gallery/html/tribe_080530/photo_0.html
...until one of the cameramen modified the ole 'got yer nose!' trick to the less popular 'got yer soul!' trick using his camera.
"Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted." -Groucho Marx
Actually, I'd guess more like Civ 3. That was the one with the antitank spearmen. And mighty cavemen in sabertooth-skin loincloths, cleaving your tank in twain with their mighty stone axe.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
"Members of one of the worlds last uncontacted tribes have been spotted and photographed from the air near the Brazil-Peru border." ... "said uncontacted tribes expert Jose Carlos dos Reis Meirelles Junior."
Grats Jose, you just worked yourself out of a job. Some expert you are!
Better versions are at CNN. Pic 1 and Pic 2
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
A small Peruvian tribe has taught you: Ceremonial Burial.
Or maybe
A small Chilean tribe has given you: Skilled Warrior.
Wow!
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Oops, here is Pic 2
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
No, sorry -- just got here.
What'd I miss while I was gone?
Enough! Americans are not all greasy inbred savages!!!!
Wait... What?
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.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
It would of been fascinating to see them try and skin, roast and eat the helicopter after they brought it down. That would be the mother of all cooking fires.
Hey, isn't flying over with a helicopter, a blatant violation of the Prime Directive?
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Is that Jeff Probst there in the black? This must be the super secret filming of the next survivor!
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
Has the MPAA filed a lawsuit yet? Their red body paint totally infringes upon several trademarks connected to Indiana Jones, as is the whole "being an Indian".
... for OOXML to be accepted as an ISO standard. Their spearman ooops, spokesman said, "though MSOffice does not support our language yet, I am sure they will soon because they gave us a picture of King Ballmer, and 24 glass beads".
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
...welcome our new spear-wielding overlords.
--I'm so big, my sig has its own sig.
-- See?
You can only imagine a discovery like this is the sort of thing every Anthropologist dreams of. Finding some primitive culture, previously untouched by the outside world. Making contact with the people for the first time. Then showing them the power of the machine gun and overthrowing their chief, then ruling the tribe with an iron fist.
I have nothing compelling to say
they dropped a Coke bottle from the helicopter and it happened to land within the tribe area. ("The Gods Must Be Crazy")
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
Nope, that's a picture of my backyard during the "Conquistador Fetish Ball".
Just drop a Coke bottle with a GPS receiver or a mini cam. Let's see how they react to it.
You never expect irony, do you?
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@iyfwrestling
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?
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
You gotta admit, they have balls for trying to attack a helicopter, something presumably they have never seen before. Imaging seeing a helicoper, when the most advanced thing you have ever seen is a bow and arrow.
It would be fun to show them the real world. Either that or let them shoot some arrows, then fire back a couple hellfire missles, just to let them know who's boss.
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There's already over a brazilian people in India.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Is it just me, or do some of those "tribesmen" look like they're wearing colonial Spanish armour? Looks like pictures taken from a movie set or as a joke to me.
No, I think it's just you, it doesn't look like Spanish armor at all. Just because you're wearing a hat that's rather tall in the middle and slopes down on either side doesn't make you a Conquistador.
The enemies of Democracy are
Can you hear me now?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
The way these things generally work is the term "uncontacted" is used to generate readership rather than reflect reality.
The more accurate phrase is minmal contact. Please remember, they share a forest with other tribes. There's interaction of all kinds.
In this case, geography minimized contact with the industrialized world. Those "uncontacted" tribes probably have at least one person that's gone all the way to the big city wherever it is thought to be.
Also note they are being pushed out by deforestation efforts, so you bet they've been on the wrong side of weapons and dealt with the industrialized world.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Why, exactly?
The Amazon basin is immense and large parts of it are almost as remote as you can get on the planet.
It's not like there isn't a long history of remote tribes who haven't really had much or any contact with "modern" people in that area.
Even a lot of the tribes which have had contact are still so isolated from the modern world that there have been only minor changes in their lives.
Short of a little outright disbelief in anything you hear, on what basis would you conclude there can't be any remote tribes that haven't been contacted before?
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
As far as i know, there will be no contact between them and... the rest of the world. Our government (yes, I'm from Brazil) said that making contact would be a violation of their rights (?). So, the idea is to demarcate their land, and let them enjoy stone age.
PS. by "our government" I mean FUNAI, the government agency that takes care of the indians.
Pick it Up!!
That would be cool. It would also be funny if you just hovered there and let their arrows bounce off until they got tired of shooting them. Then just start flashing a bunch of colored lights in geometric patterns. Once you have done that, leave the immediate area for a bit.
Then come back at night, abduct one of their tribesmen and put him in a bright room. Once he is in the room, we come in with dark sunglasses with big lenses and snazzy white coveralls to go with the shades. We should ignore him/her if they try to speak to us (we likely won't understand their language anyways). At this point we should shove probes up their asses and then take blood and other bodily fluid samples. If the abductee is female, she should be impregnated (artificial insemination is best, but if you are desperate just find a human with similar skin color and don't have him where the coveralls and glasses combo).
In the event that you do get a female and impregnate her, come back in 3 or 4 months (time isn't important, just be sure to get there before the end of the second trimester so that the baby has very little chance of surviving outside of the womb). When you come back, put the coveralls and glasses back on and abduct the woman again. Once you have her, remove the fetus and have your dark skinned pal make some hand gestures to indicate that the baby would live "up there" (point up to the sky etc). Then place a tiny piece of a meteorite under her skin (I recommend administering a good narcotic dose here, not enough to put her to sleep but enough to make her groggy and unaware). You can either keep the fetus or throw it away at this point, you won't need it again for our purposes (though I recommend keeping it as you can sell it to stem cell researchers or you can dissect it yourself if you like embryology and you just never no when an aborted fetus might come in handy - it's best to store them in a deep freeze or similar device).
Finally, every few years, come back and abduct her again. Each time you do it come back with the same weird looking kid (note that he must be both wierd looking in some fashion and of similar skin color and body type to the abductee). Have her play with the kid and give her food and drink that would appear strange to her (you could just bring something from burger king just make sure to present it in an odd fashion). If she seems upset to leave the kid behind, have the kid indicate that he can't survive outside in the air (he could just take deep breaths and then pretend to gag while pointing outside).
This is a wonderful hobby, but be warned that it's easy to get carried away with it.
Well if you read the article here: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1022822/Incredible-pictures-Earths-uncontacted-tribes-firing-bows-arrows.html you would know that they painted themselves after the helicopter made its first pass and is likely a sign of aggression. As an Anthropologist I can tell you that elaborate body painting is not uncommon in this region. This is real, but the information is rather poor quality and biased (and the latter article is very ethnocentric - you will NEVER find a culture that hasn't changed in 10,000 year's contact or not!)
Get a web developer
Damn, is my dad going to sad when I break this bit of news to him.
"We shall grapple with the ineffable, and see if we may not eff it after all." - Douglas Adams
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
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?
Yes your child could have been saved with just a few pills but we didn't want to contaminate you.
Yes, as opposed to million of African children who die of malaria every year despite the fact that the aforementioned few pills could have easily saved them?
Yes you could see what some of the lights in the sky really do look like.
Yes, as opposed to the 95% percent of world population that will never see anything except the dirt they are digging or the nike shoes going past them in the assembly line? Forget about luxuries like university education, even things like books and the fucking internet is out of reach for most of the world's people.
You could meet people from far across the sea and you two could fly through the air.
Yes, as opposed to the millions of refugees who can't leave their war-striken country because nobody will give them a visa? Forget the plane or ship, they can't even leave on foot!
But we don't want to contaminate you.
I see your point, but by suggesting that we have some enlightened duty to help those "stone age" people, you are in fact using the same preferential treatment you are accusing others to have against them. There are hundreds of millions of poor, illiterate, disease-striken people in the world, who would GLADLY accept our help. Hell, there are many poor, illiterate, disease-striken people in our own fucking country. Help THEM out before you boldly take your morals to where no man has gone before.
I think his skepticism of the photo stemmed more from people choosing to go about their day-to-day activities covered head-to-toe in body paint. The effort expended in maintaing this lifestyle seemed unlikely to the poster, making it look like an attempt to create an "exotic" picture by introducing a strange foreign habit.
The GP does not appear to have a problem believe that people could live in the amazon without contact. He just finds it hard to believe that people will waste that much time painting themselves for no practical benefit. However, he probably hadn't compared this to the effort that is often spent on religion in modern society.
Don't worry. Local talk show host Artio Bellio is now tackling the topic of these mysterious UFOs and the little white men inside. Topics include first contact and whether they'll have any chance to fight back with their spears if they survive.
Barbarian Archers. S'okie. I've got a nice stack of Combat I Swordsmen coming down the road in short order.
If there's a castle floating upside down in the sky, then there's a castle floating upside down in the sky.
Oh please! Okay, you tell me where you can get aborted fetuses for seventy cents on the dollar? You tell me, Chuck? ...Yeah, I didn't think so-You know, I'm just like the fetuses, Chuck. I wasn't born yesterday, either. Uh huh. ...So are you gonna talk to me, or are we just gonna keep bull shitting each other? Breakin' my balls, Chuck.
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It's actually a bunch of San Francisco developers that moved their facilities during the dot.bust.
You can clearly see that one is wearing Nikes and the other is wearing Birkenstocks.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Looks like two oompa loompas and a sasquatch
The thing about living the life they live is instead of spending all day commuting to work, sitting at a computer, washing dishes, filling out tax forms, and sitting in front of the boobtube, they spend a few hours gathering food and the rest of the time they can do whatever they want. Hell for all we know painting their bodies is their equivalent of American Idol.
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.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Looks photoshopped.
I see your informative link, and raise you a pithy comment.
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/
Perhaps you're an idiot. It is, in fact, extraordinarily likely if you think primitive tribesmen see an enormous, extraordinarily loud bird in the sky and think "ah-hah! more humans! We'd better conserve our cultural sanctity!"
*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 thought he was referring to his peers on /.
Bows? Aggression? I'm confused. I thought that without the corrupting distortions of 'Western Civilization' the natural state of humans was peaceful vegetarianism.
I presume they don't have to chase down and shoot their plants, so what use are the projectile weapons? Either they engage in combat with someone or they hunt, or both.
Messing up my whole world view...
Clearly they have been contacted and therefore corrupted by some damn capitalist pig. If we do contact them we should try to repair that damage; get them back to nuts and fruit.
If it's real, I'd be most interested in how they reacted to the helicopter as a tribe - not painting themselves and shooting arrows, but how they viewed the helicopter - was it a ship or beast of the gods, or simply humans with advanced technology. I'd be curious to know if they crossed Clarke's line of 'sufficiently advanced technology'.
Also I imagine the helicopter will have a somewhat serious impact on the tribe and their stories, at least if they were to remain uncontacted for a few more decades. Imagine if a large portion of our population saw something that they in no way could explain logically.
I am not an expert. If I am misled in something, please correct me.
Yea, cause when modern people see UFOs, they tend to think 'people' too...
Disclaimer: I am not god.
We may not be created equal
But we can be treated equal.
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.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
First thing they do when they see something they don't understand? Attack.
Even though their survival depends solely on our good will.
Somehow I find this to be symptomatic of whole humanity. And I don't doubt even for a second that we, supposedly "civilised" people, would do the same in similar situation...
One that hath name thou can not otter
http://mars.illtel.denver.co.us/~abelits/images/department-of-defense.png
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
I believe part of the reason for keeping them isolated is that many tribes in similar situations have been effectively wiped out by diseases they lacked exposure and therefore immunity to, such as chicken pox and even common cold.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
If they're uncontacted, then how do we know they're uncontacted? I mean, unless you ask them whether they've interacted with a modern person before, how can you be absolutely sure they haven't?
Besides, one of the guys in the picture looks like he's wearing chucks.
Proverbs 21:19
Yep, those figures are off: 2,000 years ago, there were over 1 million people in downtown Rome alone. Maybe you mean 20,000 years?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Their food isn't just lying around. They have to spend the majority of the day hunting/searching for it. Then they need to prepare it, which may involve skinning it (no easy task). Then it's cooked and eaten. They probably sleep on the ground, and have no amenities like AC, showers, reliable clean water, deodorant, or medicine.
No matter how unsatisfying modern day-to-day life can be, it doesn't make that sort of lifestyle doesn't look very appealing to me.
Oh, it's perfectly rational all right, except don't think they actually understood what the aircraft was or what the pilots were. Almost invariably this was not some enterprising souls anchored in a skeptical view of the world, but actual _cults_. They _prayed_ to those aircraft. Even when they realized there's someone piloting it (e.g., as in the ghost steamer cult of Papua), they imagined ancestor spirits, or gods, or bird spirits, coming in them to deliver those goods.
(And if you want something even funnier, at least one Sioux tribe eventually came to believe that at the end of days, when the ancestors' spirits come back, they'll come by train.)
Now I'm still saying that it's perfectly rational, for someone whose whole life and explanation of the universe is firmly rooted in spirituality and belief in supernatural spirits. The Europeans would have probably done the same if an airplane showed up, as late as the middle ages.
But at the end of the day, yes, it is rational behaviour and _human_ behaviour. If you saw a guy making a lightsaber out of 5 leds, a lens, and 4 D bateries, you'd try to do the same even if just for curiosity sake. If you don't understand how, you experiment a bit. These guys essentially did the same. They tried to replicate something which obviously worked for the Americans and Japanese. So I'm not trying to paint them as dumb or anything. I'm sure they were perfectly intelligent humans, same as everyone else.
But at the same time I _am_ saying that their explanations _were_ indeed religious. They used the framework they already had for understanding the world, and that was one of religion, magic, supernatural forces, and mighty spirits. They fit those airplanes and airfields in that framework. Because they had no other framework available.
So I wouldn't be too surprised if these guys in the Amazon did the same. Again, I'm not painting them as dumb, nor looking down upon them. But I do expect them to do what so many other tribes did: see it as some supernatural event.
That's really all.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
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?".
Speaking of which, I've been playing around with making bows recently.
Those bows look pretty well designed and made. And these guys look well fed, so they're probably a good shot. They could probably put an arrow between your eyes at fifty yards. Depending on the power of their bows, they could hit a target like the helicopter at twice that range. If they did, the arrows would very likely penetrate the skin of the helicopter and still have enough momentum to seriously injure anybody inside.
There are stories of European explorers encountering Cherokee archers; the flint arrowheads (which weren't razor sharp, by the way; they were sharper) could penetrate a steel breastplate, shattering and killing the victim with stone shrapnel. I read of one rider who was wearing cuirassier's armor who was pinned to his horse when an arrow penetrated his thigh armor.
Given that these people are woodland people who hunt and fight on foot, they probably have similar bows. They look rather broad limbed and tapered, a design that results in a reliable, powerful and fast casting bow of reasonable draw weight.
Bows and arrows may not be very "advanced", but underestimating how deadly a well designed bow in the hand of a skilled archer can be might well be the last thing you ever did. The helicopter might have scared these guys shitless, but when they grabbed their bows I'll bet they were quite confident that they could kill anything that came within bowshot stone dead. And they'd probably be right.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.