Isolated Tribes Die Shortly After We Meet Them

Daniel_Stuckey writes: "It's a story we all know — Christopher Columbus discovers America, his European buddies follow him, they meet the indigenous people living there, they indigenous people die from smallpox and guns and other unknown diseases, and the Europeans get gold, land, and so on. It's still happening today in Brazil, where 238 indigenous tribes have been contacted in the last several decades, and where between 23 and 70 uncontacted tribes are still living. A just-published report that takes a look at what happens after the modern world comes into contact with indigenous peoples isn't pretty: Of those contacted, three quarters went extinct. Those that survived saw mortality rates up over 80 percent. This is grim stuff."

Comments

HA

[zamboni1138]

"people die from smallpox and guns and other unknown diseases"

I'm pretty sure at least one of those was unintentional.

Re:HA

[Errol backfiring]

Indeed. Guns are not unknown.

Re:HA

[Ambient Sheep]

"people die from smallpox and guns and other unknown diseases"

I'm pretty sure at least one of those was unintentional.

I just thought it was a bit of anti-gun-lobby humour, myself.

Re:HA

[The Grim Reefer]

Indeed. Guns are not unknown.

They probably were to the indigenous tribes.

Re:HA

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe guns was unintentional? Lord Jeffrey Amherst used to put smallbox on blankets and hand them out to tribes.

Re:HA

[metaforest]

Yes they died from high velocity lead poisoning in some cases.

"smallpox OR guns OR other unknown diseases"

[MikeTheGreat]

C'mon people - aren't we nerds? Clearly we need an OR here, not an AND!

Re:"smallpox OR guns OR other unknown diseases"

[danlip]

The problem with the sentence is not "and" versus "or", it is really the placement of the word "other" e.g. "smallpox and other unknown diseases and guns".

Re:"smallpox OR guns OR other unknown diseases"

[JaredOfEuropa]

Interestingly, the English word "nor" is more like a NAND.

Re:"smallpox OR guns OR other unknown diseases"

[93 Escort Wagon]

C'mon people - aren't we nerds? Clearly we need an OR here, not an AND!

Nope - these natives have been just ridiculously unlucky.

Re:"smallpox OR guns OR other unknown diseases"

[Noughmad]

Either you don't understand Slashdot's native language, or you don't understand English. In any case, the Enlish "nor" is short for "neither", which is true as long as both inputs are false, exactly like a NOR gate.

Re:"smallpox OR guns OR other unknown diseases"

[N1AK]

Either you don't understand Slashdot's native language, or you don't understand English. In any case, the Enlish "nor" is short for "neither", which is true as long as both inputs are false, exactly like a NOR gate.

Odd how you'd accuse him of not understanding English when you yourself then misdefine the same word. As someone who is still trying to break the habit of using it in conversation and baffling southerners I can assure you that it isn't limited to use as a short form of neither, and nor should it be.

Re:"smallpox OR guns OR other unknown diseases"

[Pfhorrest]

It's not a shortened form of "neither", but that makes your use of "and nor" nonsensical. "Either" goes with "or" and "neither" goes with "nor", though neither "or" nor "nor" need either "either" nor "neither" (respectively) in all cases, and neither do either "nor" nor "or" ever pair directly with "and" as you had them, though either "and either" or "and neither" can introduce an "or" or "nor" clause (respectively) into a larger "and" clause just fine.

TL;DR: Say "and neither should it be" or "nor should it be", but not "and nor should it be".

Re:"smallpox OR guns OR other unknown diseases"

[JaredOfEuropa]

Crap, you're right and I need more coffee...

Re:"smallpox OR guns OR other unknown diseases"

[HeadlessNotAHorseman]

"Nor" is a hangover from Old English, when the language had a dual number in addition to the singular and plural we have today.

Re:"smallpox OR guns OR other unknown diseases"

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks a lot. I had exactly one sip of coffee and my day is ruined already.

Re:"smallpox OR guns OR other unknown diseases"

[Anonymous Coward]

He-he, quite funny, but I must rain on your parade... unfortunately.

Picture a pie chart and you'll understand why the above phrase is valid with "and". I believe that stems from a subtle semantic difference: "people die from" may be literal (use OR) or may refer to the reasons' domain.

This is like saying "animals can be terrestrial, flying, swimming, drifting _and_ sessile". That is about classes of animals rather than about one particular individual.

IMHO.

PS:
- if the spellchecker flags valid words one uses, perhaps it's time for simpler terms -- like e.g. "attached".
- maybe you knew all that and just wanted to make a joke... woosh on me, then... :-/

Re:"smallpox OR guns OR other unknown diseases"

[Anonymous Coward]

I doubt they each died of "smallpox and other unknown diseases and guns". So, 'and' versus 'or' is also a problem along with the word placement you highlighted.

Re:"smallpox OR guns OR other unknown diseases"

[Terko]

I have a hangover from Olde English...followed by a tri-number... Neither coffee nor a shower seems to cure it.

Re:"smallpox OR guns OR other unknown diseases"

[Muros]

"Either" goes with "or" and "neither" goes with "nor", though neither "or" nor "nor" need either "either" nor "neither" (respectively) in all cases, and neither do either "nor" nor "or" ever pair directly with "and" as you had them, though either "and either" or "and neither" can introduce an "or" or "nor" clause (respectively) into a larger "and" clause just fine.

I think that might be the best sentence I've ever tried to read out loud.

Re:"smallpox OR guns OR other unknown diseases"

[bjwest]

The sentence is talking about a group of people. Some in this group died from smallpox, some died from guns, some died from other unknown diseases. Thus the statement " they (sic) indigenous people die from smallpox and guns and other unknown diseases" is perfectly sound.

Re:"smallpox OR guns OR other unknown diseases"

[taiwanjohn]

Sure, it's all fun and games until somebody gets segmentation fault in the left temporal lobe...

Re:"smallpox OR guns OR other unknown diseases"

[meta-monkey]

Bravo.

Re:"smallpox OR guns OR other unknown diseases"

[tompaulco]

As a southerner myself, I would be confused to see a nor by itself, as I would expect it to be only be used after a neither.

Re:"smallpox OR guns OR other unknown diseases"

[hoggoth]

"Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo"

( City of Buffalo bison that other city of Buffalo bison bully, themselves bully city of Buffalo bison)

Re:"smallpox OR guns OR other unknown diseases"

[Anonymous Coward]

A collective can die from multiple causes.

The Ferengi were killed by famine, disease, and greed.

Re:"smallpox OR guns OR other unknown diseases"

[Jmc23]

That's neither here nor there.

Re:"smallpox OR guns OR other unknown diseases"

[MikeTheGreat]

Whooooooooooosh! :)

(Yeah, you're probably right (at least, you're making a convincing case that the 'and' is a reasonable choice), but where else can I joke about needing a logical OR instead of a logical AND?)

Re:"smallpox OR guns OR other unknown diseases"

[MikeTheGreat]

I just want to say that while I started this thread/discussion hive in a humorous vein, these posts obsessing about and/or and neither/nor totally made it worth it. We (all) might not be geeking out about technology, but we're definitely, awesomely, geeking out :)

Re:"smallpox OR guns OR other unknown diseases"

[MikeTheGreat]

LOL! Mod parent up - this is hilarious :)

Re:"smallpox OR guns OR other unknown diseases"

[LoRdTAW]

Wait .. Should I stop drinking Old English and start drinking 20/20 or sould I simply stop drinking altogether? Or should I drink both to work at a ren fair?

Re:"smallpox OR guns OR other unknown diseases"

[Anonymous Coward]

Also a little wrong :)

...though neither "or" nor "nor" need either "either" nor "neither" (respectively) in all cases,...

It should be 'or' instead of 'nor'.

Re:"smallpox OR guns OR other unknown diseases"

[Anonymous Coward]

"Either" goes with "or" and "neither" goes with "nor", though neither "or" nor "nor" need either "either" nor "neither" (respectively) in all cases, and neither do either "nor" nor "or" ever pair directly with "and" as you had them, though either "and either" or "and neither" can introduce an "or" or "nor" clause (respectively) into a larger "and" clause just fine.

This should be a rhyme that all children are made to learn.

Re:"smallpox OR guns OR other unknown diseases"

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not a shortened form of "neither", but that makes your use of "and nor" nonsensical. "Either" goes with "or" and "neither" goes with "nor", though neither "or" nor "nor" need either "either" nor "neither" (respectively) in all cases, and neither do either "nor" nor "or" ever pair directly with "and" as you had them, though either "and either" or "and neither" can introduce an "or" or "nor" clause (respectively) into a larger "and" clause just fine.

TL;DR: Say "and neither should it be" or "nor should it be", but not "and nor should it be".

EPIC reply, sir!

So?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do people think it's best to leave others living in the stone age?

Re:So?

[ColdWetDog]

Why do people think it's best to leave others living in the stone age?

Alive in the stone age or dead but part of the neoplastic mess that is Homo Industrialis?

You decide.

Re:So?

[Mr0bvious]

Dunno, but from my observations modern humans seem stressed not not overly happy (though, they have toys and are well fed).

I think you need to have lived like these people before you can make any assessment here.

Re:So?

[Anonymous Coward]

Come on, homo modernis would be incapable of being happy in any conditions, especially conditions where there's no TV, no internet and he has to do physical work.

Re:So?

[tlambert]

Dunno, but from my observations modern humans seem stressed not not overly happy (though, they have toys and are well fed).

I think you need to have lived like these people before you can make any assessment here.

I agree. Send him in to contact them... wait...

Re:So?

[the_Bionic_lemming]

what is the average age of those that lived in the stone age?

Re:So?

[Anonymous Coward]

...and what is the amount of living done now vs then? Honestly? I'd say it's a coin toss. Every time we find a solution, those "in charge" are ready with a whole mess of problems they can create to keep us off balance and out of control. I'd blame sadism, but I doubt they put that much thought into it.

Re:So?

[Johann Lau]

It's all pretty much relative, and ultimately stone age and transcendent energy beings with civilizations spanning the whole universe are exactly the same before the heat death of the universe. Can you tell me the fundamental difference between a bacterium, a dog, a human, or the entirety of human civilization? It's all just a bunch of life, and any hierarchy of value you could propose you made up yourself, self-righteously so.

And actually, it's not like we are much more than toy people from a toy culture -- we can't even make lighters that can be refilled more than a few times because we're too greedy, and right now we have new devices and software on us pushed constantly just to keep us buying, with hardly any meaningful progress and plenty of regression. We're ones to talk, really. It's Dunning-Kruger all the way down -- if we were oh so advanced, maybe cultures we came in contact with would thrive, instead of shrivel up and die?

This bit from "Network" comes to mind:

It's too late, Diana. There's nothing left in you that I can live with. You're one of Howard's humanoids. If I stay with you, I'll be destroyed. Like Howard Beale was destroyed. Like Laureen Hobbs was destroyed. Like everything you and the institution of television touch is destroyed. You're television incarnate, Diana: Indifferent to suffering; insensitive to joy. All of life is reduced to the common rubble of banality. War, murder, death are all the same to you as bottles of beer. And the daily business of life is a corrupt comedy. You even shatter the sensations of time and space into split seconds and instant replays. You're madness, Diana. Virulent madness. And everything you touch dies with you.

Re:So?

[N1AK]

Because there isn't some magically right or wrong answer. Clearly there's something wrong with contacting them if we don't do a better job of controlling whatever disease and/or other factors is wiping them out though.

Re:So?

[ttucker]

It is funny how only the super wealthy countries pine for a simple life.

Re:So?

[gl4ss]

because they regard to the tribesmen as animals to conserve. not as humans to interact with like you do with humans, to educate, to help.

now, why don't we regard north korea as the same? I'm willing to bet the justice system in those tribes works just as fine as it does in NK.... the mortality rate goes up? well, how about vaccinating them - though a lot of the reason why things hit the fan might be just that their tribal system collapses as the village elders/strongest no longer have anything to base their power on since they don't have the most strength(since guns take out brute force from killing prowess) and its obvious pretty soon that they don't have the most knowledge either.

(furthermore, the population levels of the tribes are so small that they're doomed in the long run anyways)

Re:So?

[Zedrick]

Because living in a "stone age" society is generally much healthier than living in a 1st world country. Also, more spare time - which isn't wasted on TV or the internet. (hunter-gatherer-people do not spend all their time looking for food, that's a common myth)

The downside is lack of medical treatment and vulnerability to external factors such as weather.

Re:So?

[Anonymous Coward]

The average age is determined by infant mortality mostly. They could still reach their 50s and 60s.

Re:So?

[Imsdal]

It's more healthy to live in the stone age because why, exactly? Average life span has tripled since the stone age, and that is generally considered the best proxy for health there is.

Also, the idea that we work more now than we did in the stone age is also completely wrong. A regular employee works ~1600 hours/year for ~40 years. That's less than 10% of their time. Stone age people certainly worked more than 10% of their lives (even though I agree that it may be a myth that they worked most of the time.)

Re:So?

[Opportunist]

This isn't about the average age the individual gets to, it's about a tribe in its entirety going extinct.

Another fine example why giving an average without a standard deviation is pointless. If you have a society where you reach 40 years on average it doesn't tell you whether you have a society that is thriving because people live about 35-45 years and can sensibly procreate before they die, or whether you have a society on the brink of extinction because a handful of individuals get to see 100 years while nearly all the others die long before they could possibly have offspring.

It doesn't mean jack that you can give a few individuals a longer life if the majority of people, especially young people that can ensure the survival of the tribe, dies from diseases. Yes, in the stone age few people got older than 40. But that was plenty to make sure that there's a next generation. From a purely evolutionary point of view, it's by no means necessary that we all live to see our grand-grandchildren get born. A handful of old people to serve as the brain trust and teachers of the tribe would be far more than enough.

Re:So?

[Opportunist]

I have to look it up again, but I remember a study that came to the conclusion that the hunter/gatherer that our ancestor was spent about four hours per day "working", i.e. doing what's necessary to survive. The rest of his time was what we'd today consider "leisure" time. That of course instantly provokes the question why the hell we went and increased our workload by becoming farmers. It's arguably more work to tend to a field and feed animals than to just go out where the stuff grows and simply harvest what grows naturally, and likewise it's much easier, especially with our superior brain, to hunt animals rather than raise them and tend to them until they're ready for "harvest".

Personally, I think the reason is simply security. If you have a field growing in front of your house that you can eventually harvest, and that you can store that harvest which is much, much more food than you could possibly carry around with you all the time as a nomadic lifestyle would require, that all increases the likelihood that you have food not only today but also tomorrow. Animals that you have in your enclosures and stables are far more reliable as a food source than animals that run around free and might go away when you're not looking.

But that's not where we stopped. We wanted more security. We organized past the tribal level, again increasing our workload, to lower the chance of war and pillaging. For that, again, we created a special "caste" of people to watch over the rest, a caste that didn't do any "meaningful" work but just took the responsibility to protect the others. And all those organizers, protectors and so many other "non-productive" members of the society need to be fed, clothed and sheltered, again increasing the workload on those that produce.

Security and organization always comes at a price. Right now, that means that our workload about tripled from when we were hunters/gatherers. In turn, we did get a quite impressive amount of security. In our "civilized" world, we eliminated many of the threats that our ancestors worried about. Hunger is virtually unheard of (if anything, we have more food than is good for us). People usually have fairly good shelter and can reasonably expect it to be his "castle", i.e. that nobody else goes there and claims it as his own. We also don't have to keep one or two people on guard every night to ensure nobody steals our stuff.

Of course, one could now complain about all the stress this brings along. It does. Compared to the "simple" life of a few millennia ago, it sure is a lot more complicated and stressful. But also a damn lot more predictable and safe!

Re:So?

[BitZtream]

Because its not your choice. My sister in law thinks we need to bring America's great technology and advancements ... and teachers (since she's a teacher) to 3rd world nations so they can become modern countries.

Did you ever stop and think that maybe, JUST MAYBE, these people are happy and all we're going to do is ruin their lives?

Many of my most intelligent and accomplished friends are also the same people who would love to cut the cord and find themselves in a rural setting living off nature.

Once you get to a certain point in your life, you realize all this modern technology really doesn't make you any happier. Modern medicine is really the one thats most important. Personally, I like knowledge too much and I simply can't disconnect from the Internet just yet, but that and medicine to make sure my young son is safe are really the only thing that keeps me from finding a nice little island in the tropics to live out my days without technology.

Re:So?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not all places on earth have a constant food supply around them in the form of a tropical jungle.

Re:So?

[Mr D from 63]

Why do people think it's best to leave others living in the stone age?

These tribes have struck a balance with their environment, which makes them different from the 'ever expanding' cultures. Somehow, their population and footprint remains relatively stable. Why would it be best for them for us to disturb that balance?

Curios notes: But in the end, don't these tribes need to interact with others to really thrive, even if purely for the reason of genetic diversity? Typically, how 'old' are these tribes? Are destroying a society that's been around for 75 years, 200 years, 500years? How long will they last on their own?

Re:So?

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems many of the deaths are from contagious diseases. It certainly is possible to manage that, we need better protocols for handling new populations, that doesn't mean they have to be cut off completely.

Re:So?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do people think it's best to leave others living in the stone age?

 

Because they have a severe case of white people guilt. The way to cure that is to toss themselves off a high bridge onto rocks, but oddly enough, they never do. They just want others to pay for their guilt while they continue to enjoy the benefits of the damage we supposedly did to those poor peoples.

Re:So?

[Jason Levine]

Hunger is virtually unheard of (if anything, we have more food than is good for us).

I'd disagree with hunger being virtually unheard of, but the reason I'd disagree with it supports your overall argument. There are people who go hungry (both in third world countries and in first world countries like the United States). In almost all cases, though, the problem is not "we don't have enough food to send them", but "there is plenty of food but X is preventing them from getting it" where X could be some local warlord, a natural disaster, politicians who think the solution to poverty is just "they should stop being poor", etc. In other words, the problem is mostly a human one, not a food supply one. (Side note: The amount of food waste in the United States is staggering. Food gets tossed out to rot just because it has a blemish on it and too many people want their food to be 100% blemish free.)

Re:So?

[Artifakt]

'neoplastic'

Did you mean neoplasmic there?

Re:So?

[O('_')O_Bush]

That last statement is utterly false.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncontacted_peoples

Most of their populations are in the hundreds, which is long term sustainable.

One example, off the top of my head, is the North Sentinelese, who have lived, mostly uncontacted (certainly so by white people), for a long, long time (some estimates have been in the 60,000 year range).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sentinel_Island

They also survived the 2004 Tsunami, apparently unaffected.

If the Indian government continues to protect the island from outsiders, I certainly expect them to outlast western civilization.

Re:So?

[Artifakt]

Exactly enough for a pair of breeding adults to reproduce enough times that, again on average, two of their offspring survived to reproduce, and so on. For humans, that's actually quite large, because twins and greater are rare and infant mortality is pretty extreme for mammals, so we can guess that the women of the new stone age lived to be about 25 on average, while the males should have had similar lifespans, unless the females averaged 30 and the males only made it on average to 14 but got lucky a lot in their last few months, or any other combination that balances the Darwinian books.

Re:So?

[Tony Isaac]

How about a third option: alive and part of modern society! It is not an either-or proposition. The thing to do here is figure out what is killing them, and find solutions!

Re:So?

[meta-monkey]

the hunter/gatherer that our ancestor was spent about four hours per day "working", i.e. doing what's necessary to survive

So you're saying they put in about twice as much work per day as the people in my office building?

Re:So?

[taiwanjohn]

^This.

And time is running out to create such protocols before the last remaining "uncontacted" tribes are found and exposed. They'll never be able to enforce a "no contact" rule in such a remote area. It's bound to happen eventually. In the meantime, we ought to use whatever safe means are available to study these cultures.

The farmer and author/activist Joel Salatin describes this mentality as "environmentalism by abandonment" -- ie: the only way we can protect the land is to not touch it at all. He says this is ludicrous because we are a part of the biosphere. We affect (and are affected by) the food chain, the carbon cycle, the water cycle, etc.. Our goal should be to optimize our impact rather than to minimize it.

For example, one way to study these cultures would be to drop some "fake rocks" containing cameras and transmitters into a tribal village. Better yet, make a few that are shiny and easily noticed, on the hope that some member of the tribe will bring it home to show the others. You could record hours of conversation as they try to figure out what it is and what to do with it. Then have your Cunning Linguist [TM] figure out their language.

Obviously, you'd also want to screen the anthropologists to avoid any carriers of infectious diseases. But there should be plenty of ways to study the culture "remotely" before sending them in anyway.

Re:So?

[Kielistic]

So what should we do? Lock them in an ever-shrinking reserve instead where they can never expand or improve their current lives? Perhaps we should plant some hidden cameras in this new era of zoos.

Re:So?

[Bartles]

Because, that's what movies tell us we should do. No one ever asks the natives what they want to do.

Re:So?

[AvitarX]

I assume things were invented, because people were bored. Life is boring, there's only so much leisure one can tolerate with nothing to do.

From that comes creativity and inventiveness, and here we are now.

My friend volunteered in the fringes of Zambia, and they were farmers with nothing but time too, the natives had long absurd greetings, and walked with a slow shuffle, just to fill time.

The Egyptians got bored, and built the pyramids (an early example of a society that managed to get a healthy diet farming).

In the end though, I think it comes to population of the tribe, you choose to hunt gather with 50-200 people, unless God is backing you (such as the old testament), my civilization of 500+ people will crush you. Game theory and non-optimum equilibrium or something...

Re:So?

[Intrepid imaginaut]

we can't even make lighters that can be refilled more than a few times because we're too greedy

What? Aside from the rest of the misanthropic rant, zippos work just fine for generations. They're terrible for other reasons, but you can get butane and other lighters of all sorts with incredible durability, not to mention a six inch firesteel I own which I fully expect to outlive me despite being used regularly. These things aren't cheap, but if you're looking for high quality at a low cost that's a whole other set of issues...

Re:So?

[The Grim Reefer]

what is the average age of those that lived in the stone age?

Unfortunately they neglected to update their medical records system to electronic, so we can't say for sure.

Re:So?

[GodfatherofSoul]

It's called arcadia. It's this myth that's been around since ancient Rome that life would be so much simple if wealthy urbanites could simply retire to the country for vacations to recharge. The truly delusional quit their jobs and buy farms thinking their lives will then be stress free.

Re:So?

[tsqr]

Because living in a "stone age" society is generally much healthier than living in a 1st world country.

Right. We're talking about a society where a dental cavity, or an ingrown toenail, or a wound suffered during hunting, or appendicitis, or tonsillitis, will all most likely end in death, where most women eventually die in childbirth, and a 21-year-old person is considered old. Don't confuse your supposedly healthy paleo diet with stone age society.

Re:So?

[akpak]

I wonder what they think when they see an airplane pass by overhead, or a huge ship off in the distance.

Re:So?

[penguinoid]

By that metric, wouldn't it be correct to say that stone age people worked 0% of their time? After all, it's just hunting and gathering and they never have to go to work. Otherwise, you must also include the time we spend cooking, shopping, and doing various chores, none of which ends at retirement.

Re:So?

[Richy_T]

I think you would delineate work as obtaining resources. So shopping would count (as any man knows) but cooking and chores would not.

Re:So?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dunno, but from my observations modern humans seem stressed not not overly happy (though, they have toys and are well fed).

I think you need to have lived like these people before you can make any assessment here.

That's because resources are finite but wants are infinite.

It's mathematically impossible to "be satisfied" at the macro level.

What you'll find is that in general what people are unhappy about changes. So hunter-gathers are unhappy about how hard it is to find game, that they aren't as good at making spears that their neighbor, and that they aren't having as much sex as they'd like, whereas industrial societies are unhappy that the supermarket discontinued their favorite band of yogurt, that they aren't as good at capital investment as their neighbor, and that they aren't having as much sex as they'd like.

Re:So?

[Richy_T]

Did you think that maybe, just maybe, "these people" are actually, y'know, people and should be able to decide for themselves?

Re:So?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well for one thing If I were to live at the level of a hunter gather I could probably work 1-2 hours a day on average to pay for that lifestyle at my hourly rate.

I mean, sleeping in my car, is pretty luxurious compared to living in a teepee, and food and loincloths don't cost that much.

It's the wanting a permanent chunk of high demand real-estate (my rented apartment) for my living space, the delivery of electricity, potable water, and connection to a worldwide data network, and my various toys (video-games, computers, photography equipment, etc.) and pets that force me to obstensivly work 8 hours a day (but closer to 4-6 if you discount the time I spend screwing around on Slashdot et al) to maintain my lifestyle.

Re:So?

[Tablizer]

Why do people think it's best to leave others living in the stone age?

They'll be best equipped to survive an Apocalypse. Why de-skill them?

Re:So?

[quantaman]

It's called arcadia. It's this myth that's been around since ancient Rome that life would be so much simple if wealthy urbanites could simply retire to the country for vacations to recharge. The truly delusional quit their jobs and buy farms thinking their lives will then be stress free.

I think the bigger factor is social. We spent most of our evolution in small communities with a lot of group activities, I don't think it's unreasonable to consider the possibility that those uncontacted tribe members are actually happier than we are. Hell, I'd rather be chatting with friends than posting on /. but our world isn't really designed for that.

Re:So?

[david_thornley]

There's a certain amount of natural selection also. Farming societies can support a lot more people per unit area than hunter-gatherers, and so tend to win confrontations. Moreover, any given patch of land is worth more to a farmer than a hunter-gatherer. This means that the farmers take over territory, and then there's even more farmers and fewer hunter-gatherers.

Therefore, given a farming society in an area populated by hunting-gathering societies, the farming society will wind up with the arable land and a whole lot more population. The farming society is also likely to have a whole lot more work to do and a shorter and less happy average lifespan, but it will be wildly successful in competition.

Re:So?

[metaforest]

All nice and fine until the horse-riding-archers show up in force to deprive you of your stores and your life. The only reason the Mongols didn't take over Europe is that Genghis Khan failed to produce a suitable heir for the Empire before he died. Even some of the Khans after Genghis managed to make the Norther Europeans sweat blood and tears.

Europeans had no hope of resisting, had the Khans set their sights on invading Europe.

between 23 and 70 uncontacted tribes

[Nutria]

Jesus H Christ, but that's a huge spread. Do anthropologists actually know anything?

Re:between 23 and 70 uncontacted tribes

[AK Marc]

People complain when you put the wildlife ear tags on the natives.

Re:between 23 and 70 uncontacted tribes

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that why you had to flee the country?

Re:between 23 and 70 uncontacted tribes

[Anonymous Coward]

They know that you humans are assholes.

Re:between 23 and 70 uncontacted tribes

[daem0n1x]

Do anthropologists actually know anything?

They do, but not about you.

Re:between 23 and 70 uncontacted tribes

[GodfatherofSoul]

"There are known knowns..."

Uncontacted Tribes Die Instantly After We Meet The

[Anonymous Coward]

instantly. poof, it's like magic!

Other animals

[Dan East]

Wouldn't the same thing happen to pretty much any other species of animals, if one small group had been isolated for several hundred years and a much larger group came into contact with it? The only options are to absorb into the larger group, or die out from disease, starvation or direct fighting.

Re:Other animals

[RoknrolZombie]

Explain how tribes can survive after thousands of years without disease?

I'm pretty sure the OP intended to say "new diseases". Obviously they have their own diseases - and their own immunities...they just aren't the same as the rest of the worlds'.

Native Americans used herbs and other plants to heal themselves, and yet today /.ers deny any chance that alternative medicine works.

Yes, because when it's proven to work it's called "medicine".

And what does this say about Europe who used religion as a heal/execute all.

Eh...no comment? People were largely uneducated back then? I'm not sure what the excuse is in this day and age though...

Natives Americans were fairly populated, just divided into several tribes. Without any major population wiping disease.

This is a random link - I'm sure you can find more with a quick search:
http://www.examiner.com/articl...

The only reason that the Europeans had a chance was because the Native American population was already decimated. Not saying that it's "ok" or anything like that, but thems the facts.

I'm not saying that having a large population wouldn't cause such disease, add that fact they lived with there livestock, any disease could jump from human into animal and mutate, or vice verse, and the vaccine for small pox came about because of [essentially] milk maids who didn't get the disease, due to their interaction with the heifers. Their lack of proper hygiene, not deposing of their feces in a proper manner. Contaminating their drinking water with their own feces, animal feces, ect....

Hail dumb luck? Really? What are you getting at? That science is "bad"? By all means - segregate yourself from the scientific community...I don't think you'll be missed.

Re:Other animals

[Johann Lau]

There is a huge span between "coming into contact" and "having to compete for space/food". The animals and plants I see day in and out seem to be generally rather more relaxed than what you are describing -- the option you pretend doesn't even exist, co-existence, is the most common one.

Re:Other animals

[Sique]

Herbs and other plants are not "alternative medicine". They are medicine, pure and simple. Many of our pills are herbs and other plants too, you just don't recognize them anymore. Aspirin is basicly willow bark cooked in vinegar, and many cough medications contain thyme as their main ingredient for instance. What we don't have are good natural sources for antibiotics as most molds, our main sources for antibiotics, are toxic and need heavy processing until their antibiotic substrances can be used for medication. So those tribes are depending solely on general good health and their immune system to fight off infections, and if their immune system doesn't have an answer to a new strain of bacteria, they die quickly.

Re:Other animals

[Opportunist]

Well, once you take a closer look at various "alternative medicines", you'll find out that they fall in two possible groups:

1) The one where certain herbs were used that have similar or even the same properties as some off the stuff we use in our pills. They are usually cited when claiming that "alternative" medicine works so well. There's nothing really wrong with that, except that yes, they tried it and found out that it worked. Probably the same way we did. We just decided that it's easier to store and apply when instead of chewing bark and cooking it just to the point where we can filtrate it, we just do that in an industrial process and press the result in a pill.

2) The faith healing crap. Usually, to give it some credibility, blended with the first group. The noble Watsitoju-Indians of the Amazon used that root and it worked like a charm against this ailment (because the root has medical properties similar to the stuff we use against it), so they are great healers. And these great healers heal cancer, HIV and whatever else you got with prayers and incantations, so this must work too because they are also the ones that found the root. I don't really understand the logic behind that connection, but that bullshit sure sells well.

Re:Other animals

[Anonymous Coward]

As a physician, I have to agree with one of the physicians on the web site "Science Based Medicine." He stated that there was no such thing as "alternative medicine." If something works in most patients, we use it (for individual patients, sometimes things don't work). If it hasn't been validated, we don't use it, except in clinical trials. We actually conduct studies to determine if something works or not, and don't make bogus claims to get your money. If it doesn't work, it gets thrown out (unless it has a side effect that can be useful, such as Viagra.) If it has significant side effects that outweigh the benefits, it gets thrown out, with some exceptions (The FDA initially issued a black-box warning about using cisapride (Propulsid). Unfortunately, there was nothing that worked anywhere near as well as a prokinetic agent in the gut, so, it was continued to be used. The FDA pulled it off the market and left the people with no good prokinetic agents.)

A wonderful study of asthma with a known treatment as well as two different placebo treatments was reported in the New England Journal of Medicine, http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1103319#t=article
In their study, the only treatment that showed significant improvement in air flow was the albuterol. But, the patients in both placebo groups had perceived improvement, but in air flow studies, no significant improvement.

So, for pain, with no underlying disease that will kill you, take whatever you want that works. But, if you really want to treat the cause, better stick to traditional medicine.

Re:Other animals

[bluegutang]

Obviously they have their own diseases - and their own immunities...they just aren't the same as the rest of the worlds'.

I'm not so sure. The prevalence of diseases in a population is a function of a number of factors, including:
- Size of the population
- Degree of interaction between individuals/groups within the population
- Degree of interaction with animals that can harbor diseases which affect humans.

If I remember correctly, Jared Diamond argues in one of his books that infectious disease was rare among humans until we invented agriculture. Before that, humanity consisted of isolated hunter-gatherer tribes and diseases generally did not have the chance to propagate to many people before dying out.

Re:Other animals

[Jason Levine]

To expand on Group #1 a bit, we press it into a pill because this lets us extract the medicinal agent and give it at a constant dose. Suppose we found an herb tomorrow that cured cancer. Chewing this herb seemed to make tumors go into remission in many cases. Alternative medicine folks would be happy with that and would sell the herb.

Scientists go further, though. They'd study the herb, figure out just how it is curing the cancer. They would isolate the compound within the herb that does the curing and would figure out how much of a dose was needed. There would be tests to make sure that the cure didn't come with some horrible downside. ("We've cured your cancer but now you are poisoned and have only a week to live.") They'd figure out what the side effects would be. Finally, they'd make a pill with the exact dosage. Chewing the hypothetical herb might cure your cancer or give you too high or too low of a dosage. Taking the pill would give you the exact dosage every time. Finally, since the scientists would know how the herb's chemical worked, they could look for/create similar chemicals with fewer side effects or that better targeted some kinds of cancer.

Re:Other animals

[bjwest]

Natives Americans were fairly populated, just divided into several tribes. Without any major population wiping disease.

This is a random link - I'm sure you can find more with a quick search: http://www.examiner.com/articl...

The only reason that the Europeans had a chance was because the Native American population was already decimated. Not saying that it's "ok" or anything like that, but thems the facts.

Did you even read what you referenced? The whole article is about how the Europeans were responsible for the devastation you're trying to put off on a native plague. The very act of contact is what started the (most likely smallpox) plague that devastated the native populations. The American population was doing just fine until the Europeans showed up.

Re:Other animals

[tsqr]

Did you even read what you referenced? The whole article is about how the Europeans were responsible for the devastation you're trying to put off on a native plague.

Well, no, not the whole article. There's this, which I imagine is what he was referring to: "Little known outside the circle of a few forensic epidemiologists, though, is the fact that the deadliest plague of all in the Americas was very possibly a home grown virus."

Re:Other animals

[bjwest]

Did you even read what you referenced? The whole article is about how the Europeans were responsible for the devastation you're trying to put off on a native plague.

Well, no, not the whole article. There's this, which I imagine is what he was referring to: "Little known outside the circle of a few forensic epidemiologists, though, is the fact that the deadliest plague of all in the Americas was very possibly a home grown virus."

Reading the remainder of the paragraph "It mutated in the chaotic environment of post-Conquest Mexico. In a series of outbreaks during the 1500s, the mega-plague wiped out 95% of the indigenous population of the Mexican Highlands. It is also the most likely culprit for a massive depopulation of the Southern Highlands around 1585-1600 that left most of its landscape uninhabited." This "home grown virus" spread post-Conquest, which means it was most likely something that came over with the Europeans and mutated here. This would still make the Europeans responsible.

Re:Other animals

[david_thornley]

In the days when a sailing ship could spend months afloat, they tended to be disease-free after being out a week or so. That was one reason yellow fever was so feared: it could survive on a ship without human hosts and keep infecting people far away from shore.

Re:Open SSL

[Anonymous Coward]

When I said I wanted my SSL open, I didn't mean this open, am I right folks!?

Re:Open SSL

[megabeck42]

Are you new here? I'm surprised he isn't citing a petrified Natalie Portman covered in grits and vetted by the GNAA. "Netcraft confirms X" is an old, old, late 90s slashdot comment "joke." Granted, it's as funny as those forwarded email I get from my aunt; but it's the thought that counts, right?

Sad, and not black and white either

[RightwingNutjob]

The metaphorical White Man has a heavy burden here. Reach out to the savages, and there are adverse consequences, suffering, death, and loss of traditions going back millennia. Stay away, and people who should be your fellow human beings are cut off from the fruits of civilization, and are treated like livestock whose habitat must be delineated and (un)managed to keep their numbers healthy so that more children can be born into a life where their greatest aspiration can be to live just like their grandfathers going back tens of thousands of years.

Re:Sad, and not black and white either

[phantomfive]

The metaphorical White Man has a heavy burden here.

What is the burden? I mean, what do you suggest doing? We can barely take care of ourselves out here.......

Re:Sad, and not black and white either

[Anonymous Coward]

It is our duty to keep those tribes alive, for they could be a chance for the human race to reboot after the technological collapse.

Re:Sad, and not black and white either

[loufoque]

Are you implying that white men have better aspirations than living?

Re:Sad, and not black and white either

[Anonymous Coward]

Not really. They won't be *that* helpful to us. They've got local knowledge of flora and fauna, but that's not helpful to me many thousands of miles away in another ecosystem. Just because they are still living as their ancestors lived hundreds of years ago, doesn't mean they possess some ancient wisdom that trumps modern science. I'm not sure it's our duty to keep them alive. Do we have a duty to keep others alive? I'd like to think yes, but this is Slashdot, and I can bet a lot of people would disagree that we owe anything to our fellow Man. We're not responsible for those tribes being in their predicament to the extent that we didn't prevent them from evolving on their own. They were isolated, and when their ancestors encountered Europeans, they retreated further away into the jungle in order to stay isolated. Those are consequences they must deal with. If we went in to contact them, we would be trespassing on their world and threatening their lives. If we left them alone, we wouldn't be isolating them anymore than they already have themselves. The fact is, we can't interact with them without requiring them to change. At the very least, they must be vaccinated.

Re:Sad, and not black and white either

[Anonymous Coward]

Reboot really? The rest of civilization has done things like land on the moon and send rovers to mars. We have satellites that are leaving our solar system. Some of the indigenous tribes in Australia haven't developed pottery yet.

My point is they have yet to evolve to a point where we were thousands of years ago, I have no hope that suddenly they will change. Somewhere they lost their drive to better themselves. Even if that means moving to a location that allows them to do so.

Re:Sad, and not black and white either

[Immerman]

One man spends a few hours a day supplying for all his worldly needs, and the rest in the pursuit of art, spiitual development, and other pleasures.
The other spends half his waking day slaving away for somebody else's goals, in order to earn money he doesn't need in order to buy things he doesn't want so he can impress people he doesn't care about.

Which is the wiser man?

Re:Sad, and not black and white either

[93 Escort Wagon]

They really need access to Facebook.

Re:Sad, and not black and white either

[RoknrolZombie]

The one that got a banking degree in the 80's?

Re:Sad, and not black and white either

[Johann Lau]

Yeah, those types are just oozing spiritual development.

Re:Sad, and not black and white either

[rossdee]

Climate change will wipe them out too, probably by drought.

Re:Sad, and not black and white either

[Anonymous Coward]

Pursuit of the spiritual and pursuit of the material are not an either/or proposition, you tourist. You would visit quaint villages in foreign countries and remark about how pure the people were, slaving away at the fields, foraging for food, risking death to bring back meat, using rudimentary tools, free from the pressures of credit and the horrific slavery of refrigeration, combustion engines, and metal alloys. So pure, so free.

It's so easy to look at people that still struggle for the most basic of wordily needs and find some form of peace when you enjoy everything they don't have and bear little or none of their risks. When you get sick, and you will, you will have medicine, medicine that you bought slaving away for somebody else's goals. When you are hungry again, you will have to make that awful choice of take-out or instant. You won't have to hunt. You may want to, but you won't have to.

Be a hipster if you want, talk about how iPhones are killing good ol' fashioned chats in the street with strangers, or how satellite radio and fuel efficient cars have destroyed the bond you used to be able to have with a beast of burden, whether it be your spouse or your horse; but don't think for a moment that those impressive things that people buy for themselves are incapable of bringing them actual lasting happiness simply because their lavish. You're just fooling yourself. I will happily take an understanding of the atom and bacteria over a belief that the sun is angry at me, or the constant fear that comes from superstition.

Re:Sad, and not black and white either

[Tom]

One has a life expectancy of 30-odd years, the other of 70+. He has access to literature, art and music from all over the world. If he breaks his leg, he is transported to a hospital, gets a cast and will be well again in a short time instead of getting an infection and having a 50-50 chance of surviving.

We have romantic thoughts about prior times mostly because we forget all the shit about them. Your average medieval market fair doesn't include the open-latrines, your village getting burnt down in one of the constant wars, the fact that women had a reasonably high chance to die when giving birth or the simple fact that most likely everyone reeked to high heavens. Or just the fact that 90% of us would be pig farmers or something.

I know what I'd pick if given a choice. If you think different, pick a tribe, learn their language and go and live with them for a few years.

You can totally work a few hours a day to satisfy basic needs and spend the rest doing whatever you want. Of course it will probably mean not being able to buy the latest smartphone every year or going on expensive holiday trips, or very much medical care or a car - but then, the tribesmen do without those as well, right?

Re:Sad, and not black and white either

[Waccoon]

The one that can still feed himself for a few months if he breaks a leg.

I'm not a very materialistic person and I don't make much money, but I do very much understand the concepts of emergency buffers and retirement savings.

Re:Sad, and not black and white either

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't bother about it.
No one here has spent more than a couple of days in the jungle, and most likely with a weeks worth of food with them.
You go to any shit-hole village in the jungle anywhere and most people are trying to get out, or get their kids out.
They have fuck all to do all day and they have all kinds of stuff to worry about that we take for granted.
They worry about getting food.
They worry about getting sick or injured. (no hospitals out there, and gg no re if you get some kind of infection)
They worry about getting clean drinking water.
They worry about crop failure because they don't have several years worth of strategic maple syrup stored up.
And they eat the same fucking shit every day.
Every time someone starts about how we are ruining these simple folk with our modern things I get pissed off.
Maybe let those people decide for themselves what they want.

Re:Sad, and not black and white either

[Anonymous Coward]

cut off from the fruits of civilisation

Or cut off from the restrictions of civilisation. Is it better to live (on average - and the difference is much less once you ignore infant death) a short, free life or a long, tedious life? I'm not answering for anyone else, but my answer is that the modern Western world and the indigenous lifestyle seem to be equally tedious extremes, and both suffer the problem that it's very hard to escape either. Pre-globalisation, at least one could more easily escape the former.

treated like livestock whose habitat must be delineated and (un)managed

Eh, first world human private property is "delineated and managed" - we are much more like livestock than what would have to be done here, which is to delineate and unmanage as much as possible.

to keep their numbers healthy

The purpose would be to not interfere, not to maintain, no? Although maybe we'd interfere anyway in a crisis, Prime Directive style. IDK.

so that more children can be born into a life where their greatest aspiration can be to live just like their grandfathers going back tens of thousands of years.

The average first world aspirations of sitting in a cubicle and mastering the new buzzword, getting a mortgage, buying an iPhone, etc. seems far more horrific. Yeah, a tiny tiny population of first worlders may invent or discover something which has the potential to change lives, but even then only a small proportion of those inventions/discoveries will end up becoming usable in the public domain rather than "owned" and exploited.

I was happiest when I was living in a mixture: in a remote village in Scotland, on a small farm, with private water and sewerage, much food sourced on-site, miles of beach and common ground around us, etc. And yet I could also access the Internet! so I had a combination of traditional and very modern lives. Back now in an English suburban lifestyle, I have lost one aspect but not the other, and I can say with regret that I'd rather have lost the Internet than everything else. But that area has gradually been gentrified, providing holiday homes for city dwellers - dullards who took advantage of price disparity - so I don't think I'd want to go back there specifically.

Ah well. My father was born during the siege of Madrid during the Spanish civil war. If that doesn't provide a lifelong message that the best life is one where you're left the fuck alone by the big boys with toys who think they know better, I don't know what will.

Re:Sad, and not black and white either

[ChunderDownunder]

Not helpful??

Think of the plants in the rainforest with which local tribesmen use to treat illness. Synthesising these compounds may be crucial in treating the next batch of superbugs.

Think of terra preta, a fertile soil mix found in the Amazon, whose synthesis could be the key to 21st century crop yields devastated by climate change.

Re:Sad, and not black and white either

[Anonymous Coward]

> the best life is one where you're left the fuck alone by the big boys with toys who think they know better

+10^1000 (modded higher if I could)..

Well done! Truer words could not have been spoken.

Re:Sad, and not black and white either

[Anonymous Coward]

The premise was that we would need them to help us figure out how to survive after the end of the technological world, which is a ridiculous idea as their expertise is specific to their locality and often kept amongst a few elder tribesman who pass it on to the next generation of elders. I seriously doubt that indigenous people possess a special understanding of terra preta above expertise in using it. They don't know why it's especially fertile. They have nothing to compare it to. Remember, these people know nothing about the world around them.

Re:Sad, and not black and white either

[stenvar]

"Art, spiritual development, and other pleasures?" What does that have to do with life in pre-contact societies or tribes? Most of the time in such societies is taken up with working very hard to get enough food not to starve. Medical care is non-existent, and disease widepreas. Violence is rampant in many of those societies. Justice and power are arbitrary There isn't much room for "spiritual development".

Re:Sad, and not black and white either

[andydread]

I've seen a documentary where they contacted one of these tribes. They were living a rich life in the jungle actually and were happy and never hungry. They didn't even have clothes. they were pretty much naked. Some missionaries decided to feel sorry for them and 'help' them. They gave them clothes, sodas, junk food and other staples from civilzation and led them out of the jungle into civilization. You know what happened? They went from a rich happy life in the jungle to living in abject poverty in south america. No money, nothing. it was horrible. That is when I realized that indeginous people should be left alone. And if people want to spin it that leaving these people alone is "treating them like animals on a reserve" or whatever then so be it. Those people lived a happy life in the jungle and were well fed. When they came out of the jungle the suffered living in 3rd world slum with no food and no money and no clue how to make money. Horrible. I think the best thing to do is treat them as natural living beings that are living in their natural habitat on the brink of extinction and we should just leave them and their habitat alone. There are no fruits from our civilization that they can benifit from at this stage. They definitely can't benifit from a third world slum.

Re:Sad, and not black and white either

[drinkypoo]

On the third hand, it seems like there could be some kind of middle ground, where we have modern communications and health care, but we don't have so much meaningless grind for the sake of grind, the replicated and contradictory efforts... We spend a lot of time and money fighting each other and it doesn't seem strictly necessary.

Re:Sad, and not black and white either

[Anonymous Coward]

One man spends a few hours a day supplying for all his worldly needs, and the rest in the pursuit of art, spiitual development, and other pleasures.
The other spends half his waking day slaving away for somebody else's goals, in order to earn money he doesn't need in order to buy things he doesn't want so he can impress people he doesn't care about.

Which is the wiser man?

you realize modern civilization provides for the first scenario as well, right?

working a job for money doesn't necessitate mindless consumerism.

Re:Sad, and not black and white either

[Opportunist]

The premise is that they might be the only humans still existing after we manage to kill ourselves. My only hope is that we don't take them with us, my hope for us is long gone.

Re:Sad, and not black and white either

[Anonymous Coward]

Wise !== Spiritual

Re:Sad, and not black and white either

[Opportunist]

I know the type. They're oozing, all right, but if that's spiritual development, I'm not too eager to be enlightened.

Re:Sad, and not black and white either

[Anonymous Coward]

We all hatez da Faseb00ch!!!!!
 
HERP!!!!
 
You're part of the problem.

Re:Sad, and not black and white either

[Anonymous Coward]

If these tribes were so good at curing disease they wouldn't go extinct after we meet them. I'm all for preserving the Amazon rain forests, and coral reefs, and all that stuff, but don't insult me with vague promises of hypothetical cures.

Re:Sad, and not black and white either

[Anonymous Coward]

Le me know when you find it.
I've been looking for a while now.

Re:Sad, and not black and white either

[Anonymous Coward]

children can be born into a life where their greatest aspiration can be to live just like their grandfathers going back tens of thousands of years.

What exactly is so wrong with this? Why is it such a bad thing? Almost wish I had an account so I could hear the nonsensical answer(s).

Re:Sad, and not black and white either

[meta-monkey]

How else will they share pics of the bugs and mollusks they're having for dinner with the people in the next hut over?

Re:Sad, and not black and white either

[Trailer Trash]

We have romantic thoughts about prior times mostly because we forget all the shit about them. Your average medieval market fair .... or the simple fact that most likely everyone reeked to high heavens.

You apparently haven't been the the renfaire around here. But, yeah, other than that, spot on.

Re:Sad, and not black and white either

[Immerman]

You obviously don't know what you're talking about either. I've never been in the jungle, but I've spent enough time in forested wilderness areas.
Food is everywhere, it's chocolate and whiskey you really want to pack in. And pain killers - modern stuff is *way* more powerful, and you really don't want to be faced with hiking out 20 miles on a broken leg with nothing stronger than aspirin.
Medicine is everywhere as well - maybe not quite as effective as the modern versions, but many of our modern drugs are just more potent synthetic versions of herbal medicine. Antibiotics, coagulants, etc. - odds are there's always something within a few block of you. And when you get right down to it tribal medicine is often at least as effective as Victorian-era medicine, it's only quite recently that "civilized" medicine became anything remotely resembling an actual science.
Clean drinking water is mostly only a real issue if you have "civilized" people living upstream dumping sewage and/or toxic chemicals into the water. There's still things like giardia, etc to deal with, but your body can mostly adapt to such things quickly enough.

>Maybe let those people decide for themselves what they want.
Indeed. And while it's pretty much impossible to ignore modern societies exist, and word no doubt spreads about us among the tribes in the jungle, they choose to stay where they are rather than come out and join us. Don't be such a fucking cultural imperialist, assuming your own lifestyle is so much more desirable than the many alternatives.

Re:Sad, and not black and white either

[Immerman]

If food is everywhere year round, then your emergency buffer is the good will of your tribe-mates. So is your retirement savings, with the addition of the life-skills you've learned and can now pass on to the younger generations. Gift economies are difficult for us to wrap our mind around because we've been so indoctrinated to trade-based economies, but they were quite common outside the imperialist societies. Still are in fact, it's just that imperialism has spread over most the world so there's not that much outside anymore. If nothing else empires are far more effective at waging war against their neighbors.

Imagine a world where money *doesn't exist*. Wealth is measured only in the quality of your hut, tools, and the (mostly unpreserved) food you have on hand at the moment. That was the norm for most of human history. It's only with the invention of agriculture that things began to change significantly.

Re:Sad, and not black and white either

[Immerman]

No, look at the research done on contemporary hunter-gatherer societies. Typically only a couple hours a day are spent accumulating food. *Farming* is hard, but food is everywhere if you know how to catch and collect it. Especially in the tropics where you don't have to worry about stockpiling for winter. Medicine is less effective, but hardly nonexistent - it's only in the last century or two that modern medicine has significantly improved over herbalism, and many pharmaceutical companies are busily collecting herbalism lore in our search for new medicines. You are right about the violence though.

Re:Sad, and not black and white either

[Tom]

There's some truth to both sides, as usual.

I spend quite a bit of my time outdoors, averaging a few weeks a year, often with no electricity, gas-powered cooking and living in a tent. It is definitely beautiful in its own way and I'm always happy to go - and I'm equally happy to come back to a warm, dry home with a hot shower.

The dark ages were called that for a reason, one of them being that it was a step backwards from what civilization had already accomplished. The ancient greek lived better in many ways than the medieval europeans 1000 years later.

But even if you take the best period in pre-modern human history, I wouldn't want to switch, at least not permanently. There's still disease and pain and war, crime rates are crazy compared to today (ignore the news, they are lying, google Steven Pinker for a scholarly analysis) and let's not even get started about the ignorance and the dominance of religion over daily life. Plus you'd be very lucky indeed to visit another country once in your lifetime, as someone else posted your meals would have a fraction of the variety they have today, and so on and so forth.

Re:Sad, and not black and white either

[hoggoth]

I was on vacation on a remote island in Fiji, taking a canoe ride with some other American tourists. A man in his 50's sighed and said 'I hope I can afford to live like this one day'. The irony was totally lost on him that the people who's life he was jealous of woke up in their huts, had a little food, then played soccer and fished all day without owning a single penny.

Re:Sad, and not black and white either

[Immerman]

Others have done a good job addressing most of your points, I'll just throw out one more:

After 8 hours asleep, another 8 at work, plus time spent commuting, shopping, and all the other stuff you need to do just to maintain a modern life, how many hours of leisure would you say you average per day? 2? 4? 6? Let's call it 6. Times 70 years that's about 150,000 leisure-hours in your lifetime.

Now lets look at the hunter-gatherer. (who in reality will likely live a lot longer than 30 years if not unfortunate enough to be living in the waste of modern civilization, but I'll use your numbers) Same 8 hours sleeping, call it 2 hours gathering food, and lets call it another 2 for all the various other stuff, though that's probably overstating it - after all he has far less "stuff" to maintain than you do - most of his wealth is in his relationship with his tribe. So, 12 hours per day left to leisure. Times 30 years that's about 131,000 leisure-hours in his lifetime. His total lifespan may be half yours, but he's had almost as much leisure time, and only paid a fraction of the price in labor-time. How much do you enjoy all the time spent in labor and maintenance? Are you so certain you're getting the better deal?

Re:Sad, and not black and white either

[sadboyzz]

And to think in this vast Universe, we are likely just another tribe, living on this tiny isolated planet we call Earth. I just hope we don't get to meet the metaphorical White Man in my life time, because no matter what their intentions are, it never ends well for the tribers...

Re:Sad, and not black and white either

[Immerman]

Well, I'll grant you the hot showers. And throw in double-bacon cheeseburgers and french-fries cooked in sweetened grease (about the only time I east fast food is coming back from the woods, and then it's *so* good). And obviously I'm here so on the whole I prefer the modern conveniences to sleeping in a hammock under the stars. But we're not really talking about people camping in the woods, we're talking about them *living* there - they have houses to keep them dry and comfortable (in the tropics "warm" isn't really an issue). They have all their friends and family around them. They have specialists in medicine and other lore to go to when their own abilities are insufficient. It's not even remotely the same thing as camping.

Re:Sad, and not black and white either

[Jmc23]

The irony is that you think it's ironic, when it's actually true.

Re:Sad, and not black and white either

[Immerman]

We do have a dismaying tendency to measure wealth in terms of money, and fail to see our own delusion even when sitting in the middle of a counter-example. Did you do the kind thing and point out to him that he could already easily afford the lifestyle if he so chose? There are of course benefits to living the rat race, but many people never actually weigh the costs and benefits to see if they're worth it to them, they mostly just follow the life-path they've been taught is normal. Even if he chose to rejoin the rat race (and he probably would), the questioning may well help him shed the most damaging parts of his delusion of poverty. And every little bit we can do to gently break the delusion enriches humanity.

Re:Sad, and not black and white either

[hoggoth]

Yes, actually I did. I pointed out that he could get off the canoe right there and live in a hut and it wouldn't cost him a dime. His savings would most likely be enough to pay for whatever logistics he needed (plane tickets to visit home once a year, food, some clothes, etc). But he would be giving up the "normal" life he was used to. He thought about it for a moment and said he really wants to retire "in style" and not in a hut, and that he would have to "work his ass off" for a few more years to do that. At least he acknowledged what his priorities and trade-offs are.

Re:Sad, and not black and white either

[hoggoth]

The irony is you feel compelled to inject useless noise into the conversation on the very same topic your signature asks us not to complain about.
Bait taken.

Re:Sad, and not black and white either

[Anonymous Coward]

If you think different, pick a tribe, learn their language and go and live with them for a few years.

You forgot:

To watch them die from the plague of diseases you brought with you, destroying them and they way of life you idealize so highly.

Re:Sad, and not black and white either

[Anonymous Coward]

This raises the question:

If life outside the jungle was so terrible why didn't they just go back into the jungle?

Re:Sad, and not black and white either

[Anonymous Coward]

This isn't even real to life. Our present society allows millions of people to pursue worldly pleasures. I also think you greatly discount how hard it is to live how many natives live. You're jaded.

Not to mention the fact that being selfish( all his worldly needs, and the rest in pursuit of art, spiitual development, and other pleasures) does not progress society. Nor does it help your fellow man. It makes for a happier person, sure. But if we are all just out for ourselves we will not survive as a species.

To survive as a species we need to branch off this planet. And even then our survival is not assured. In a universal wide view, why does one many drawing a picture matter when his species dies out and his picture turns to dust? If humans go extinct at this point, nothing we have done matters.

Re:Sad, and not black and white either

[sjames]

They worry about getting food.

Not a problem exclusive to poor villages.

They worry about getting sick or injured. (no hospitals out there, and gg no re if you get some kind of infection)

Sounds like 21st century America.

They worry about getting clean drinking water.

Have you watched the news?

We have the ability to do better, yet refuse to.

Re:Sad, and not black and white either

[93 Escort Wagon]

I was thinking more along the lines of "how else will they share pics of whomever they're having for dinner?"

Re:Sad, and not black and white either

[Jiro]

It's funny how it sounds like a hipster to say "oh, and savage tribes don't even need iPhones" (or Xbox, or Star Trek, or other things like that). But rephrase it as "they don't have Plato, or Shakespeare, or Dickens" and suddenly it takes on a very different tinge, even though Shakespeare's plays were the lowbrow popular culture of their day.

Re:Sad, and not black and white either

[Tom]

First, I'm not an expert on the subject, not even particularily interested. I've just gathered a few things here and there.

I think you dramatically underestimate the work of the hunter-gathere and overestimate the work of the modern men, mostly because you use different definitions.

You spend 8 hours a day at the office. During the week. How many of those hours do you really work, and how many of them are socializing with co-workers, Facebook, /. or goofing off? Let's be honest here, the average office worker does not spend all 8 hours working.

I don't think you're done with 2 hours of hunting or gathering, either. It depends on location and other details, but at least in Africa, early men and many still existing primitive tribes are persistence hunters, which can take all day.

You conveniently forget things like gathering water, which sometimes (again, depending on location) can take a few hours by itself.

You also conveniently forget that due to division of labor, most of the maintenance work of modern life is already included in your daily work, because with the money you earn there you go and buy stuff ready-made instead of having to make it yourself.

If you have a grand- or grand-grand-mother still alive, ask her about washing clothes before the washing machine was invented.

And you also assume that there's a strict split between work and leisure time. I'm probably not alone in saying that for most of my life, I've actually enjoyed my work, and I do it not just for the money but also because it gives me pleasure and purpose and challenge.

I simply don't think there is an easy comparison. I'm saying that all things considered, I would not want to switch places. Maybe the tribesmen wouldn't want to, either, and that's fine with me. Or maybe he would, you'll have to ask him, not me.

Re:Sad, and not black and white either

[Tom]

You haven't seen my tent and that of some other people I hang with. We don't go camping, we do LARP. My tent has carpets. :-)

That said yes, if you know this is your life, you'll of course do things differently. And of course if you've been born into it, then that's just how things are, you don't even notice most of it.

Still... I prefer being able to open the tap to walking two miles to get fresh water. Little things like that.

Re:Sad, and not black and white either

[Anonymous Coward]

Not true.
Having spent half a year backpacking around the jungles/forests/mountains/beaches/villages of India without money, I can say with direct experience that there is a sense of spirituality there that simply overrides the theoretical "problems" you are accustomed to imagining (lack of food/water/health, etc.) in a Western mindset. When living IN nature, you live WITH nature, and BECOME nature. Nature natures, and always provides to those with the sense to ask.

Yes, there definitely is a chance that you will eat "the same fucking shit every day" however that is only if you consider it "shit" and "the same"
Yes, "they have fuck all to do all day" but only if they consider their FREE time as empty (within nothing, is everything!)
Yes, "they have all kinds of stuff to worry about that we take for granted" but only if they choose to worry by living in fear
Yes, getting sick or injured is something that could happen, however to worry about such an event is by choice, when choosing a life of fear

No to the rest of your thoughts based on my experience, since food grows naturally and is in abundance within jungles or anywhere else for that matter (if you know how to find it). Water is available, again if you know how to find it (water in motion, never drink from a stagnant source). Based on my travels, the only reason that "most people" want to get out, or get their kids out, is because they are saturated with American propaganda that tells them every American citizen lives a life of a Hollywood actor/actress. I recommend you take an extended trip to the jungle in order to gather your own thoughts through experience, which would thoroughly change your perception on many "truths" you now hold 3

Re:Sad, and not black and white either

[stenvar]

Typically only a couple hours a day are spent accumulating food.

And typically, people in civilized countries spend only a few minutes a day on average accumulating food. So I'd say things have actually improved.

Re:Sad, and not black and white either

[david_thornley]

Don't base decisions or beliefs on television documentaries. They can be made for entertainment, politics, and knowledge, and it can be very hard to tell which is which.

You do realize that the way to keep a hunting-gathering group well fed is to limit the population, don't you? That's not always pretty, and is likely something that would not be shown on TV.

Also consider that keeping these few people happy (if not as happy as the documentary says), they're taking up a whole lot of resources. They aren't actually consuming much of them, but they're making them unavailable to others. It's rather like being wealthy enough to live a life of mostly leisure.

Re:Sad, and not black and white either

[Anonymous Coward]

"If humans go extinct at this point, nothing we have done matters."

You seem to think that anything you do actually matters. Clue for you - it does NOT in the overall scheme of things, anyway.

Re:Sad, and not black and white either

[bingoUV]

most of his wealth is in his relationship with his tribe

Yes, and it is extremely hard work to acquire and maintain this wealth. Your tribe has powerful members that will kill you if you cross them - really or only in their perception. That means letting go of your good food because they want it, offering them your mate if they like her, besides the harder physical work you do than the powerful members.

Re:Sad, and not black and white either

[Immerman]

And how exactly is that different than in "civilized" society? Except that the elite are far more powerful here, and more socially stratified from "normals", so the odds of them ever noticing you personally are far smaller.

Re:Sad, and not black and white either

[bingoUV]

Exactly because they are socially stratified from "normals", your chances of crossing them by coming into contact with them are negligible. So effort to maintain relationships with them is negligible.

Effort to keep "powerful people" un-crossed is enormous in non-"civilized" society because they are frequently right next to you.

Also, in "civilized" society, people powerful enough to get away with murder are about one in a million. In non-"civilized", there are multiple within a tribe, say 15-100.

Correlation != Causation

[Z34107]

Correlation is not causation. It's entirely possible that dying natives cause visiting Europeans. I'll admit I'm unsure as to the mechanism, but maybe Hernan Cortes was a misunderstood doctors-without-borders kind of guy.

It's also possible that a third confounding factor causes both dying natives and Europeans. Perhaps they both generate spontaneously from gold and oil, or perhaps from tectonic action within countries with hats.

Re:Correlation != Causation

[Anonymous Coward]

Awesome, but you forgot to include the post hoc fallacy possibility as well. I didn't see any estimates of the death rates of actually-uncontacted "uncontacted" tribes. If an uncontacted-uncontacted tribe dies off in the forest, and no anthropologist is there to record the data...?

Re:Correlation != Causation

[Immerman]

I'm sorry, but we had to kill the patient in order to save him. The good news though is that soon we will have cured you and all your neighbors as well.

Re:Correlation != Causation

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll admit I'm unsure as to the mechanism, but maybe Hernan Cortes was a misunderstood doctors-without-borders kind of guy.

Playing doctor gets a whole new meaning here.

Re:Correlation != Causation

[Joce640k]

You got the joke, well done you!

Re:Correlation != Causation

[flyneye]

What have we learned from this, class?
Do not hide yourself away from society or you can die from something as embarrassing as a common cold.
Cover your sneezes and coughs, wash your hands frequently.
Isolate fragile subjects for study so you do not compromise them.
If the unthinkable should happen, quickly preserve them, pin and label genus, species etc. in latin.

Re:Correlation != Causation

[kasperd]

Correlation is not causation. It's entirely possible that dying natives cause visiting Europeans.

How can we even be sure there is a correlation? We can measure mortality of the tribes that we do find. But then we need to compare that number to the mortality of the tribes that we do not find. Measuring the mortality of tribes that we do not find sounds tricky.

Re:Open SSL

[Anonymous Coward]

and should be reading Ars Technica instead of Slashdot which still hasn't reported on this.

But you just don't get old fashioned internet babble like yours on those other sites. You're like the authentic frontier gibberish hillbilly from Blazing Saddles, and I am happy to have witnessed this display of a disappearing part of net culture.

Evolution in action

[Anonymous Coward]

I always find it interesting when people who believe in evolution get upset when instances of it take place in real life. If you can't adapt to the current world, then you die. That's evolution in action. This is the world we live in and being shut of from it doesn't help anyone's society or the human race in general progress further. Millions of species have died out over millions of years, so why not specific groups of humans too ? But no, evolutionist want to have a kind, caring world, even though their very theory demands the opposite. For the human race to survive and grow, it must move forward and evolve in new ways. This means that the failures die off just like they have throughout the entire history of this planet and this benefits the race as a whole. And please, don't call me a troll. I'm not trolling. I'm saying exactly what evolutionists have been saying for decades, but tried to hide. This is evolution in action. So deal with it.

Re:Evolution in action

[MightyMartian]

So if someone walks up and shoots you in the head, that's fine because it's evolution?

Evolutionary biology is science, not morality.

Re:Evolution in action

[mooingyak]

I always find it interesting when people who believe in evolution get upset when instances of it take place in real life.

Why?

I believe that if I were stabbed, it could be fatal. At a minimum it would probably hurt. I would get upset if an instance of this were to take place in real life.

Would this also be interesting?

Re:Evolution in action

[Anonymous Coward]

You are talking about an action that takes place to an individual by another individual. I'm talking about something taking place to a group of humans because they can't handle the modern world. Their isolation makes it impossible to survive in today's world. Therefore, they as a group die off.

Re:Evolution in action

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, you are right, evolution is a science. It's supposedly the way humans came into being. So what does morality have to do with that ? There is NO morality in evolution. It's all about survival of the strongest, smartest, fastest. The weak, stupid, slow die off so that eventually they no longer add to the race. The only "morality" is the survival of the human race. That's it.

Re:Evolution in action

[Immerman]

If you contact an isolated group, knowing you are a carrier for pathogens likely to kill 80% of them, then you are absolutely taking an action as an individual against a group of individuals.

Not that I'm opposed to allowing natural selection back into human development, but I abhor a double standard. Tell you what, I've got a friend here who's a carrier to a particularly virulent strain of Ebola. His tribe are all immune, but what say I send him to your family reunion to make contact with a foreign culture?

Re:Evolution in action

[Flozzin]

Not the original AC. But I agree with him. I would take it a step further. Warring tribes used to completely wipe each other out. I would call this evolution as well. You see the same pattern of behavior in ant colonies. When they find another colony, they go and attack. At the end one colony wins the other is defeated. The capture the living as slaves. On the scale of ants, its evolution. On the scale of humans, it's evolution. Just because we are self aware does not mean evolution stops for us.

Re:Evolution in action

[Anonymous Coward]

In the grand scheme of things, if a faction of humans kills themselves off because they can't live with each other, then yes - that's evolution. The ones that have learned to live and help each have clearly evolved socially to persist longer than those who did not.

Re:Evolution in action

[Johann Lau]

If you can't adapt to the current world, then you die.

Heh. There is no singular "current world" outside our tightening sphere of slavery. Also: if you adapt successfully, for a while, you die as well.

But no, evolutionist want to have a kind, caring world, even though their very theory demands the opposite.

What is it with kids these days awkwardly rephrasing Mein Kampf and not even being aware of it? I swear I keep seeing that.

Evolution doesn't "demand" shit, it just is. It doesn't strive towards a certain purpose or zenith, it just wobbles around here and there because it can, because there is energy available to do so, and when it ends, it ends. Yeah, there is competition and fighting, but it's not required for evolution to happen -- all we need is diversity and random stuff happening. And it's actually kinda hard, if not impossible, to get rid of that, and furthermore evolution also laughs at the tiny timeframes you can conceive of, the differences you see.

Where you see a straight line to some kind of goal, it sees you bouncing around local optima, and none of the what any lifeform is doing is distuingishable from anything else if you zoom far out enough. Yet if you zoom in far enough, if you are that lifeform, it always matters. If you zoom in too far, you end up believing what you think matters, matters in general, and that's where unintentional comedy begins.

Last but surely not least: a stone age baby raised by modern parents would behave like any modern child. Most of our supposed progress is not in us, it's in the networks of objects and human relations we amassed; by ourselves, we haven't changed. And 5000 years of progress would disappear in one single generation if it simply ceased to be passed on, you know? Not so for, say, the ability of a bird to fly. Instead of thinking we're hot shit because it feels good to hear us saying that, we should know our place and think for a change, really.

Re:Evolution in action

[Hategrin]

A stone age baby would be 4ft tall and have more likelihood of having a debilitating genetic disorder than not. If you don't think things like immunity to disease and dietary patterns or even social structures have an effect on evolution then you haven't a clue what evolution is, and you should quit spreading misinformation as if you are some kind of expert on it. As for "kid's quoting "Mien Kaumph", I don't believe anybody is talking about the Aryian race here. Care to point out who was declaring the white man to be the supreme race? The only person being quoted was Charls Darwin, who's literary works were twisted into a form of propaganda by Hitler and the NAZI party. It's like calling calling Democrats a bunch of Stalinists because they often quotes Orwell, who was somewhat influenced by Marx.

Re:Evolution in action

[Hategrin]

Then again, to a neo Libreal anyone who isn't willing to give away half their paycheck so the impoverished can pop out 8 kids and watch Jerry Springier all day is a "NAZI sympathizer".

Re:Evolution in action

[Anonymous Coward]

A stone age baby would be 4ft tall

What on earth are you talking about?

Re:Evolution in action

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, don't have any modpoints, but +1

Re:Evolution in action

[khallow]

You are talking about an action that takes place to an individual by another individual.

So what? Kill someone who could have reproduced some more and that becomes a selection event, just like wiping out an Amazon tribe.

Re:Evolution in action

[khallow]

I always find it interesting when people who believe in evolution get upset when instances of it take place in real life.

Why? I imagine most people believe to some degree that existence is unfair, capricious, and very painful. That doesn't stop them from getting upset when bad things happen. Nor are they "hiding" things.

Here, we have the capability to steer evolution. There is no reason to just accept that Amazon tribes have to die due to evolution. The selection process can be changed for the better. They don't need to be "failures".

Also, what's with this weird stuff about "people who believe in evolution" and "evolutionists"? Is it somehow better morally to pretend that evolution doesn't exist?

Re:Evolution in action

[Agent0013]

I think he means a baby made of stone!? Like the statues you see in fountains.

Re:Evolution in action

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you retarded, or just delusional? You have some pretty odd beliefs about people you're incapable of understanding.

Re:Evolution in action

[Anonymous Coward]

Humans do not have to evolve like that though. We have technology that can solve many problems. We are still evolving but at this point our evolution is guided more by technology and our own will than raw nature. In this respect humans are different from any other life we know of.

Re:Evolution in action

[tompaulco]

Yes, you are right, evolution is a science. It's supposedly the way humans came into being. So what does morality have to do with that ? There is NO morality in evolution. It's all about survival of the strongest, smartest, fastest. The weak, stupid, slow die off so that eventually they no longer add to the race. The only "morality" is the survival of the human race. That's it.

When morality comes into it is when we decide that the weak, stupid and slow ought to have the same (or better) shake at passing on their genes as the strong, smart and fast do. In fact, the strong, smart and fast tend to limit themselves on their offspring to only what they can support, while the weak, stupid and slow have as many children as they possibly can, on the dime of the strong, smart and fast.

Re:Evolution in action

[Johann Lau]

A stone age baby would be 4ft tall

Okay, I'm not an expert on stone age babies, I was ranting after all. And it's really besides the point: take a human from 5000 years ago, when they were mostly much smaller, and give them *our diet*, raise it with our diversity of things to see and interact with, and blammo, you have yourself a modern baby.

If you don't think things like immunity to disease and dietary patterns or even social structures have an effect on evolution then you haven't a clue what evolution is, and you should quit spreading misinformation as if you are some kind of expert on it

I didn't say it doesn't have *any* influence, of course lack of disease immunity is a huge factor, but that doesn't change anything about those distorted ideas of what evolution supposedly means and wants which piss me off so much. I don't

Furthermore I would say cultures evolve, too (e.g. "memes" before that became to mean captioned cat pics). But that doesn't change the fact that biologically, we're all pretty much the same, our main differences come from habits and culture. Things that can be 100% reprogrammed in a single generation, and therefore are very, very thin ice from which to look down on supposedly primitve tribes.

Yeah yeah, I grant you that you no longer die of the common cold. Good job. If that was all some people were patting themselves on the back for, I would not have posted.

As for "kid's quoting "Mien Kaumph", I don't believe anybody is talking about the Aryian race here.

I said "rephrasing", and with all that talk about how evolution "demands" the stronger wiping out the weaker, it actually does imply that by sheer virtue of being here while others are not, we are some kind of winner.

But I am here to tell you, the only thing you "win" by evolving is that you lose more sophisticated things when you ultimately, inavoidably, go extinct forever. I'm not saying progress is pointless -- otherwise I wouldn't snarl at what I consider to be stupid statements, you know, I would rather welcome them as the decay they represent -- but fuck getting attached to it, and thinking it *really* means anything.... in short, thinking a tree is "better" than a flower, or a galaxy spanning civilization better than a bacterium. This idea of better and worse is not what evolution "demands", it's an utterly human concept. And looking around, I would even guess it's made up in compensation for how laughably weak we've become as individuals to fit into our great civilization which does all the heavy lifting, and increasingly our thinking, for us.

Evolution doesn't achieve a goal, it's just passing the time, and it's not even "using energy" -- differentials even themselves out, and that leads to pretty forms and weird sounds, for a while. Nothing more, but hey, also nothing less.

Aryian, schmaryian, after all that was just pseudo-scientific babble, today we say "modern man" or "western civilization" and stuff like that. It's just as vapid, just as pseudo-scientific, and just as chauvinistic. Much less active and aggressive, sure - but it still contains the seeds of misguided ideas that could motivate less lazy people to do more than just shrug when others die, or crush icky bugs without even trying to fetch a glass and putting them outside, because that'd be just asking too much. Evolution, progress, hahahahaha. Good one. We give up our individual strength to make the machine stronger, is all it is. All for the purpose of the further degeneration of a precious few at the top exploiting the machine. I wish I could hear and bitch about *their* delusions, they ought to be even more infuriation than the ones we have down here at the bottom of the food chain.

Also, I made it my policy to only post on slashdot before having breakfast, so don't take it personally, I just wanna scream into the digital abyss a bit >:[

Inherent bias

[JazzHarper]

We have considerably less data on the isolated tribes that die out before we meet them.

Re:Inherent bias

[alexhs]

We have considerably less data on the isolated tribes that die out before we meet them.

Well, that's what you think.

We know how many there are (*).
Should I remind you that the NSA never met you; however it knows more about you than your close family ?

(*) Obviously, the civilians only get a rough approximation, the exact number is classified.

Re:Inherent bias

[jez9999]

So you're saying they may have been dying out from our gun bullets before we met them?

Re:Inherent bias

[Mr D from 63]

We have considerably less data on the isolated tribes that die out before we meet them.

We'd better find the rest before they die too.

Which makes me wonder...what is the likelihood there are any undiscovered tribes? This lesson learned may never have the chance to be applied from here on out.

Re:Inherent bias

[Mr D from 63]

Which makes me wonder...what is the likelihood there are any undiscovered tribes?

^OK, ignore that part... the result of skipping the summary and skimming the article.... Although I still wonder if they are really truly "uncontacted" tribes.

Re:Inherent bias

[Gavagai80]

They could, actually, when we sell bullets to their neighbors who we have met.

Re:Inherent bias

[timeOday]

It is known from archeological evidence that diseases from Europe wiped out over 80% of native Americans post-Columbus:

"Using an estimate of approximately 30 million people in 1492 (including 6 million in the Aztec Empire, 8 million in the Mayan States, 11 million in what is now Brazil, and 12 million in the Inca Empire), the lowest estimates give a death toll due from disease of an astonishing 90% by the end of the 17th century (nine million people in 1650). 10% were killed by fighting. " (wikipedia)

These are known not to have been little tribes that died off all the time like you are imagining might be the case. So unless things are somehow different for these last remaining tribes, "first contact" amounts to holocaust.

No wonder we don't see Aliens

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps intelligent life forms don't want to visit Earth because they know it all ends in tears. The pattern is they come, say hello in their fancy technology and then we die of some alien plague; or we're scared and try to nuke them.. Maybe it's happened time and time again and so the really clever kind ones just don't bother to make contact because alien life is so hard to come by in the first place.

Re:No wonder we don't see Aliens

[Immerman]

That makes sense, except why haven't we been visited by the drunken alien frat boys out for a joy ride?

Wait a minute... Random graffiti in corn fields. Mutilated cows. Probe-rich abductions. Suddenly it all makes sense!

Re:No wonder we don't see Aliens

[Anonymous Coward]

And they never made it home, because once they exposed themselves to our putrid cesspool of a planet, they died off as well.

Re:Consider the GDP

[istartedi]

Are we going to train them to write PHP

Improv. GO!

... yes, because there aren't enough qualified people here, get them H1B ASAP.

... Backward tribes already use PHP.

... Many of them can only count to 3, so... oh, no problem. Carry on.

... for FacePaintBook?

OK, that's all I've got. Thanks for the setup.

Weren't they already dying?

[hawguy]

Weren't they already in serious decline before being visited?

That first graph shows a lot larger average population before year 0 (the year of contact), which slowly grows in the 20 years after contact.

http://www.nature.com/srep/201...

The original article seems to confirm this:

http://www.nature.com/srep/201...

Estimates of population sizes before sustained peaceful contact (n = 22, recorded an average of 45 years before contact, range 1–106) were on average 5.5 times larger than populations at contact ...

So if populations were 5 times higher before any contact at all, why do they blame the contact for population declines?

Re:Weren't they already dying?

[rasmusbr]

The year zero on the graph is the approximate year of peaceful contact.

Re:Weren't they already dying?

[CrimsonAvenger]

And yet GP is correct.

On the graphs, there is a line for "pre 0", which is ~5x as high as the "year 0" line.

So, why are we blaming contact for the primary problems, if population fell by 80% (to the year 0 levels) from pre-contact?

Re:Weren't they already dying?

[rasmusbr]

And yet GP is correct.

On the graphs, there is a line for "pre 0", which is ~5x as high as the "year 0" line.

So, why are we blaming contact for the primary problems, if population fell by 80% (to the year 0 levels) from pre-contact?

Well, those 80% are presumably the ones that died when they came into non-peaceful contact by the less than peaceful Europeans who broke new ground.

What do they think?

[erlegreer]

What do uncontacted tribes think when they see our passenger jets and cargo ships? Gods?

Re:What do they think?

[j-beda]

What do uncontacted tribes think when they see our passenger jets and cargo ships? Gods?

"There goes the neighbourhood"?

Re:What do they think?

[Lendrick]

Spaceballs.

There goes the planet.

Re:What do they think?

[dbIII]

A first contact situation with a pilot landing in the New Guinea highlands showed that "Gods" or not, it was not an important enough situation to miss out on lunch :)
In that situation a lot of people turned up to look and then went home after a while. Unlike fiction they recognised the pilot as a person that just happened to have a lot of really cool stuff.
People are people wherever they are even if fiction likes to paint some as more superstitious than a Californian crystal healing fanatic or with less reasoning ability as a meth head.

Re:What do they think?

[geniice]

Not much. They usually know a fair bit about us. Which in turn is usually the reason they are trying to avoid us.

Re:What do they think?

[azrael29a]

What do uncontacted tribes think when they see our passenger jets and cargo ships? Gods?

Yup. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

Re:What do they think?

[ed1park]

Yes.

Cargo Cults.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://answers.yahoo.com/ques...

And for fun, The Gods Must be Crazy. :)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt00...

Re:What do they think?

[ShaunC]

Yes, especially when we drop Coke bottles into their villages while flying overhead.

Re:What do they think?

[Anonymous Coward]

Every watch the movie, "The Gods Must Be Crazy" ?

Re:If only

[Anonymous Coward]

You're going to die of old age, QA.

Just as sure as the luddite tribes that didn't care to find out what was over the next hill.

Reality Check

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry to break it to you, people. But this is exactly what we can expect to happen to us if the "friendly aliens" ever do show up here.

Re:Reality Check

[Immerman]

That would presume compatible biology. It's just as likely their pathogens take one bite of our incompatible amino acids and go belly up. And that's assuming they're even amino acid based at all.

Re:Reality Check

[Anonymous Coward]

These tribes die out because they are suitable hosts for whatever pathogens the visitors carry, since tribesman and visitor are actually of the same species. It is quite a stretch to assume the same thing will hold true for visiting aliens, at the very least you'd have to buy into the crackpottery about aliens seeding Earth with their own DNA or some similar mechanism that makes us == them.

Just look at your friendly neighborhood pets, there are thousands of diseases that they can contract that will not affect a human, even though we've shared the same habitat for, well forever.

Colonial Guilt

[Anonymous Coward]

Take your colonial guilt and go blow yourself up.
Then the rest of us can enjoy life for what it is and the progress we've made.

Not just the isloated

[cold fjord]

Various Native American tribes are engaging in self-destructive behavior. Some say it is over gambling profits.

Disenrollment leaves Natives "culturally homeless"

One tribe in California will shortly have cut itself in half, down to 900 or less: I Know I Am, But What Are You?

Re:Not just the isloated

[MRe_nl]

The last chapter in any successful genocide is the one in which the oppressor can remove their hands and say, "My God, what are these people doing to themselves? They're killing each other. They're killing themselves while we watch them die."

https://www.ted.com/talks/aaron_huey#t-6523

Re:Not just the isloated

[stenvar]

Whatever happened to "Native Americans" a couple of centuries ago, the US has gone out of its way to try to help Native American communities for more than half a century. Calling this an ongoing genocide or oppression is just wrong.

At this point, the "Native American" identity really has become a corrupt and racist farce: there simply is no separate group or culture of Native Americans; it's people who pick a particular identity for various personal, political, and economic reasons.

Re:Not just the isloated

[Anonymous Coward]

>ted talks
>being worth anything

Re:Not just the isloated

[Jmc23]

Do you read the things you write?

What 'happened' to the native americans was the US!

Re:Not just the isloated

[stenvar]

What 'happened' to the native americans was the US!

The US was founded nearly three centuries after Columbus. By that time, the Native American population had already declined by probably at least 95%.

What happened to Native Americans was European colonialism and European imperialism. And the same kind of European brutality and greed that killed the Native Americans is the reason so many Europeans emigrated to the Americas, because European elites didn't just slaughter and oppress people abroad, they also did it to their own populations.

Prophylactic immunization

[EmperorOfCanada]

I am going to go out on a limb; but maybe the solution is to figure out which diseases are typically killing all these people, then put together a tasty treat that is filled with weakened strains of this and that, and air drop them into areas where these people might be living.

Then stage two might be to hunt them sci-fi style with drones and fire vaccine darts into their asses.

Now I am going to go even further out on a limb; To do anything less would be a condemnation on our lack of civilization. If the people of the world have to spend a few billion saving these people then I think that then we might be able to call ourselves at least marginally civilized.

Look at the effort being spent on finding a missing plane. We are not doing it to find the plane so much as to find out what happened so that we don't have it happen to us. Maybe we can even find a selfish reason to save these people; so let's assume that one of their medicine men knows something pretty cool.

Re:Prophylactic immunization

[Anonymous Coward]

Bet you that large portion of deaths are due to sudden availability of cheap alcohol, tobacco and drugs. Vaccinate that. Adapting to el hombre blanco is more than just getting your vaccines.

Re:Prophylactic immunization

[BlackPignouf]

+1
In French Guiana, isolated tribes saw white men coming at them, and basically telling them :
"Congrats, you're now officialy unemployed French citizens. You don't know what money is, but you'll receive XXX Francs per month from the government. You can go visit the next town, and discover what rum and hookers are. Not much else to do though. kthxbye!"

Re:Prophylactic immunization

[John.Banister]

Y'know, I didn't read about the deaths of individuals in the article, but rather the decline of populations. It could be that people died, but it could also be that they left the former population group and moved somewhere further away from the nosy intruders. In particular, I could see people wanting to leave if the population was discovered in fairly close proximity to an operation that was converting forest to farmland or making a road that vehicles started using on a regular basis. When the population is at pre-rebound minimum, probably the only people left are the ones that are willing to deal with a life that includes regular contact with "civilization."

Re:Prophylactic immunization

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe you misunderstand how vaccination works. It does not create a new capacity in your immune system, it activates a capacity that you already had because your ancestors had evolved that capacity. If your ancestors had never come into contact with the pathogen, you would not have that capacity. Immunity to new pathogens takes a long time to develop in the population, by random mutation and harsh selection.

Vaccinating tribes against pathogens their ancestors have never come into contact with will not do any good, unfortunately.

Also, I disagree that we're mainly looking for MH370 to avoid the same thing happening to us. I think the main reason why we're looking is because we're curious. We just want to know. It's not very rational and it is, perhaps, morbid. But it's what we are.

Re:Prophylactic immunization

[jafiwam]

I believe you misunderstand how vaccination works. It does not create a new capacity in your immune system, it activates a capacity that you already had because your ancestors had evolved that capacity. If your ancestors had never come into contact with the pathogen, you would not have that capacity. Immunity to new pathogens takes a long time to develop in the population, by random mutation and harsh selection.

Vaccinating tribes against pathogens their ancestors have never come into contact with will not do any good, unfortunately.

Also, I disagree that we're mainly looking for MH370 to avoid the same thing happening to us. I think the main reason why we're looking is because we're curious. We just want to know. It's not very rational and it is, perhaps, morbid. But it's what we are.

How would vaccinations for completely new diseases work then?

Your idea about how vaccinations work is completely wrong. Stop posting bullshit, Jenny, and go back to whoring. You are better at that.

Re:Prophylactic immunization

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is, we're talking about diseases that don't affect you, me, or anyone else any pathologist has ever met. We're all immune to them, our lab rats are all immune, our lab monkeys are all immune. We take it for granted that they're not harmful; they're everywhere, there are a million like them, and nobody has ever gotten so much as a fever from them.

It's only once we make contact with the isolated population that we discover, oops, it turns out that some random staph strain that lives harmlessly in the grease on the screen of your smartphone is fatal to people from this random tribe unless they receive massive antibiotics within a week of contact.

Re:Prophylactic immunization

[rasmusbr]

Just the titles of some of the footnotes of the paper should give you a good idea...

"The Conquest of the Brazilian Indians"
"The epidemiology of infectious diseases among South American Indians: A call for guidelines for ethical research"
"Massacre of the Brazilian Indians"
"The Defeat of the Brazilian Indians"
"Die If You Must: Brazilian Indians in the Twentieth Century"

It sounds like they'd need body armor and rifles more than they'd need vaccines to protect themselves.

Re:Prophylactic immunization

[EmperorOfCanada]

Yes if Aliens landed later today and told me that I could go out and join a highly advanced galactic civilization full of opportunity, health benefits, education, and wonder; I am pretty sure that my family and I would be gone in a heartbeat.

But at the same time I would hope that the Aliens would vaccinate me against that fungus that melts your brain,

Re:Prophylactic immunization

[neminem]

Alternatively, they could say, "frack this, this whole running water, modern medicine and color tvs thing looks far too enticing". I know that's what *I'd* do, if I were part of such an isolated tribe and then civilization caught up to it.

My understanding is that that would be counted as "dying" too - there's no longer an isolated tribe, it's been assimilated. (Terrible for anthropological and linguistics research; not necessarily so terrible for the people actually involved.)

Re:Prophylactic immunization

[John.Banister]

If a bunch of strangers with nifty gadgets, who are clearly inept at all the skills you've developed to be successful at living your life well came in and gently explained how they're sure that 90% of everything you think you know is wrong, and how you'll never be able to have the really nifty ones of their gadgets, you might decide you'd rather go somewhere you could finish living the life you had planned for rather than having the life of an ineffective primitive adjunct to 200 million people who (from your point of view) couldn't tell their ass from a hole in the ground, except there's 200 million of them, so they apparently don't have to.

Re:Open SSL

[Immerman]

Out of curiosity, and as long as we're all horribly off-topic anyway, why are your comments all in a hideous fixed-width font?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Inevitable Star Trek Reference ...

[garry_g]

... look like it's time to put a Prime Directive into effect ... only observe them, protected by a cloaking shield ... do not make contact until they have developed warp drive ...

Re:Inevitable Star Trek Reference ...

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean do not contact until they have developed vaccinations against common diseases?

Re:Inevitable Star Trek Reference ...

[Anonymous Coward]

fuck that kill 'em and take the land.

What happened to the Romans?

[Neo-Rio-101]

This is the argument that usually gets the slam-dunk in discussions with racial supremacists of any ilk.
The fact that all civilizations form, collapse, and remorph is an element of evolution.

As for indigenous populations dying off... many of them interbreed with the local populations, while the rest of them engage in self-destructive behaviour (gambling, alcohol, and other vices) which in turn destroy what's left of their old communities.

Re:What happened to the Romans?

[swb]

As an ethnic German, I keep waiting for my sack of gold coins from Rome as reparations for Roman slavery, genocide and imperialism.

Re:What happened to the Romans?

[Anonymous Coward]

Pretty sure Germany used up any credit it may have built from from the days of the Roman empire. Most of it in the '30's and '40's.....

Another tribe set for the kill?

[Trax3001BBS]

Mar 31, 2014 When I read this article 9 days ago, my first though was -well they're history.

What This Uncontacted Tribe Did When Seeing A Plane For The First Time Is Awesome Yet Heartbreaking.

Upon seeing an airplane, this was their reaction.
http://www.berbix.com/stories/...

----

11 August 2011 Find one lose another.

Brazil confirms existence of 'lost Amazon tribe' discovered via satellite as another goes missing after drug gang attack
The news comes as another uncontacted tribe went 'missing' after drug traffickers overran Brazilian guards posted to protect its lands.
No trace of the Indian tribe has been found after heavily-armed men destroyed a guard post in western Brazil around 32 miles from the Peruvian border.
Workers from FUNAI, the government bureau of Indian affairs, found a broken arrow in one of the men's backpacks, raising fears for the tribe's safety.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new...

Re:Another tribe set for the kill?

[Anonymous Coward]

What exactly was heartbreaking about the tribes reaction in your first link? They held up spears in the direction of the plane, it is human nature to show fear and caution towards things we are unfamiliar with.

"We"

[Anonymous Coward]

We , you know , the civilized ones

Guns are the worst disease

[azrael29a]

"indigenous people die from smallpox and guns and other unknown diseases" Yeah, guns are the worst disease - there is still no vaccine for it.

Discovered?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why the hell people still say that Columbus "discovered" America?

Re:Discovered?

[Frankie70]

Ok - Columbus invented America. Happy now?

Don't despair.

[OpenSourced]

There is always the possibility that one of these tribes will have a sickness that will wipe out the rest of the world. Or at least 80% of it.

Re:Don't despair.

[Anonymous Coward]

Few novel domesticated animals with brand new zoonotic diseases; most of the known peoples of the world have been eating enough bushmeat to get the real nasties, like ebola, lately.

Re:Don't despair.

[Tony Isaac]

Scary diseases aren't limited to undiscovered tribes. We have flesh-eating bacteria in the U.S. If you are looking for the sky to fall, you don't have to go to South America. In other words, you might be right, but even if we stayed away from these tribes, we wouldn't necessarily be safer.

Grow up and smell the corpses

[govett]

The world is neither a faculty lounge nor a museum. It's a Darwinian battlefield where those who can, do (for as long as they can), while those who can't, fall. But you'll find that out soon enough.

farming vs. hunter gatherer

[Anonymous Coward]

You need to read up on this.... Sure, being a peasant farmer sucked. That's because Farming Sucked. Still does.

Hunter/Gatherers don't really work all that hard. Their life expectancy is quite longer than 30 years. They DO have grandparents around. Childbirth wasn't really that bad... and frankly, when Europeans showed up in the Americas, the Natives thought they smelled horrible... Hunter Gatherers do bathe... That whole Bathing Is Bad For Your Health thing was a European mode of thought.

BIG difference between Hunter/Gatherer and Peasant Farmer.

Why'd we switch if it used to be so awesome? That's a big conversation, the real reasons lost in history.

Re:farming vs. hunter gatherer

[ttucker]

This is the exact type of, romanticized version of the past bullshit, that we are saying is bullshit here.

Re:farming vs. hunter gatherer

[stenvar]

Hunter/Gatherers don't really work all that hard. Their life expectancy is quite longer than 30 years.

Under ideal conditions that is true: a stable habitat with abundant resources and low population densities. But under such conditions, populations grow and people get pushed out into more and more marginal habitats. People didn't adopt farming and civilization for fun, we adopted it because most of us got pushed into poor habitats and had to be clever in order to make a better life for ourselves.

Re:farming vs. hunter gatherer

[Agent0013]

I have been watching "Alaska: The Last Frontier" lately. It's a documentary show about a homesteading family in Alaska. They like the hunter/farmer/subsistence lifestyle. It's pretty amazing watching what they have to do during the short summers to prepare for the long hard winter. And the people love the lifestyle and would not want to move into the civilized world. They certainly work hard each day doing things like hunting for food or growing their vegetables or chopping wood for heat, but at least they aren't working all day in a cube farm and end up with no time to spend with their families or be out in nature.

Re:farming vs. hunter gatherer

[Anonymous Coward]

If you survived past the age of 2, this might be true. But let's ask reality.

Re:farming vs. hunter gatherer

[Immerman]

Who's talking about the past? There's plenty of contemporary hunter-gatherer societies we can watch in action.

Re:farming vs. hunter gatherer

[Puff_Of_Hot_Air]

Under ideal conditions that is true: a stable habitat with abundant resources and low population densities. But under such conditions, populations grow and people get pushed out into more and more marginal habitats.

Not true! Or at least, not universally true. Take the Australian Aboriginals as example; nice stable culture for 30000 years. Practised birth control via a combination of penile splitting and other methods I'll allow you to look up. The point is that humans have long understood how increased population causes problems; and have sometimes found ways around the issue.

Re:farming vs. hunter gatherer

[Tom]

Don't forget that life expectancy figures in child mortality and that is high in all pre-modern cultures. Yeah, once you've made it past 5 or so, you could reasonably expect to see 40 or 50.

It's not only about hard work. It's also about famine and disease, for example. Not having to work hard is cool - until you suddenly have to just in order to not fucking die.

Re:farming vs. hunter gatherer

[Anonymous Coward]

You need to read up on this.... Sure, being a peasant farmer sucked. That's because Farming Sucked. Still does.

Hunter/Gatherers don't really work all that hard. Their life expectancy is quite longer than 30 years. They DO have grandparents around. Childbirth wasn't really that bad... and frankly, when Europeans showed up in the Americas, the Natives thought they smelled horrible... Hunter Gatherers do bathe... That whole Bathing Is Bad For Your Health thing was a European mode of thought.

BIG difference between Hunter/Gatherer and Peasant Farmer.

Why'd we switch if it used to be so awesome? That's a big conversation, the real reasons lost in history.

The reason we switched is that hunter-gathering is an extremely fragile and inefficient economic system that can't support a large or technologically advanced population. So historically the cultures with access to agriculture were also able to out-compeet the hunter gathers through superior numbers and weaponry.

Re:farming vs. hunter gatherer

[Anonymous Coward]

Why'd we switch if it used to be so awesome? That's a big conversation, the real reasons lost in history.

Occam called, he says maybe it wasn't so awesome.

Re:farming vs. hunter gatherer

[stenvar]

The entire continent of Australia is marginal land; it has about 6% arable land. European nations are around 35%.

Furthermore, I was responding to the notion that the hunter gatherer lifestyle was idyllic; Australian aboriginals had short life expectancies and a rough life.

Finally, the AC seemed to believe that Native Americans were hunter gatherers. In fact, there were many diverse civilizations in the Americas, many of which had towns, cities, and farming, as well as overpopulation and environmental degradation.

Re:farming vs. hunter gatherer

[Puff_Of_Hot_Air]

Your response is uninformed nonsense. Yes Aboriginals today have a shorter and rougher life on aggregate, but this was simply not the case prior to colonization. Go read a little history before you spout such drivel.

Re:farming vs. hunter gatherer

[stenvar]

Having read a lot of history, biology, and anthropology, I not only know that you're wrong, but also that your politically motivated attempts to rewrite history and distort facts recur again and again. You're victim of the noble savage mythology, paleo-diet hucksters, romantic primitivism, and a great deal of Luddism. How and when people died in pre-contact populations is pretty well established, and we can determine it from skeletons.

Re:farming vs. hunter gatherer

[Reziac]

Some of whom practiced slaving and genocide, too. Roundly denied by the idyllicists.

Re:farming vs. hunter gatherer

[Puff_Of_Hot_Air]

How and when people died in pre-contact populations is pretty well established, and we can determine it from skeletons.

Ignoring your ridiculous attempts to paint me with various motivations or political leanings, this is about the only comment you have made that is not completely wrong. If you can be bothered to find the studies, you'll find that the life expectancy and general health of Australian aboriginals prior to colonization was better than that of the average European at the time. But never let bothersome facts get in the way of good uninformed diatribe.

Re:farming vs. hunter gatherer

[stenvar]

If you can be bothered to find the studies, you'll find that the life expectancy and general health of Australian aboriginals prior to colonization was better than that of the average European at the time.

This is what I was responding to:

Hunter/Gatherers don't really work all that hard. Their life expectancy is quite longer than 30 years

You're correct that aboriginal populations were slightly better off than European populations at the time of colonization; but they still had life spans in the low 30s, a dangerous and hard life, and very little leisure time.

It's good that you realize how horrific life was in Europe at the time, because the moral dimension of colonialism changes quite a bit when you realize that many of the colonists were themselves escaping poverty, disease, and oppression (if they weren't pressed into military service outright).

Re:farming vs. hunter gatherer

[Puff_Of_Hot_Air]

More ignorance. Life spans were not in the "low 30's" for indigenous or Europeans. Average life expectancy was predominantly impacted by infant mortality rates. Once out of childhood, you could reasonably expect to hit late 50's or 60 odd. Leisure time is again something you are simply wrong about. From all evidence, including first person accounts from early explorers; life was easy. In fact, there is a reasonable argument to be made that this is why such little advancement was made over 40000 years. If life is easy and food is plentiful, why do anything different? But continue on, I'm interested in what other sweeping statements you will make inspite of all evidence to the contrary.

Re:farming vs. hunter gatherer

[stenvar]

Leisure time is again something you are simply wrong about. From all evidence, including first person accounts from early explorers; life was easy.

These topics have been discussed at length in anthropology, for example under the name "The Original Affluent Society" theory. For you to pretend that it represents a settled, accepted, mainstream view is bullshit. Your views represent a minority view with little evidence to back it up.

More ignorance. Life spans were not in the "low 30's" for indigenous or Europeans. Average life expectancy was predominantly impacted by infant mortality rates.

Yes, life spans were in the low 30's, and the reason is that these populations had much higher mortality rates in the young than we do (not just higher infant mortality rates).

Re:farming vs. hunter gatherer

[Puff_Of_Hot_Air]

It seems to me that you delight in being wrong. Australian aboriginals worked, on average, 6 hours per day. Australian history is quite recent, this statement is not in dispute. I'm not trying to suggest that this was the case for any other hunter-gatherer society (I'm quite ignorant outside of this area), but the idea that Australian aboriginals had a relatively easy life is neither minority view nor controversial.

On the "life span" topic, you seem to indicate that people are uniformly dropping off in their 30's, which was simply not the case. You were quite likely to die in childhood (particularly infancy), but if you got through that, quite likely to creek on past 50. Why present this as if people are dying in their 30's, ground down by poor diet and harsh conditions? Simple nonsense.

Re:farming vs. hunter gatherer

[Anonymous Coward]

On the "life span" topic, you seem to indicate that people are uniformly dropping off in their 30's, which was simply not the case. You were quite likely to die in childhood (particularly infancy), but if you got through that, quite likely to creek on past 50.

Pre-modern societies have high mortality rates throughout life; you aren't safer once you make it through infancy. That's a simple consequence of high incidence of fatal infectious disease and injury. The idea that if you made it through infancy, you were relatively safe is simply false.

It seems to me that you delight in being wrong. Australian aboriginals worked, on average, 6 hours per day.

And this amazing fact has been established ... how? Time travel? Floppy disks unearthed from aboriginal middens? Roman anthropologists? You're pulling these "facts" out of your ass, and you are making ridiculous generalizations about an entire continent of people and tens of thousands of years of history.

what about the reverse

[splatterboy]

How many rainforest diseases have we taken back to civilization? Syphilis? What about when man encounters extraterrestrial life - we have sci-fi stories about how they die because of our germs and diseases but what about the pathogens they bring to us? Will there be a mass die-off of human life on the same scale? If the government is scared of something, Im sure this would be high on the list, TFA being an example

Pre-columbian estimates

[DavidMZ]

In the book 1491, Charles Mann tries to summarize the current knowledge on Pre-columbian Americas. Based on demographics and epidemiologic studies, he comes with a mortality rate for american Indians after encounter with European in the 90-95% range, which means that America before Columbus would have been very densely populated. Although there is a high uncertainty in this number due to the scarcity of data, the 80% of this study definitely supports the pre-Columbian values, especially if we consider the differences in access to medicine. And yeah, this is grim stuff.

Re:Consider the GDP

[ttucker]

Flamebait? Smallpox is eradicated in the wild.

This is why the government covers up UFOs.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is why the government covers up UFOs.

Don't click that link!

[Anonymous Coward]

The link brought up a virus alert (malicious script / trojan).

Re:Don't click that link!

[Trax3001BBS]

The link brought up a virus alert (malicious script / trojan).

I came across the story at drudgereport.com while keeping one informed drudgereport.com will send you places that you wouldn't normally go (who pays I figure).

Looking again there was a > 403 Forbidden, at the top of the page (didn't like me)
From (/Affiliate/SearchBoxImpression.ash)

One of the few site's I've been to that safebrowsing-cache.google.com/safebrowsing Isn't supplying it (I've blocked that link as it's the same tracking) - I unblocked it to view the link I posted. depending up on what your using it could of been a Google alert ( I don't run Chrome).

I wouldn't intentionally send anyone to a "bad" link, but it's best to be prepared.

I use simple things: HTTPNetworkSniffer and SmartSniff both from http://www.nirsoft.net/ to view HTTP activity, and normally have them running, if something odd were to of shown I'd of used a copy and paste of the text.

Thanks though.

"A web server may return a 403 Forbidden HTTP status code in response to a request from a client for a web page or resource to indicate that the server can be reached and understood the request, but refuses to take any further action. Status code 403 responses are the result of the web server being configured to deny access, for some reason, to the requested resource by the client." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...

simple matter

[allcoolnameswheretak]

There is no heavy burden. If the consequences of contact are so disastrous, they must not be contacted, full stop. We have 95% of the world at our disposal. It wouldn't really kill us to leave some patches of unscathed rain forest standing. On the contrary, the non-stop, all consuming "progress" seems to be that which will kill us.

Re:simple matter

[stenvar]

If the consequences of contact are so disastrous, they must not be contacted, full stop.

You can't "not contact" them. People are pushing into their habitats no matter what. There is simply no option.

Even if we had a choice, it's unclear that not contacting them would be the right thing to do. First, you are depriving them of many of the benefits of modern civilization: immunizations, agriculture, education. Second, they are occupying and using land very inefficiently. Finally, their societies generally violate basic rights of their members; should we really let that go on?

Re:simple matter

[silentcoder]

>Even if we had a choice, it's unclear that not contacting them would be the right thing to do. First, you are depriving them of many of the benefits of modern civilization: immunizations, agriculture, education. Second, they are occupying and using land very inefficiently. Finally, their societies generally violate basic rights of their members; should we really let that go on?

Wait, hold on a second - from that long list of reasons - which one exactly is *worse* than GOING COMPLETELY EXTINCT ?

Because I can't find it.

Re:simple matter

[stenvar]

Wait, hold on a second - from that long list of reasons - which one exactly is *worse* than GOING COMPLETELY EXTINCT ? Because I can't find it.

None is worse, actually. All of us come from extinct tribal societies, and we are better off for it. A society "going completely extinct" doesn't mean its members are killed, it means ending injustice and poverty if those are the hallmarks of the society that goes extinct.

Don't you think ending injustice and poverty is a good thing?

Re:simple matter

[Anonymous Coward]

Going extinct might be bad for the tribe, but not necessarily for the individuals.
If we could have them not all die from disease the tribe might still die just because everyone moves somewhere else.
But would that be bad for the people in the tribe?
I'm not sure. It depends on them.
If the french go extinct because aliens came and introduced them to better technology that allowed them all to move to mars where everything is better (seemingly at least) is that bad? For the old people that stay behind, sure.

Re:simple matter

[silentcoder]

>None is worse, actually. All of us come from extinct tribal societies, and we are better off for it. A society "going completely extinct" doesn't mean its members are killed, it means ending injustice and poverty if those are the hallmarks of the society that goes extinct

In the context of this research - and the discussion (I actually RTFA) it DOES not mean that, it means extinct as in dead. Every single member of those tribes - DEAD.
Corpses everywhere. No living members remain.

The research differentiates between cultural destruction (which you may or may not approve of) an extinction of the people and gives numbers for both -that 80% is the ones where EVERYBODY DIES.

Re:simple matter

[sjames]

If you could honestly say that our civilization is the sort that gives people the best that it can, that might be true. However, our civilization is more about the least it can get away with. Are you prepared to provide any of those tribesmen food, clothing, shelter, and all that wonderful healthcare and entertainment? Are you even prepared to provide them with education specially tailored to their unique needs and social workers that can teach them what they need to know in order to live in our civilization?

History suggests that they'll be herded into a barren place and expected to just magically know how to get work and become part of civilization. When they fail to manage that, they'll be left to starve.

Re:simple matter

[stenvar]

I was responding to the statement:

If the consequences of contact are so disastrous, they must not be contacted, full stop.

I'm saying: that's not an option because you can't prevent these tribes from being contacted. All we can do is to minimize the impact of contact. Obviously, as the cited research shows, populations dramatically decline post-contact, and these are all populations in which the government is attempting cultural preservation.

Hence my suggestion that it's better to give up on cultural preservation altogether and focus on keeping these groups alive: vaccination programs, public health education, healthcare, schooling, training, and assimilation into Western society.

Finally, you say:

Corpses everywhere. No living members remain.

That is not at all what the paper says. Furthermore, even for the mortality figures that the paper states, I see little evidence in there. Most of the evidence is simply for population decline, which could well be due to migration.

Re:simple matter

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you prepared to provide any of those tribesmen food, clothing, shelter, and all that wonderful healthcare and entertainment? Are you even prepared to provide them with education specially tailored to their unique needs and social workers that can teach them what they need to know in order to live in our civilization?

I'm suggesting that that's a better thing to do for them than trying to preserve their culture.

History suggests that they'll be herded into a barren place and expected to just magically know how to get work and become part of civilization. When they fail to manage that, they'll be left to starve.

History suggests that anybody with half a brain always leaves these cultures and assimilates into mainstream Western society if they can. It's not surprising that the people who are left behind on the reservations are those who have trouble assimilating. They should be helped as much as possible, rather than trying to create a fiction that there is still a viable, distinct culture there.

Re:simple matter

[sjames]

You're missing the point, Are *YOU* prepared to see to their well being? Do you know of *ANYONE* who is? If not, a half effort is more of an out of the frying pan and into the fire situation.

Imagine, today was a perfectly ordinary day. But tomorrow morning, you are awakened by a pounding on your door. Someone tells you in badly mangled English that you need to get in the truck for your own good. By the afternoon, you are pushed out of the truck and into the middle of a thick jungle. The men wish you good luck and drive off.

But thank God they saved you from the misery of your work-a-day lifestyle! Now you can live free and happy. Isn't that wonderful?

Re:simple matter

[silentcoder]

I was responding to the statement:

If the consequences of contact are so disastrous, they must not be contacted, full stop.

I'm saying: that's not an option because you can't prevent these tribes from being contacted. All we can do is to minimize the impact of contact. Obviously, as the cited research shows, populations dramatically decline post-contact, and these are all populations in which the government is attempting cultural preservation.

Hence my suggestion that it's better to give up on cultural preservation altogether and focus on keeping these groups alive: vaccination programs, public health education, healthcare, schooling, training, and assimilation into Western society.

Finally, you say:

Corpses everywhere. No living members remain.

That is not at all what the paper says. Furthermore, even for the mortality figures that the paper states, I see little evidence in there. Most of the evidence is simply for population decline, which could well be due to migration.

I was responding to the statement:

If the consequences of contact are so disastrous, they must not be contacted, full stop.

I'm saying: that's not an option because you can't prevent these tribes from being contacted. All we can do is to minimize the impact of contact. Obviously, as the cited research shows, populations dramatically decline post-contact, and these are all populations in which the government is attempting cultural preservation.

Hence my suggestion that it's better to give up on cultural preservation altogether and focus on keeping these groups alive: vaccination programs, public health education, healthcare, schooling, training, and assimilation into Western society.

Finally, you say:

Corpses everywhere. No living members remain.

That is not at all what the paper says. Furthermore, even for the mortality figures that the paper states, I see little evidence in there. Most of the evidence is simply for population decline, which could well be due to migration.

>That is not at all what the paper says. Furthermore, even for the mortality figures that the paper states, I see little evidence in there. Most of the evidence is simply for population decline, which could well be due to migration.

You should re-read the paper - slowly this time - it has two sets of data and you're conflating them. Data-set one is the people who ALL DIE - that is complete extinction: this comprises 80% of those contacted.
The other data-set is what happens to the 20% of cultures where there are survivors. These cultures are frequently destroyed, their mortality rate gets much worse and they live in poverty - pulled into a world where they have no money and no knowledge of how to acquire it and money (rather than the skills they spent ten thousand years perfecting) is the requisite tool for acquiring the means to live.

In most cases - they never quite recover. The Mayan culture is not, contrary to what most people believe, extinct - they are one of the few cultures from the original Cortez contacts to have survived. There is still around 20-thousand Mayans living in central America, mostly in one town in Mexico - and to this day they live in abject poverty with a life expectancy far below the mean for their country. Number one cause of death: malnutrition.

You're conflating the decline in those populations that survive with the over-all mortality rate - but the paper clearly differentiates these. That decline is among those tribes that do not all die out within months of first-contact, and they represent only 20% of tribes contacted. This actually correlates almost exactly with what epidemiology would predict. Introducing a new pathogen into a population group (most of these tribes would be the same genetic ethnicity - they differ culturally not biologically) we

Re:simple matter

[stenvar]

You should re-read the paper - slowly this time - it has two sets of data and you're conflating them. Data-set one is the people who ALL DIE - that is complete extinction: this comprises 80% of those contacted.

No, you should read it slowly. The paper says: " For example, the initial colonization of Brazil by Europeans in the 16th century, resulted in the extinction of ~75% of known societies," That's not a data set from the paper, it's a claim repeated from the literature.

Furthermore, extinction of a society doesn't mean that they "all die"; it can be through migration. That's how societies and cultures often go extinct these days: people get fed up with them and leave.

For actually observed populations, the paper says: "Indeed, about one third of the time-series capture contact population crashes of up to 99% mortality, and the remainder demonstrate post-contact exponential growth from small population sizes,", so what's actually observed post contact in the majority (2/3) of population is exponential growth.

The abstract of the paper is sensationalized and tendentious, but there is actually little data in the paper, and what there is doesn't support the conclusions.

What western contact with uncontacted tribes mean - is the sudden introduction of a massive amount of new pathogens

Native populations usually crash from pathogens long before contact. And you cannot prevent the introduction of pathogens by avoiding contact. We may be able to mitigate the impact of contact if we give up the notion that we can, or should, preserve the way of life of these people, and instead focus on their physical well being and integration into modern society. That's still not a nice choice, but it probably beats being dead.

In most cases - they never quite recover. The Mayan culture is not, contrary to what most people believe, extinct - they are one of the few cultures from the original Cortez contacts to have survived. There is still around 20-thousand Mayans living in central America, mostly in one town in Mexico - and to this day they live in abject poverty with a life expectancy far below the mean for their country. Number one cause of death: malnutrition.

The Mayan culture is, of course, extinct, and most ethnically Mayan people are simply ordinary citizens of Mexico and other nations. There are groups of people who adopt a Mayan identity for various political, economic, and linguistic reasons. But thinking of them as the inheritors of Mayan culture and blaming Europeans for their plight makes no sense. Mostly, what's harming those individuals is your way of thinking, namely that they are a culturally distinct group whose separateness should be preserved. Educate their kids, have them learn and use Spanish, etc. and the poverty will disappear.

And most of those cultures deserved to disappear; everybody is genuinely a lot better off in modern Western societies than in Mayan culture or hunter gatherer societies.

Woman chose tribal life over NYC

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, this guy's mom came from a tribe living in Brazil, moved to NYC then went back to live with her tribe in NYC. It's an amazing story.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-23758087

Predestination, Heathens!

[Anonymous Coward]

If you believe that you're part of the problem. Wake up!

We need those tribes in the USPTO...

[StripedCow]

These tribes, that have never been in contact with western civilization, could be very helpful in the USPTO.
Being void of any reference to technology, we could use them to figure out whether patent applications are truly non-obvious inventions.

E.g., if a tribe member can figure out "slide-to-unlock" by himself, then we can be sure that it is obvious stuff!

Re:We need those tribes in the USPTO...

[Anonymous Coward]

The criteria is "obvious to an expert in the field", not "obvious to someone from the stone age", although I'll grant that if it meets the latter, it should meet the former.

Re:Open SSL

[geirlk]

*badom-tish*

Re:If only

[Anonymous Coward]

Or the tribes that didn't care to find out how aging works and how to stop it, eh? They'll die before the next Einstein discovers cheap 3D printed FTL warp drive.

We've discovered the answer to the Fermi Paradox

[Anonymous Coward]

Clearly, humanity simply isn't advanced enough to survive contact with an advanced alien species.

Re:Open SSL

[Anonymous Coward]

Thought? You must be new here...

Mortals

[Anonymous Coward]

PUNY HUMANS.

Re:We've discovered the answer to the Fermi Parado

[Anonymous Coward]

Nonsense. We've survived the Kardashians very nicely, thank you.

Not 80% mortality rate

[Attila Dimedici]

I reviewed both linked articles and discovered that despite the fact that the study called it an "80% mortality rate" that is not what they actually measured. They measured the reduction in the population of the group. That means that by the methodology used they count those who moved away as having died. I am sure that mortality rates among isolated populations which are contacted are high, but without some measure of how many move out of the area we do not have any way to judge how many die vs how many just move away.

Star Trek Called it

[spankey51]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...

Re:Star Trek Called it

[john.l.christopher]

Perhaps this explains the Fermi Paradox

"Insightful"

[Anonymous Coward]

Average voting age on Slashdot must be somewhere between basement-tween and late-angsty-college-grad.

Genetic Diversity

[envelope]

I hope we're sending in our women to get impregnated by their men, so we can capture their genetic diversity.

Re:Genetic Diversity

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not how it's done. You're supposed to steal their women and rape their livestock, or something like that.

Life without technology was not easier.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it's interesting that you estimate a subsistence living can be managed by working only a few hours a day. Surviving as a hunter/gatherer or through agriculture with near zero technology is very labor intensive. Building your shelter, clothing and everything else you need to remain fed and protected from the elements is labor intensive. My grandfather grew up in revolutionary Russia working their farm by hand basically living a subsistence lifestyle, but with the advantage of a lot more technology than the tribes discussed. Even at that, when he'd go visit the nostalgic ag day events where guys would show off how things were done in the olden days his response was surprising. While the generation after him was all excited to come and ask him about how much better things use to be he'd give an almost disbelieving response that anyone waxing nostalgic about the good old days hasn't a clue what it was actually like.

Re:Life without technology was not easier.

[Immerman]

It's not my estimate - IIRC it's based on an analysis of modern hunter-gatherer societies. Yes, subsistence farming is backbreaking labor, but the hunter-gatherer lifestyle is *completely* different - the actual reasons for the transition are lost to history, but one of the more popular theories is that farming provided better food security in marginal environments, at the said cost of requiring a full day's labor on a semi-regular basis. In the tropics, like say in the Amazon rain forest, food is everywhere all year round - you need only kill/collect it. Even in the desert it's not really that difficult to find, provided your population density is low enough.

Consider - anywhere you have wild animals those animals are obviously finding something to eat. And unless it's mostly leaves, grass and tree bark we can probably eat the same thing just fine, and the animals as well. We're one of the planet's most effective omnivores after all, right up there with rats.

Tom = multiple /. sockpuppet using scum

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's let TOM speak shall we:

"I'm having great conversations on this site with one of my alias accounts" - by Tom (822) on Monday April 07, 2014 @02:29PM (#46686259) Homepage

FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

BY THE WAY TOM: Using your sockpuppet fake /. registered luser accounts to downmod the 1st time I posted this, trying to *vainly* & effetely "hide it", since it serves in exposing you?

Weak -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

AND

As was said there regarding your post I am replying to?

It also explains your +5 up mod on this post!

(Easy to get using YOUR sockpuppets, admittedly, to mod up your other registered account posts too, isn't it? Yes, it is -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p... )

It's going to be reposted again, anyhow - have fun blowing your modpoints, which you'll run DRY of, & then I'll just post it again... lol (I always, win).

APK

P.S.=> Tom *tried* to libel me & failed after I destroyed him in a technical debate on hosts files... result?

Tom ended up "eating his words" here http://slashdot.org/comments.p... spiced with "the bitter taste of SELF-defeat" + HIS FOOT IN HIS MOUTH

... apk

Gb2reddit

[Anonymous Coward]

This is some reddit-level fedora arguing.

Well done!

Re:Tom = multiple /. sockpuppet using scum

[Anonymous Coward]

Explains a +5 "insightful" Tom gave his own post thru sockpuppets & minusmodding your other post like this one I replied to apk. Tom's online trash.

Headline needs fixin'

[Anonymous Coward]

Headline : Isolated Tribes Die Shortly After We Meet Them

OK, I feel guilty now.

Perhaps the headline should read, "Isolated Tribes Die Shortly After Contact By Modern Humans Who Should Be Minding Their Own Business"

There. Fixed that.

What was missing

[Anonymous Coward]

The exposure historical was intentional such as blankets that were gifted that had been used by small pox victims.

This can go both ways

[Anonymous Coward]

Is is possible but not probable that we may encounter an isolated tribe that is immune to a disease that they carry that is fatal to us. If this happens then we will be the ones to suffer the 80% mortality.

Re:This can go both ways

[tomhath]

That happened to Europeans many times. Plague, yellow fever, malaria, maybe HIV, etc. It's unlikely another disease is lurking out there that modern medicine can't handle.

Solution

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't isolate yourself. Now if only those isolated tribes had internet access so they could read this.

Re:Open SSL

[SleazyRidr]

The association with TFA is that people using OpenSSL are an "isolated tribe" who have recently "died" from the heartbleed attack which has exposed a whole load of stuff that was supposed to be secure.

Re:Open SSL

[SleazyRidr]

It's for writing code. The monospace font makes it easier to see the indents in your code and make it easier to follow what's going on.

Tom = multiple /. sockpuppet using scum

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's let TOM speak shall we:

"I'm having great conversations on this site with one of my alias accounts" - by Tom (822) on Monday April 07, 2014 @02:29PM (#46686259) Homepage

FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

BY THE WAY TOM: Using your sockpuppet fake /. registered luser accounts to downmod the 1st time I posted this, trying to *vainly* & effetely "hide it", since it serves in exposing you?

Weak -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

AND

As was said there regarding your post I am replying to?

It also explains your +5 up mod on that post of yours I replied to there exposing you in this...!

(Easy to get using YOUR sockpuppets, admittedly, to mod up your other registered account posts too, isn't it? Yes, it is -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p... )

It's going to be reposted again, anyhow - have fun blowing your modpoints, which you'll run DRY of, & then I'll just post it again... lol (I always, win).

APK

P.S.=> Tom *tried* to libel me & failed after I destroyed him in a technical debate on hosts files... result?

Tom ended up "eating his words" here http://slashdot.org/comments.p... spiced with "the bitter taste of SELF-defeat" + HIS FOOT IN HIS MOUTH

... apk

Re:Tom = multiple /. sockpuppet using scum

[Anonymous Coward]

Tom mods up his own posts using alternate multiple sockpuppet accounts? Wouldn't surprise me. Look who he hangs around with on slashdot (webmistressrachel, gmhowell, Zontar, Sardaukar86, tomhudson = Barbara, not Barbie (another multiple fake /. account using troll who got caught by apk and ran)).

Re:We've discovered the answer to the Fermi Parado

[Anonymous Coward]

he said ADVANCED...the Kardashians while alien, are definitely not advanced...

Re:Open SSL

[Immerman]

I recognize that, and can see the value in using it occasionally, but in what sane world would you want to set that as the default on a primarily conversational forum? Except, as I pointed out, that Slashdot doesn't offer any per-post formatting options.

Tom = multiple /. sockpuppet using scum

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's let TOM speak shall we:

"I'm having great conversations on this site with one of my alias accounts" - by Tom (822) on Monday April 07, 2014 @02:29PM (#46686259) Homepage

FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

BY THE WAY TOM: Using your sockpuppet fake /. registered luser accounts to downmod the 1st time I posted this, trying to *vainly* & effetely "hide it", since it serves in exposing you?

Weak -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

AND

As was said there regarding your post I am replying to?

It also explains your +5 up mod on that post of yours I replied to there exposing you in this...!

(Easy to get using YOUR sockpuppets, admittedly, to mod up your other registered account posts too, isn't it? Yes, it is -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p... )

It's going to be reposted again, anyhow - have fun blowing your modpoints, which you'll run DRY of, & then I'll just post it again... lol (I always, win).

APK

P.S.=> Tom *tried* to libel me & failed after I destroyed him in a technical debate on hosts files... result?

Tom ended up "eating his words" here http://slashdot.org/comments.p... spiced with "the bitter taste of SELF-defeat" + HIS FOOT IN HIS MOUTH

... apk

How are they gonna go back home

[Rinikusu]

Once they've seen Karl Hungus?

Re:Tom = multiple /. sockpuppet using scum

[Anonymous Coward]

Tom mods up his own posts using alternate multiple sockpuppet accounts? Doesn't surprise me. Look who he hangs around with on slashdot (webmistressrachel, gmhowell, Zontar, Sardaukar86, tomhudson = Barbara, not Barbie (another multiple fake /. account using troll who got caught by apk and ran)).

Safety

[Anonymous Coward]

For our own survival we need to shoot first and ask questions later.

We could do the obvious...

[Anonymous Coward]

We could offer them the chance to move into a (free for them) boarding school. We could teach them how to live in our society. We do this for mentally retarded young adults.

Then, we could offer them whatever schooling and/or job training they want, free for life. This only applies to the first generation. There should be no reservation-tribe-style-entitlement. We give them the option to integrate to stay the way they were.

This is common sense to me. I'm just saying we should treat them the way I would want aliens to treat me. If Captain Picard found our primitive planet, I would want to be given the chance to learn about their society, and how to function in it. Once I learned that, I might want to integrate as quickly as possible, or I might want to go back to Earth and live in (relative) isolation from their crazy society.

It is possible the bigoted enviro-wackos who demand we keep these people from integrating into our society are responsible for murdering these people.

That's the price for poly- or pantheism

[Anonymous Coward]

No civilization based on polytheism or pantheism gives rise to science or to any technology not "stumbled upon", and NO the Romans are not a counter-example; they ran for centuries with what they stumbled upon or got from others who'd stumbed upon stuff without further developing it in any organized way. I am NOT making an argument that monotheism is TRUE (in the religious sense), but rather that the beliefs it propagates drive advancement. The particular form of monotheism that arose in ancient Israel and its spin-off Christian philosophy provided several vital elements that drove the development of Western Civilization and nearly all of the science and technology we have today:

1. The view that the universe was deliberately designed and created by an intelligence (which meant it HAD a "design")

2. The idea that man was meant to understand the design of the world and learn to tend and maintain it (which meant man had to be capable of these things).

3. The idea that man should spread-out across the world, taming the wilderness.

Polytheism tends to lead to societies that do not develop science, in part, because in a world of many co-equal Gods struggling with eachother, there is a presumption that things like storms are sky god and wind god fights, with capricious gods who will regularly and routinely change the way nature itself works at a whim and with nobody in charge of a unified design, there is no design to study and understand - no guarantee that what you learn about the way things work today will still be true tomorrow.

Pantheism tends to lead to the view that nature is itself divine, which can lead to a hesitancy to take things apart to study their workings and the idea that it is wrong to "fool with mother nature". When trees are divine, it's wrong to cut them down. When rivers and rocks are divine, it's wrong to mine and build dams. etc.

Philosophy actually matters. What we think and what we believe has a great impact upon the societies we humans build. Again, it's not always whether what we believe is TRUE, in a grand cosmic sense, as much as it matters how our beliefs drive our actions. If you are a polytheistic or a pantheistic society you are likely to be a primitive stone-age barbarian tribal culture until you stumble onto better things (which you will then use at face value, rather than using as a stepping stone to advancement).

Missionaries.

[blackanvil]

I wonder how much of this is caused by the inevitable invasion by missionaries, injecting memes into the local population that conflict with the indigenous culture and cause conflict, confusion, and the other symptoms of Christianity. Not to mention the purely physical diseases they bring with them. I know they mean well, but everything I've read about post-missionary contact of isolated tribes shows an increase in depression, aggression, and lowered quality of life.

Finally,

[Anonymous Coward]

a way to rid the Tea Party! :-)

Tom = multiple /. sockpuppet using scum

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's let TOM speak shall we:

"I'm having great conversations on this site with one of my alias accounts" - by Tom (822) on Monday April 07, 2014 @02:29PM (#46686259) Homepage

FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

APK

P.S.=> Tom *tried* to libel me & failed after I destroyed him in a technical debate on hosts files... result?

Tom ended up "eating his words" here http://slashdot.org/comments.p... spiced with "the bitter taste of SELF-defeat" + HIS FOOT IN HIS MOUTH

... apk

Tom = multiple /. sockpuppet using scum

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's let TOM speak shall we:

"I'm having great conversations on this site with one of my alias accounts" - by Tom (822) on Monday April 07, 2014 @02:29PM (#46686259) Homepage

FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

APK

P.S.=> Tom *tried* to libel me & failed after I destroyed him in a technical debate on hosts files... result?

Tom ended up "eating his words" here http://slashdot.org/comments.p... spiced with "the bitter taste of SELF-defeat" + HIS FOOT IN HIS MOUTH

... apk

Vegans don't, after we meet them

[Anonymous Coward]

Nuff said

Proof at last...

[Anonymous Coward]

..that there is intelligent life on /.
Well stated