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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."
"people die from smallpox and guns and other unknown diseases"
I'm pretty sure at least one of those was unintentional.
C'mon people - aren't we nerds? Clearly we need an OR here, not an AND!
Why do people think it's best to leave others living in the stone age?
Jesus H Christ, but that's a huge spread. Do anthropologists actually know anything?
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
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.
Better known as 318230.
When I said I wanted my SSL open, I didn't mean this open, am I right folks!?
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.
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.
DATABASE WOW WOW
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.
We have considerably less data on the isolated tribes that die out before we meet them.
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.
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.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
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?
What do uncontacted tribes think when they see our passenger jets and cargo ships? Gods?
So if someone walks up and shoots you in the head, that's fine because it's evolution?
Evolutionary biology is science, not morality.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
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?
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
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.
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?
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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?
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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.
"Cowardice in a race, as in an individual, is the unpardonable sin." --Teddy Roosevelt
Comment removed based on user account deletion
... 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 ...
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.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
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/...
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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...
"indigenous people die from smallpox and guns and other unknown diseases" Yeah, guns are the worst disease - there is still no vaccine for it.
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.
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.
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.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
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.
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.
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
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." ~The Honorable Daniel Patrick Moynihan
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.
Flamebait? Smallpox is eradicated in the wild.
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.
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
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!
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
*badom-tish*
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.
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.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
-ubuntu others as you would have others ubuntu you.
Ok - Columbus invented America. Happy now?
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.
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?
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.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I think he means a baby made of stone!? Like the statues you see in fountains.
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
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.
Is 1563649 a prime number?
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.
Is 1563649 a prime number?
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.
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.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Once they've seen Karl Hungus?
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
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.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
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.
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.
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.
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 >:[
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...