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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.
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.
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
People complain when you put the wildlife ear tags on the natives.
Learn to love Alaska
We have considerably less data on the isolated tribes that die out before we meet them.
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.
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.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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.
Never happened. True story.
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...
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.
what is the average age of those that lived in the stone age?
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
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.
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!
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
... 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 ...
C'mon people - aren't we nerds? Clearly we need an OR here, not an AND!
Nope - these natives have been just ridiculously unlucky.
#DeleteChrome
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.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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...
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:
"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.
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.
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".
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
It is funny how only the super wealthy countries pine for a simple life.
This is the exact type of, romanticized version of the past bullshit, that we are saying is bullshit here.
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
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)
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
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.
"Nor" is a hangover from Old English, when the language had a dual number in addition to the singular and plural we have today.
I like my coffee the way I like my women - roasted and ground up into little tiny pieces.
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.
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.)
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!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
"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.
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.)
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Sure, it's all fun and games until somebody gets segmentation fault in the left temporal lobe...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
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.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
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!
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 swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
"There are known knowns..."
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
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 :)