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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."
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
We have considerably less data on the isolated tribes that die out before we meet them.
What do uncontacted tribes think when they see our passenger jets and cargo ships? Gods?
"There goes the neighbourhood"?
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!
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.
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.
+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!"
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.
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."
This is the exact type of, romanticized version of the past bullshit, that we are saying is bullshit here.
"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.
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.
"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.
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);
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!