Isolated Amazon Tribe Makes First Contact

[RKP5637]

I feel so sorry for them ... it ain't always greener on the other side. Perhaps they will choose to remain isolated.

http://www.newser.com/story/190759/isolated-amazon-tribe-makes-first-contact.html

(NEWSER) – An Amazon tribe that has managed to remain isolated from the outside world is isolated no more. Members of the unnamed tribe have taken what Science calls the "momentous and potentially tragic step" of approaching a group of Brazilian scientists in the rainforest. (It's believed to be the same tribe that was photographed a few years ago by a government plane, notes Vice, though no contact was made at that time.) The government dispatched the team of scientists to the Upper Envira River region after getting complaints from local villagers that members of the tribe had shown up and were raiding their fields.

Brazil has a strict no-contact policy with such tribes—about 70 are thought to exist in the rainforest—but an Arizona anthropologist thinks it made sense to send the team in this case given the "serious threat of violence" that existed between the tribe and villagers. Little is known about the group, and scientists haven't yet identified its language, but LiveScience reports that the tribe likely came from Peru when illegal loggers and drug traffickers encroached on its territory. Maybe they "felt they had nowhere left to go," says a member of advocacy group Survival International. Scientists have quarantined the area because the tribe's members are at high risk of picking up diseases. They'll eventually get to decide whether they want to settle in a village with ties to the modern world.

[Tetris_Iguana]

1. I hate it when people romanticize the good ol days.

While primitive living might seem "greener"to us, I'm sure it's full of unnecessary suffering already solved by modern civilization.

I wish this tribe the best with their transition.

[RKP5637]

2. Looks like they have some options, so that's good IMO. Yes, there must

be some horrific misery.

[LiberalElite]

4. And there isn't horrific misery in our culture?

Just because they live in huts in the rainforest doesn't mean they automatically must be miserable.

[RKP5637]

5. I was thinking only along the lines of some medical conditions. n/t

[LiberalElite]

6. Well, now that they're making some limited contact -

they have to be shielded from contracting diseases that they have no immunity to.

[RKP5637]

7. Definitely! n/t

[LiberalElite]

3. For me it's not romanticizing the good old days but

seeking to preserve radically different cultures that live much lightly on the earth. When they get more contact with modern civilization all this is lost and they become consumers like the rest of us. As far as unnecessary suffering, there's heaps of that in "civilization."