May 30, 2008: Uncontacted Indigenous People

[DanaC]

Because he hasn't been there? Because he hasn't contacted the tribe? But there have been a hundered tribes discovered before and a hundred times it has been the case. But that past history doesn't mean that he knows what the lifestyle is like about these people?

If you check the record of such contact you'll find it mainly went pretty badly for the contacted tribes. On the whole they did not march forward into the white heat of technology....

Also, if you think that anthropology has in any way reached a consensus on most of this stuff you are sadly mistaken. There have been near fist fights and decades long feuds over subtle distinctions of societal development in these tribes. There have also been new generations of observers who have brought wholly different techniques and observations to tribes who we previously thought we understood.


[eta] if you went to a convention of those anthropologists who've documented the first contacts you are talking about and tried to tell them any assumptions could be made on the grounds of what they already knew, you'd be laughed out of the building. Just a thought.