The last paragraph reveals how serious the lack of medical attention can be:
"In the mid-1980s, a group of Yora tribespeople who made contact with loggers in their region in the Peruvian Amazon were first infected by influenza and later came down with pneumonia and other secondary infections. Without antibiotics, “the old people died and all the young kids died,” Hill says. A subsequent study by medical anthropologist Glenn Shepard of the Paraense Emilio Goeldi Museum in Belém, Brazil, revealed that some 300 people died, between 50% and 60% of the population."
It's a tragic illustration of one of the points of Jared Diamond's book Guns, Germs, and Steel.
The Sentinelese also have the unique(?) advantage of living on a very isolated island with no significant exploitable resources of interest to others: https://goo.gl/maps/0xTek
Well, that's one misconception I harboured that's now been corrected. It makes sense upon reflection that uncontacted tribes knew far more about outsiders than the other way around, but I never thought that most of their fear was due to prior killings or disease through both uncaring and caring encounters.
> I never thought that most of their fear was due to prior killings or disease through both uncaring and caring encounters.
It's even worse than that. I recently read Jared Diamond's book The World Until Yesterday. In it he describes just how violent inter-group affairs can be among pre-industrial societies. Globally, the default is typically to kill anyone from another group before they have a chance to do the same to you.
One thing I found interesting about the book 1491 New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus were claims that there were some tribes more advanced around the Amazon than many would commonly think. Of course after first contact, who knows what exactly happened to the people in the area. It has never been exactly well developed even today.
You'll even find extremely knowledgable American history professors who use the term to describe Native Americans. Their graduate students, however, will tell you separately that they want and expect you to use more politically correct terms instead. Just has to do with the times.
In theory the rule is that you're supposed to refer to people by what name they prefer (e.g. "Little people").
Here's what Wikipedia says:
* The terms used to refer to Native Americans have been controversial. According to a 1995 U.S. Census Bureau set of home interviews, most of the respondents with an expressed preference refer to themselves as "American Indians" or simply "Indians"; this term has been adopted by major newspapers and some academic groups
A late-'90s Russell Means polemic against "Native American" (along with the fact that it got quite a bit of agreement) has been somewhat influential in that respect: http://www.nemasys.com/ghostwolf/Native/wai.shtml
So what is the problem with "indians" - is that word from a time when people thought they had discovered the passage to India?
Maybe just "natives" would be sufficient? Not all uncontacted tribes are in the Americas afaik (for example I've heard about a tribe in some Russian mountains).
It seems inevitable that any group of humans too long cut off from the majority of humanity is destined for destruction once contact is re-established due to cultural shock, unscrupulous or illegal activity, but chiefly by diseases against which they have no natural immunity.
Second: a bunch of formerly uncontacted people have been interviewed after contact was made and none of them indicated a desire to abstain from the evil outside world or to preserve their way of life... They were merely afraid and/or lacked appropriate opportunity for contact.
Further, none of them were wholly unaware of life outside their small isolated villages/reserves; people gossip and even the most isolated peoples have some knowledge of the rest of humanity.
Best we can tell this process is inevitable. The article has some suggestions for minimizing the damage but by and large there is little anyone can do despite the best intentions unless we were to forcibly isolate these people and prohibit them from making contact.
At least in the mean time we can try as best as possible to learn from them, before their cultures are forgotten. So much of what we assume is standard operating procedure is deeply made-up. Seeing how other folks do things is a way to learn.
Contrary to popular belief, living in these societies would not be a fun experience. Well if you're a strong man happy to live to 50 they might be ok. To bad if you're a women.
But we allow them to continue by actively prohibiting people from helping them purely for our rich persons entertainment.
Paleolithic culture is a genuinely mixed bag. Not as bad as almost everyone thinks, but worse than the rest think. I would put 1850 as my over-under for the year that neolithic culture provided an improvement in average quality of life. The problem with being a foraging people is that farming peoples can push you off the nicer land, as the article corroborates. Over millenia, foraging probably got to be a worse deal.
It is far from clear, though, that living as a hunter gatherer isn't fun. Reports from the 18th and 19th centuries mention the scandal that when white farmers were captured by indigenous tribes, they hardly ever wanted to go back. Foraging beat farming in terms of qalys, it seemed.
Studies of the ǃKung San, who were recently hunter-gatherers living in a rather marginal environment, showed that they could get by doing far less work than farmers. The work they did do was strenuous. For example, they practiced persistence hunting. However, on average they had a lot more leisure time. Being a hunter-gatherer was probably an even sweeter deal before farmers and ranchers gobbled up all the prime real estate.
Interestingly enough, the recent history of the !Kung shows that settling down and joining the rest of civilization does not always benefit the fairer sex. !Kung society was much less sexist before contact than it is now, as the surrounding peoples they are now in contact with are not exactly the most egalitarian. Most archaeologists consider egalitarian social structure to be typical of hunter-gatherer societies, with rigid hierarchical structure being an innovation resulting from settlement. Consider the concept of being "rich" for example. In a nomadic pastoral culture, wealth might be owning a big herd. In a sedentary culture, wealth might take the form of housing or accumulated items. A hunter-gatherer does not own animals and has to carry everything he/she owns around. A hunter-gather's abilities are his/her wealth.
There are plenty of "civilized" places on Earth today where being poor is basically hell. There's ceaseless toil, no power or freedom, pollution, violence, poor nutrition, and no real access to the wonders of modern medicine that most of us are aghast at the thought of doing without. I'd far rather be among today's last few hunter-gatherer tribes than an immigrant worker in UAE or Qatar.
This basically tells us that land ownership and control is the critical ingredient against egalitarianism. The structure of the society is built around preserving land ownership; suddenly because family membership and inheritance grants you access to land it becomes a point of contention, and control is imposed on women to maintain that boundary.
Those people don't all die in their 20s. It's harder to get past 20, but once you did, you could live up to 70 if not more. There wouldn't be elders otherwise.
http://news.sciencemag.org/archaeology/2014/07/uncontacted-t...
(Abstract only, main report is behind a paywall.) And the recent update:
http://news.sciencemag.org/health/2014/07/did-brazils-uncont...
The last paragraph reveals how serious the lack of medical attention can be:
"In the mid-1980s, a group of Yora tribespeople who made contact with loggers in their region in the Peruvian Amazon were first infected by influenza and later came down with pneumonia and other secondary infections. Without antibiotics, “the old people died and all the young kids died,” Hill says. A subsequent study by medical anthropologist Glenn Shepard of the Paraense Emilio Goeldi Museum in Belém, Brazil, revealed that some 300 people died, between 50% and 60% of the population."
It's a tragic illustration of one of the points of Jared Diamond's book Guns, Germs, and Steel.