Isolated Tribes Die Shortly After We Meet Them 351
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."
HA (Score:4, Funny)
"people die from smallpox and guns and other unknown diseases"
I'm pretty sure at least one of those was unintentional.
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Either you don't understand Slashdot's native language, or you don't understand English. In any case, the Enlish "nor" is short for "neither", which is true as long as both inputs are false, exactly like a NOR gate.
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Odd how you'd accuse him of not understanding English when you yourself then misdefine the same word. As someone who is still trying to break the habit of using it in conversation and baffling southerners I can assure you that it isn't limited to use as a short form of neither, and nor should it
Re:"smallpox OR guns OR other unknown diseases" (Score:5, Informative)
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".
Re:"smallpox OR guns OR other unknown diseases" (Score:5, Interesting)
"Nor" is a hangover from Old English, when the language had a dual number in addition to the singular and plural we have today.
Re:"smallpox OR guns OR other unknown diseases" (Score:5, Insightful)
"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.
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Sure, it's all fun and games until somebody gets segmentation fault in the left temporal lobe...
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The problem with the sentence is not "and" versus "or", it is really the placement of the word "other" e.g. "smallpox and other unknown diseases and guns".
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C'mon people - aren't we nerds? Clearly we need an OR here, not an AND!
Nope - these natives have been just ridiculously unlucky.
between 23 and 70 uncontacted tribes (Score:2, Troll)
Jesus H Christ, but that's a huge spread. Do anthropologists actually know anything?
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Do anthropologists actually know anything?
They do, but not about you.
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"There are known knowns..."
Other animals (Score:3)
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.
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There is a huge span between "coming into contact" and "having to compete for space/food". The animals and plants I see day in and out seem to be generally rather more relaxed than what you are describing -- the option you pretend doesn't even exist, co-existence, is the most common one.
Re:Other animals (Score:5, Insightful)
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... [examiner.com]
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.
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Well, once you take a closer look at various "alternative medicines", you'll find out that they fall in two possible groups:
1) The one where certain herbs were used that have similar or even the same properties as some off the stuff we use in our pills. They are usually cited when claiming that "alternative" medicine works so well. There's nothing really wrong with that, except that yes, they tried it and found out that it worked. Probably the same way we did. We just decided that it's easier to store and a
Sad, and not black and white either (Score:5, Insightful)
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The metaphorical White Man has a heavy burden here.
What is the burden? I mean, what do you suggest doing? We can barely take care of ourselves out here.......
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They really need access to Facebook.
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Climate change will wipe them out too, probably by drought.
Re:Sad, and not black and white either (Score:4, Insightful)
One man spends a few hours a day supplying for all his worldly needs, and the rest in the pursuit of art, spiitual development, and other pleasures.
The other spends half his waking day slaving away for somebody else's goals, in order to earn money he doesn't need in order to buy things he doesn't want so he can impress people he doesn't care about.
Which is the wiser man?
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The one that got a banking degree in the 80's?
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Yeah, those types are just oozing spiritual development.
Re:Sad, and not black and white either (Score:5, Insightful)
One has a life expectancy of 30-odd years, the other of 70+. He has access to literature, art and music from all over the world. If he breaks his leg, he is transported to a hospital, gets a cast and will be well again in a short time instead of getting an infection and having a 50-50 chance of surviving.
We have romantic thoughts about prior times mostly because we forget all the shit about them. Your average medieval market fair doesn't include the open-latrines, your village getting burnt down in one of the constant wars, the fact that women had a reasonably high chance to die when giving birth or the simple fact that most likely everyone reeked to high heavens. Or just the fact that 90% of us would be pig farmers or something.
I know what I'd pick if given a choice. If you think different, pick a tribe, learn their language and go and live with them for a few years.
You can totally work a few hours a day to satisfy basic needs and spend the rest doing whatever you want. Of course it will probably mean not being able to buy the latest smartphone every year or going on expensive holiday trips, or very much medical care or a car - but then, the tribesmen do without those as well, right?
Re:Sad, and not black and white either (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't bother about it.
No one here has spent more than a couple of days in the jungle, and most likely with a weeks worth of food with them.
You go to any shit-hole village in the jungle anywhere and most people are trying to get out, or get their kids out.
They have fuck all to do all day and they have all kinds of stuff to worry about that we take for granted.
They worry about getting food.
They worry about getting sick or injured. (no hospitals out there, and gg no re if you get some kind of infection)
They worry about getting clean drinking water.
They worry about crop failure because they don't have several years worth of strategic maple syrup stored up.
And they eat the same fucking shit every day.
Every time someone starts about how we are ruining these simple folk with our modern things I get pissed off.
Maybe let those people decide for themselves what they want.
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On the third hand, it seems like there could be some kind of middle ground, where we have modern communications and health care, but we don't have so much meaningless grind for the sake of grind, the replicated and contradictory efforts... We spend a lot of time and money fighting each other and it doesn't seem strictly necessary.
Re:farming vs. hunter gatherer (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:farming vs. hunter gatherer (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Sad, and not black and white either (Score:4, Insightful)
The one that can still feed himself for a few months if he breaks a leg.
I'm not a very materialistic person and I don't make much money, but I do very much understand the concepts of emergency buffers and retirement savings.
Woman chose tribal life over NYC (Score:2, Interesting)
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
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"Art, spiritual development, and other pleasures?" What does that have to do with life in pre-contact societies or tribes? Most of the time in such societies is taken up with working very hard to get enough food not to starve. Medical care is non-existent, and disease widepreas. Violence is rampant in many of those societies. Justice and power are arbitrary There isn't much room for "spiritual development".
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Not helpful??
Think of the plants in the rainforest with which local tribesmen use to treat illness. Synthesising these compounds may be crucial in treating the next batch of superbugs.
Think of terra preta, a fertile soil mix found in the Amazon, whose synthesis could be the key to 21st century crop yields devastated by climate change.
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The premise is that they might be the only humans still existing after we manage to kill ourselves. My only hope is that we don't take them with us, my hope for us is long gone.
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Are you implying that white men have better aspirations than living?
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cut off from the fruits of civilisation
Or cut off from the restrictions of civilisation. Is it better to live (on average - and the difference is much less once you ignore infant death) a short, free life or a long, tedious life? I'm not answering for anyone else, but my answer is that the modern Western world and the indigenous lifestyle seem to be equally tedious extremes, and both suffer the problem that it's very hard to escape either. Pre-globalisation, at least one could more easily escape the former.
treated like livestock whose habitat must be delineated and (un)managed
Eh, first world human private property
simple matter (Score:2)
There is no heavy burden. If the consequences of contact are so disastrous, they must not be contacted, full stop. We have 95% of the world at our disposal. It wouldn't really kill us to leave some patches of unscathed rain forest standing. On the contrary, the non-stop, all consuming "progress" seems to be that which will kill us.
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You can't "not contact" them. People are pushing into their habitats no matter what. There is simply no option.
Even if we had a choice, it's unclear that not contacting them would be the right thing to do. First, you are depriving them of many of the benefits of modern civilization: immunizations, agriculture, education. Second, they are occupying and using land very inefficiently. Finally, their societies generally vio
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Inherent bias (Score:5, Insightful)
We have considerably less data on the isolated tribes that die out before we meet them.
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We have considerably less data on the isolated tribes that die out before we meet them.
Well, that's what you think.
We know how many there are (*).
Should I remind you that the NSA never met you; however it knows more about you than your close family ?
(*) Obviously, the civilians only get a rough approximation, the exact number is classified.
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So you're saying they may have been dying out from our gun bullets before we met them?
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We have considerably less data on the isolated tribes that die out before we meet them.
We'd better find the rest before they die too.
Which makes me wonder...what is the likelihood there are any undiscovered tribes? This lesson learned may never have the chance to be applied from here on out.
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Which makes me wonder...what is the likelihood there are any undiscovered tribes?
^OK, ignore that part... the result of skipping the summary and skimming the article.... Although I still wonder if they are really truly "uncontacted" tribes.
Weren't they already dying? (Score:4, Interesting)
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... [nature.com]
The original article seems to confirm this:
http://www.nature.com/srep/201... [nature.com]
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?
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The year zero on the graph is the approximate year of peaceful contact.
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And yet GP is correct.
On the graphs, there is a line for "pre 0", which is ~5x as high as the "year 0" line.
So, why are we blaming contact for the primary problems, if population fell by 80% (to the year 0 levels) from pre-contact?
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And yet GP is correct.
On the graphs, there is a line for "pre 0", which is ~5x as high as the "year 0" line.
So, why are we blaming contact for the primary problems, if population fell by 80% (to the year 0 levels) from pre-contact?
Well, those 80% are presumably the ones that died when they came into non-peaceful contact by the less than peaceful Europeans who broke new ground.
What do they think? (Score:3, Interesting)
What do uncontacted tribes think when they see our passenger jets and cargo ships? Gods?
Re:What do they think? (Score:5, Funny)
What do uncontacted tribes think when they see our passenger jets and cargo ships? Gods?
"There goes the neighbourhood"?
Re:What do they think? (Score:4, Funny)
Spaceballs.
There goes the planet.
Re:What do they think? (Score:4, Insightful)
In that situation a lot of people turned up to look and then went home after a while. Unlike fiction they recognised the pilot as a person that just happened to have a lot of really cool stuff.
People are people wherever they are even if fiction likes to paint some as more superstitious than a Californian crystal healing fanatic or with less reasoning ability as a meth head.
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Not much. They usually know a fair bit about us. Which in turn is usually the reason they are trying to avoid us.
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Yes.
Cargo Cults.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
https://answers.yahoo.com/ques... [yahoo.com]
And for fun, The Gods Must be Crazy. :)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt00... [imdb.com]
Not just the isloated (Score:4, Interesting)
Various Native American tribes are engaging in self-destructive behavior. Some say it is over gambling profits.
Disenrollment leaves Natives "culturally homeless" [cbsnews.com]
One tribe in California will shortly have cut itself in half, down to 900 or less: I Know I Am, But What Are You? [thisamericanlife.org]
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The last chapter in any successful genocide is the one in which the oppressor can remove their hands and say, "My God, what are these people doing to themselves? They're killing each other. They're killing themselves while we watch them die."
https://www.ted.com/talks/aaron_huey#t-6523 [ted.com]
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Whatever happened to "Native Americans" a couple of centuries ago, the US has gone out of its way to try to help Native American communities for more than half a century. Calling this an ongoing genocide or oppression is just wrong.
At this point, the "Native American" identity really has become a corrupt and racist farce: there simply is no separate group or culture of Native Americans; it's people who pick a particular identity for various personal, political, and economic reasons.
Prophylactic immunization (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Prophylactic immunization (Score:5, Informative)
+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!"
Inevitable Star Trek Reference ... (Score:3)
... 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 ...
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As an ethnic German, I keep waiting for my sack of gold coins from Rome as reparations for Roman slavery, genocide and imperialism.
Another tribe set for the kill? (Score:4, Informative)
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/... [berbix.com]
----
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... [dailymail.co.uk]
Guns are the worst disease (Score:2)
Don't despair. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
what about the reverse (Score:2)
We need those tribes in the USPTO... (Score:4, Insightful)
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!
Correlation != Causation (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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I'm sorry, but we had to kill the patient in order to save him. The good news though is that soon we will have cured you and all your neighbors as well.
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*badom-tish*
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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.
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Re:Evolution in action (Score:4, Insightful)
So if someone walks up and shoots you in the head, that's fine because it's evolution?
Evolutionary biology is science, not morality.
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Re:Evolution in action (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Re:Evolution in action (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:So? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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what is the average age of those that lived in the stone age?
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This isn't about the average age the individual gets to, it's about a tribe in its entirety going extinct.
Another fine example why giving an average without a standard deviation is pointless. If you have a society where you reach 40 years on average it doesn't tell you whether you have a society that is thriving because people live about 35-45 years and can sensibly procreate before they die, or whether you have a society on the brink of extinction because a handful of individuals get to see 100 years while
Re:So? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:So? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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!
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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.
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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...
Re:So? (Score:5, Interesting)
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!
Re:So? (Score:4, Informative)
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.)
Re:So? (Score:4, Insightful)
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:
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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 thei
Re:So? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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!
Re:Reality Check (Score:4, Insightful)
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.