Man of the Hole(en.wikipedia.org) |
Man of the Hole(en.wikipedia.org) |
Man of the Hole - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32703518 - Sept 2022 (3 comments)
'Man of the Hole': Last of his tribe dies in Brazil - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32638304 - Aug 2022 (14 comments)
Amazon activists mourn death of ‘man of the hole’, last of his tribe - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32633003 - Aug 2022 (2 comments)
Man of the Hole - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29445016 - Dec 2021 (6 comments)
Isolated man in Amazon Jungle - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12557052 - Sept 2016 (4 comments)
> In 1984 a group of Australian Aboriginal people living a traditional nomadic life were encountered in the heart of the Gibson desert in Western Australia.
> They had been unaware of the arrival of Europeans on the continent, let alone cars - or even clothes.
> If you want to know how Australian Aboriginal peoples lived for 40,000 years, just ask Yukultji.
> She stepped into the 20th Century just 30 years ago.
~ (written in 2014) https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-30500591
Amazing story just the same.
> takes the viewer on a cultural travelogue through the three regions of the Kimberleys: the coast, the rivers and tablelands, and the desert.
and you're correct about the breadth of languages across Australia as a whole.
The point stands that this group were first hand direct testimony to Western Desert lifestyles prior to colonial invasion.
One of the more interesting thing about growing up in the less inhabited parts of Western Austrlia (ie. most it given its 3x size of Texas with a pop of > 2 million mostly living in the SW corner) is the direct interaction with many people that still directly connect to traditional lifestyles [2].
[1] https://www.roninfilms.com.au/feature/710/milli-milli.html
I found it incredible how several of the siblings are now well-known artists[0]! What a life these people have led.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warlimpirrnga_Tjapaltjarri
Their bond to each other, fear of the new world, confusion, and inability to communicate are heartbreaking. The way they try to smile at the camera alone is haunting.
Available free on YouTube: https://youtu.be/kGuxaY8HPjs
I wonder if they are using some sort of aerial surveillance. Maybe looking for heat signature from a fire at night? (Assuming he knows about or even needs fire.) Or perhaps trail cameras placed all over his territory. In a YouTube video the officials are seen giving him an axe and other gifts. A GPS locator hidden in the handle of the axe? I don't believe that's the answer, but thinking about all the nature videos I've seen in which GPS trackers are attached to birds, whales, mountain lions, and even house cats wandering the garden, it is at least technically doable.
Hopefully there are some outdoorsmen here on HN who can shed light on how the tracking might be done.
There is some hint to that in the Wikipedia entry: "They observed that he periodically moved his home, building straw huts for shelter. He hunted wild game, collected fruits and honey, and also planted maize and manioc. Over the years, more than 50 huts built by him were identified by FUNAI."
I can think of 2 major differences between locating him vs hikers:
1. Less time pressure as the government could wait weeks/months between locating him. Finding him once in a 3 month window is a success, finding hikers after 3 months would likely be for the purposes of recovering remains.
2. Hikers usually don't construct multiple semi-permanent structures that can be identified from the air (holes, animal traps, shelter)
He lost them all. All taken from him. His whole surrounding culture.
Imagine being him.
After that, I realized what was so strange about them. They were ghosts, but they still had their bodies.
One lifes day to day and digs a grave for oneself wherever the wind blows you. Hoping that at least in the afterlife, you will be together with the butchered.
The only way to stop poachers, is to provide the natives with area denial devices.. magnetic mines and drones. Nothing else will work.
Ironic though, that the genocide of the north, which stopped and was historically recognized as wrong, can go on in the present day south, without creating the same political fervor.
It happened on Brazil's watch so it's Brazil's responsibility, but I'm ill-convinced convinced that in its absence this wouldn't continue to happen (in its absence, there's no FINRA, no organization protecting these tribes... And there are still people willing to kill for mining profit).
And even when we do have the opportunity, there are cases where we can't, because the language is untranslatable, for example the North Sentinel islanders: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese_language
I think that in the end, none of debate will matter and that all remaining tribes will either be dead or clumsily brought into civilization without regard for ethics.
And they're observed remotely merely to help ensure that violent people don't disturb them - making sure they aren't killed or driven to civilization unless they want to go.
A preserve is an area carved out to prohibit the others from going in and screwing with someone or something.
So basically, they’re polar opposites.
Jeeze.
> Civilization is basically an ever expanding cultural grey goo meat grinder
In some ways, it was, in some ways, it wasn't. Civilization allows some ideas and some ways of life that aren't/weren't possible otherwise. An example cited in this thread is that of an aboriginal group (Pintupi Nine) that became artists after contact with civilization. Surely being a dedicated artist would be much more difficult without civilization support. Many civilizations were respectful of regional differences and even local religions and other beliefs (even e.g. Alexander). I mean, modern civilization essentially respects regional differences and has understood rights w.r.t. cultures. If you look at the consensus from social sciences it seems by far in the side of non-uniformization as being healthier and preferable choice for societies (and hence for policymaking). And of course and some of the absurdities of 20th century were ideas of supremacy and forced uniformity.
And most important, civilization is not static (and not a physical law), it's a system, maybe almost like an operating system, and we continually are making choices on how to build it. And studying how our design choices contribute to better, more fulfilling, more interesting existences.
I assure you, those choices are being made right now, and more active participation, in-depth study and science are important to assure to good future. (you shouldn't use the first few OS designs as a rule that all OSes will need to follow forever)
"Nobody really regrets any of it"
It's not impossible, but "holding Brazil accountable" is a strategy far likelier to succeed, I suspect.
Even in the UK and the EU you're barely a generation away from "what do you hunt" being a fair and reasonable question - hunting boar in a European forest in the 1940s was not altogether uncommon, catching birds, fish, rabbits, et al in the countryside to supplement scarce food was absolutely a wartime pursuit in the UK.
As a Kimberley kid I grew up spear fishing [1] from boats, jetties, reefs, and the shore as part and parcel of a life building radios to listen in on US submarine comms stations further down the coast and reverse engineer early NAVSTAR signals .. thanks to a lot of post war types that felt the need to stay in touch with world tensions and events in the region from Vietnam through to PNG.
Can't complain about a healthy lifestyle with plenty of fresh food :-)
A teacher I had of Jewish descent said something similar about his tradition.
It was a lot more common to memorize texts and cultural highlights. In the even recent past most people could recite complete poems and stories by heart.
Note how far the question has already drifted from human zoos, to just whether it's good to contact people or not. This is not an accident. It's because the human zoo comparison was never defensible; it was trivial to force you to move the goalposts.
Would you have preferred that he had been forcibly contacted and educated, to make an "informed" choice, in the name of his liberty and/or autonomy?
If so, then yup, perfectly fine.
In the scenario you’re describing (a walled off preserve), said folks could decide to join ‘the space age’ by walking to the next valley if they wanted to.
And that is someone Stone Age folks did regularly, walk to other valleys.
In the real Stone Age, that means they see another group of Stone Age folks. In the space age scenario, that means they get exposure to some space age stuff.
So they’d be making the choice to stay, by staying, if they don’t do that.
No one is building a fence to keep them in, just like no one was working to keep ‘the man of the hole’ in. If someone does make a fenced off area around them that is impossible to escape, then sure that could be a problem. It’s a prison then.
But that’s not what anyone is proposing I can see.
They were just working to keep others from going in and screwing with him.
He knew there were others out there, he just didn’t want to be bothered - and they were trying to help him do that.
But they don't, unless they actually get exposed to it. "They've heard a machine and it was loud and terrible and knocked over a tree" doesn't mean they're making an informed decision, because e.g. they don't know surgery or antibiotics.
> They were just working to keep others from going in and screwing with him.
And that's fine, but he's not making an informed decision to stay in the the forest because he prefers that way of life. He's doing what he knows and doesn't do what he doesn't know. That's not a choice. Before Fosbury developed the Fosbury Flop, other athletes weren't choosing to not jump that way.
Preserves don’t do that either.
My intuition is more about not forcibly relocating but putting boundaries so that movement is restricted and safe observations can be performed for prolonged time.
By the criteria you seem to be using, I’m not sure it’s possible for anyone to ever make an informed consent about 99% of anything, since practically speaking there are near infinite possible options available for almost every action, almost all of them impractical or pointless to even discuss, and most of them more damaging than they are worth to even bring up.
For example, it doesn’t seem like a reasonable requirement that someone spends a bunch of time doing cocaine so they understand it, in order to not want to do cocaine.
If the tribe wanted to know more about the big scary machines, they are free to try to contact the folks and learn more.
If they want to stay away from the giant shitshow that is modern society, that’s fine too. I can’t necessarily blame them either!
They don’t need to spend a lifetime learning all the myriad reasons why just to not be exposed to all the myriad reasons why.
> For example, it doesn’t seem like a reasonable requirement that someone spends a bunch of time doing cocaine so they understand it, in order to not want to do cocaine.
And I would mostly agree with that, if it weren't for the fact that you can read about drugs and their effect and learn something about it. It's limited, and you should be very aware of the fact that you have a very limited understanding of the alternatives, but it's not comparable to "I don't know that cocaine exists, therefore I have chosen not to consume it". That's just ignorance, not choice.
In the cocaine example, If I stay away from reading about recreational drugs, and don’t put anything that I don’t know what’s in it in my body, why should I ever have to know or care about cocaine at all? Is that not a choice with the same effect, but also without all the work and risk involved in doing all that research and potentially trying something that is more dangerous to me than would be obvious?
Forcing someone to know something is removing their ability to make those choices.
Having Agency/Self Determination means being able to make that choice, even when others don’t agree with it, or it causes potential problems for someone. That is the cost (and privilege) of ownership.
In a society, we infringe that for members of our society when the society overall thinks it justifies the costs. Vaccinations for kids before they go to school, to stop large scale outbreaks and death for instance. Or mandatory public education.
But that is for folks raised in and part of the overall fabric already, and impossibly intertwined with it.
Doing that for someone outside of it makes no sense.
For one (less extreme) example, The Amish (if they’re devout) aren’t being deprived because they aren’t being forced to learn how to program in C or whatever. They’re making choices to intentionally not go there, for their own reasons. They are free to change that if they want.
If you want to argue that their kids or whatever don’t get to choose, that’s all kids everywhere.
Unless they are offending us in some serious way that we can’t stand by and ignore, we’ve generally all agreed to let everyone live and let live, since otherwise it produces worse abuse and deprives them of their right to live the way they want.
But if you want to say that it’s societies obligation to ‘fix that’, you’re treading a very dark and dangerous path.
The same path that resulted in the ‘aboriginal schools’ in Australia, Canada, etc. and the reservations, missions, forced conversions etc. in the US and their massive and terrible abuses.
If you don't share that understanding, we don't have enough common ground to communicate.
Cheers!