Off Beat7 Most Isolated Humans On The Planet

7 Most Isolated Humans On The Planet

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7 Most Isolated Humans On The Planet

In our globalised where you can get everything from a pizza to a prostitute to your door with the click of a button, it's easy to forget that there are still people on the planet happily living outside of the system, in small communities.

Many of these communities still live lives that their ancestors would recognise. Some are unaware of the presence of the outside world, some are simply not interested in participating in it, some will happily cross paths, but prefer their lives how they are, and some reject the outside world so aggressively, that attempts at contact had had to be ceased due to the danger of horrible, painful death.

There are still parts of the world that have been untouched by the concrete hands of civilisation, and many of the planet's uncontacted peoples live in the dense forests of South America and New Guinea, or the remote islands of the South Pacific or Indian Oceans.

Encounters can come from aerial footage, accounts from nearby communities, expeditions and, sadly, illegal encroachment on their territory by loggers and poachers. Isolated communities can come under threat from, destruction of their land, diseases to which they have no immunity and even government sponsored attempts at “civilising” and assimilating them.

7. The Jarawa People

https://youtu.be/FriH-Ucwltk

The Jarawa are one of the indigenous groups of the Andaman Islands in and they have by and large shunned interactions with outsiders since first contact was made.

The Andaman Islands have been known around the world since ancient times, but they have remained largely isolated and the Jarawa are thought to have split from the now-extinct Jangil tribe some hundreds or even thousands of years ago.

In the past, one of the biggest threats posed to the locals was British colonialism at its worst, with the government sponsored spread of opium, alcohol and disease in an attempt to depopulate the territory spelling the end for other indigenous groups. The Jarawa rejected a lot of this contact and moved into some of the newly freed up land.

Nowadays, however, a new threat presents itself in the form of the Great Andaman Trunk Road, which runs through their territory. The road was built in the 70s and, although further construction has been banned, the numbers of outsiders moving through and tourists attempting to make contact for !*$% selfies (no, really) greatly increases the risk of disease spreading through the community.

6. The Sentinelese

The Sentinelese

The Sentinelese are an uncontacted tribe indigenous to Sentinel Island in the Bay of Bengal, and that's exactly how they like it.

Any attempts to make contact with the Sentinelese is met with fierce and often violent resistance from the tribe and, as such, they are one of the most mysterious groups of people on the planet – we know nothing of their , society or language. Attempt to even approach the waters surrounding the island and you will be greeted by a welcome party of arrows and spears.

You can't really blame them for their hostility as, back in 1880, a British expedition arrived on the island to try to make “friendly contact”, whereupon they promptly kidnapped some of the islanders (the British, it turns out, not so great at diplomacy), showered them with gifts and sent them back to tell all their friends. Unfortunately, two of them died from diseases to which they had no immunity and the other simple went back to their communities and made no attempt to make any more contact.

Official attempts at contact ceased in 1996 after the tribe killed of two fishermen whose boat drifted into their waters.

5. The Man Of The Hole

The Man Of The Hole

There is a man currently living alone in the Brazilian rainforest and that is virtually the extent of anyone's knowledge of him.

Thought to be the last of his tribe, “the man of the hole” gets his name from the five foot deep rectangular hole that is found in each of his abandoned huts. We don't know how or why he digs them because each time anyone gets even remotely close to one of his palm huts, it is abandoned. We have no idea what language he speaks or what the name of his tribe was.

In 2007, the Brazilian government “declared a 31-square-mile [8,029 hectare] area around him off-limits to trespassing and development.”, essentially giving him his own park in the territory traditionally inhabited by the indigenous people of Brazil. In 2009 he was attacked by gunmen, but is thought to have survived.

This excerpt from a documentary, in which some white people try to stick a camera in the face of a dude who is giving off some fairly clear “Go f*ck yourself” signals, is some of the only footage we have of him.

4. The Korowai Tribe

Korowai Treehouse

The Korowai, live in southeastern West Papua and the majority of them live in some frankly awesome treehouses. It's possible that they were unaware of any humans besides themselves before contact was made in 1970.

Many attempts to assimilate the Korowai have failed and the extremely dense rainforest in which they live serves to keep them mostly isolated from both surrounding tribes and the wider global community.

The Korowai do come into occasional contact with tourists and wide-eyed anthropologists and some reports have surfaced of their practice of cannibalism. There is, however, some reason to suspect that some of the Korowai and similar neighbour tribes are actually trolling us for a bit of a laugh, and that cannibalisms is no longer widely practiced in the community, if at all.

3. The Pitcairn Islands

Pitcairn Islanders 1916

 

The Pitcairn Islands are a little group of four volcanic islands in the Southern Pacific. Although it is technically a British territory, the islands are spread over hundreds of miles of ocean, and yet only have a land areas of 18 square miles.

The inhabitants are the weirdest part of the island. There are only around 56 of them, and it is thought that the vast majority of those are directly descended from the mutinous crew, and accompanying Tahitians, of the HMS Bounty, which was sent on a botanical mission to collect breadfruit in the 1700s, but instead found itself being burnt off the coast of the Pitcairns.

In 2004, seven men on the islands were charged with sexual assault, making up a third of the population. The extreme isolation of the islands enabled thier inhabitants to escape the scrutiny of the rest of the world, and continue practices that most would consider to be abusive. One investigation found that most of the girls on the island had their first child between the ages of 12 and 15.

The trial was even subject to a conspiracy theory that it was an attempt by the British government to do away with the able bodied men of the island and shut the community down.

2. The Pintupi Nine

The Pintupi Nine

The Pintupi Nine were a group of nine Pintupi people, who were one of the last isolated Australian Aboriginal groups, who were hailed as “the last nomads” when they ran into a white guy in the desert in 1984 and hit the headlines.

They were a family group that were left behind in the desert when the rest of the Pintupi people were moved from their ancestral home by the Australian government in the 60s, who decided that testing bombs in the desert was much more important. Most of them moved to the fringes of the desert, but some were taken for “reeducation” before they could be assimilated into white society, which sometimes involved removing thousands of Aboriginal children from their families and putting them into religious institutions or foster care (and, white people, WTF?). These are known as the Stolen Generation.

The Pintupi Nine escaped this program and continued to live a nomadic lifestyle, unaware of the presence of white people in Australia. After the father of the group died, they set out to make contact with their relatives and, after a shaky start, became the final Australian aboriginals to enter the modern world.

1. The Uncontacted Tribes Of The Amazon

https://youtu.be/sLErPqqCC54

Before the extraordinary aerial images of them were captured, many people didn't (or wouldn't) believe that these uncontacted Amazonian tribes existed.

Their existence and Amazon rainforest home are under threat from illegal logging and many governments and private companies are reluctant to acknowledge their existence, because it throws a spanner in the works for the sucking-the-earth's-resources-dry industry. As well as the problems that come from direct contact with loggers, including the transmission of disease as well as the destruction of their home, the rapidly disappearing rainforest forces many different tribes into a smaller and smaller area, increasing the risk of conflict for land and resources.

We know very little about them, but from what we can gather, they live in small communities with papaya and cassava plants as a staple food that are grown in gardens, and they occasionally paint themselves with annatto seed dye.

Videos and pictures, shot with super-zoom lenses to maintain a distance, are one of the few ways that campaigners can prove the existence of these people and force governments to protect their way of life.

 

Northlines
Northlines
The Northlines is an independent source on the Web for news, facts and figures relating to Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh and its neighbourhood.

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