Speaker 1: Hey, everybody.
Speaker 2: Chuck here with a Saturday Select, bringing you one all
Speaker 2: the way back from August twenty eighteen. A nice summer episode.
Speaker 2: Who Is the Man of the Whole? This is very interesting.
Speaker 2: The Man of the Holes was somebody who lived by
Speaker 2: himself as an uncontacted human, well pretty much uncontacted. A
Speaker 2: very interesting story. Sometimes I wish I was the Man
Speaker 2: of the Whole. But check it out right now. Who
Speaker 2: is the Man of the Hole? Welcome to Stuff You
Speaker 2: Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 3: Hey, and welcome to the podcast. So I'm Josh Clark,
Speaker 3: and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry Jerome Brolind. Boy,
Speaker 3: I'm not in a good way today, Chuck, you off
Speaker 3: your game, as if you can't tell I think you're fine. Well, thanks, man,
Speaker 3: I feel a lot better. Sure, Yeah, no, I'm okay.
Speaker 3: I can tell you. I'm I'm surrounded by friend's family.
Speaker 1: Like your dad's in the corner. It's weird.
Speaker 3: I have the idea I have TV. Oh man. I
Speaker 3: instagrammed a photo of my mom and dad from the seventies. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and I captioned it They're like looking at each other
Speaker 3: kind of lovingly and I captioned it the moment before
Speaker 3: I was conceived.
Speaker 1: You know what Jerry showed me that today?
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, she did. I look a lot like my
Speaker 3: parents mixed together. Huh.
Speaker 1: Well.
Speaker 2: The first thing I noticed was like, Wow, that's that's
Speaker 2: what Josh would have looked like as a grown man
Speaker 2: in the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 1: Because that profile.
Speaker 2: Of your dad, I don't know, I've never seen your
Speaker 2: dad young, So I was like, man, that's really that's you.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I totally saw it. I saw both.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, because you look at my dad, You're like, oh,
Speaker 3: that's Josh. But then you look at my mom, You're like, oh,
Speaker 3: there's Josh too. Very bizarre.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't. I guess I definitely favor my father,
Speaker 1: is that right?
Speaker 3: Yeah, So a lot of people just favor one or
Speaker 3: the other. But I'm fifty to.
Speaker 1: Fifty Yep, that's kay all fifty to fifty.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that's a new one.
Speaker 1: There's a T shirt, Yeah, fifty to fifty Clark.
Speaker 3: So, oh, I know the point I was making. There's
Speaker 3: this House Stuff Works article that you sent called The
Speaker 3: Man in the Hole, and it talks about this guy
Speaker 3: who is the last of his kind, he's, as this
Speaker 3: article put it, like the loneliest person on Earth. And
Speaker 3: I was like, yeah, I mean, I'm sure this is
Speaker 3: a lot like being in solitary confinement or something like that,
Speaker 3: but no, this is way beyond that. And this house
Speaker 3: stuff works article byes Lynn Shields like really drove it home.
Speaker 3: She wrote, like, what if you were the last person
Speaker 3: who could speak your language, the last person who remembered
Speaker 3: what Halloween was, or a Coca cola, or that a
Speaker 3: dog says wolf, Like, imagine that, And I'm like, yeah,
Speaker 3: that's way different from being in solitary. Solitary confinement would
Speaker 3: be bad enough. You know, you're physically restrained, but at
Speaker 3: least you'd know out there that there are other people
Speaker 3: who know the same things you know, that speak the
Speaker 3: same language you speak, that your family's still out there,
Speaker 3: that kind of thing. This is utterly different. And this man,
Speaker 3: the last Tribesman he's called or the Man in the Hole,
Speaker 3: is possibly not just the last of his kind. He
Speaker 3: might be the only person on the entire planet in
Speaker 3: the situation that he's in. Maybe isn't that bizarre to think?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, we did another show on are There
Speaker 2: Undiscovered People? Quite a few years back, and I don't
Speaker 2: know how he didn't get to this guy, but I
Speaker 2: saw this article and it was striking, especially if you've
Speaker 2: seen the couple of videos, and I think there are
Speaker 2: only two pieces of video of this dude. One I
Speaker 2: saw where they were sort of shooting, you know, they
Speaker 2: were zoomed in on a hut, and that's you know,
Speaker 2: where he lives. There's a series of thatched huts in
Speaker 2: the Tenaru Indigenous Reserve in the Rondonia state of Brazil, YEP.
Speaker 2: About twenty thousand acres big area of the forest in jungle.
Speaker 2: So he lives in these thatched huts that are scattered
Speaker 2: about in the middle of nowhere, and they were able
Speaker 2: to get him on film kind of zoomed in between
Speaker 2: the cracks and you see the guy kind of looking
Speaker 2: a little bit, but you can't make out much. So
Speaker 2: I saw that video and then I saw another one
Speaker 2: where it was a pretty good shot of him from
Speaker 2: a distance making good work trying to chop down a tree.
Speaker 3: That was the most recent video, which well, let's just.
Speaker 1: Go ahead and get into this.
Speaker 2: He was found or discovered in I think in nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety six when some loggers from the State of Rondonia.
Speaker 3: Which from the impression I have, this is a very
Speaker 3: rough and tumble state populated by loggers and cattle ranchers,
Speaker 3: and there are very few laws from what I understand,
Speaker 3: and things are settled by the gun. Is the impression
Speaker 3: that I have of Rondnia. It's right smack dab in
Speaker 3: the middle of South America, and it's extraordinarily densely jungled
Speaker 3: in the Amazon.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean that.
Speaker 2: One New York Times article, like the guy was talking
Speaker 2: that they were talking to said, from a helicopter, you
Speaker 2: look down there and you think there's just no one
Speaker 2: down there.
Speaker 1: It's just all jungle, he said.
Speaker 2: But when you get down there, he said, there's a
Speaker 2: lot of people and drug runners and bad men everywhere.
Speaker 2: So this guy is definitely an anomaly because he is
Speaker 2: not hanging out with anybody.
Speaker 3: No. And the reason why they think he's alone, Chuck,
Speaker 3: is because back in nineteen ninety five nineteen ninety six,
Speaker 3: when the rumors of like a wild man in the
Speaker 3: jungle started to circulate, they think that he had just
Speaker 3: recently survived a slaughter that had killed off the rest
Speaker 3: of his tribe.
Speaker 2: Which was only like supposedly five or six people by
Speaker 2: that point, because they think the rest had been slaughtered
Speaker 2: and't that that's a common thing We're going to come
Speaker 2: up on in a couple of these is these ranchers
Speaker 2: and loggers. They're like, we want to go clear this land,
Speaker 2: and there's a tribe, a native tribe, they're an indigenous tribe,
Speaker 2: so let's just slaughter them, get them out of the way.
Speaker 1: It's really, really an awful, awful thing.
Speaker 3: And it's been a very common thing apparently since the
Speaker 3: seventies and eighties, when ranchers and loggers moved into Rondonia,
Speaker 3: just snatching up land. And this is again, this is
Speaker 3: the Amazon. This is basically Christine Forest rainforest that people
Speaker 3: who have never been contacted by anyone from the outside
Speaker 3: world live still to this day. And this guy's one
Speaker 3: of them. So at first they thought maybe Hughes just
Speaker 3: a member of a tribe that we already know about, right,
Speaker 3: And then over time as they started to study this guy,
Speaker 3: it became quite clear that now Hughes, he's a member
Speaker 3: of a tribe that we didn't know about before, and
Speaker 3: we're pretty sure he's the last of his kind.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So there's this organization called Funai fu NAI, the
Speaker 2: National Indian Foundation of Brazil, and they have been tasked
Speaker 2: with for the past twenty years monitoring this dude, and
Speaker 2: before his companions were killed, monitoring his companions. And you
Speaker 2: sent a nice follow up on FUNAI. They have a
Speaker 2: departments and one is called the General Coordination Unit of
Speaker 2: Uncontacted Indians the CGII, and that was established in nineteen
Speaker 2: eighty seven and they're the only a department of government
Speaker 2: in the world which protects indigenous peoples who don't have
Speaker 2: contact with the outside world or nearby tribes.
Speaker 3: Yeah, because before in the nineteenth century and even through
Speaker 3: a lot of the twentieth century, there was it was
Speaker 3: just basically Christian missionaries who were making their way into
Speaker 3: the Amazon to contact tribes and bring them Jesus basically,
Speaker 3: and also healthcare and food and all that stuff tools
Speaker 3: the implements of modern culture, but also to proselytize too,
Speaker 3: and there was a lot of it just wasn't very
Speaker 3: well thought out. And as a result, even from these
Speaker 3: these the best of intentions that a lot of these
Speaker 3: missionaries had a lot of tribes died. So in nineteen
Speaker 3: ten Brazil came up with their I think it was
Speaker 3: like the Indian Protection Services was the name of the
Speaker 3: department that they first came up with, and the Indian
Speaker 3: Protection Service they took over from the missionaries, and it
Speaker 3: was a step up in that sense because it was
Speaker 3: more coordinated. There was thought to it, there was some
Speaker 3: sort of study, but the point was to take uncontacted
Speaker 3: Amazonian tribes and bring them into the modern world so
Speaker 3: that they could assimilate with the modern world. The point
Speaker 3: was to basically reduce cultural diversity in Brazil and that
Speaker 3: kept going until the sixties when there was a huge
Speaker 3: ExPASy about the Indian Protection Service that they had just
Speaker 3: fallen down so terribly in their mission that there was
Speaker 3: basically mass extermination, slavery, rape, everything, every horrible thing that
Speaker 3: you can think of that could befall a human being
Speaker 3: happened to these tribes under the watch of the Indian
Speaker 3: Services Protection over sixty years.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So.
Speaker 2: The department in nineteen eighty seven, the CGII was founded
Speaker 2: by a man named Sidney Posuelo. I guess how you
Speaker 2: pronounced that. And this was a big sea change in policy,
Speaker 2: which was, like you were saying, the previous strategy established
Speaker 2: contact to try and get them integrated at some point
Speaker 2: to this new policy, which was don't even contact these
Speaker 2: people unless they are under serious threat, because history has
Speaker 2: shown all manner of bad things can happen when you
Speaker 2: contact these people, one of which is certainly introducing them
Speaker 2: to new diseases and things that will kill them that
Speaker 2: they've never never seen or experienced. And this is you know,
Speaker 2: there's a big debate still on, like what the best
Speaker 2: policies are here.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So these two American anthropologists, white American anthropologists, men
Speaker 3: who I guess, wrote an open letter in either Science
Speaker 3: or Nature, I think Nature, basically saying Brazil and Peru
Speaker 3: should reverse this long standing policy of not contacting Indians
Speaker 3: in the Amazon and should actually plan peaceful, well organized
Speaker 3: contact so that they can be better protected. It's these
Speaker 3: anthropologists stants that if you don't protect them, they're going
Speaker 3: to die one way or another. That there's no way
Speaker 3: that they're going to remain isolated. On the long term.
Speaker 3: Maybe you've got another generation possibly of some of these
Speaker 3: tribes that could live like this, but beyond that, it's
Speaker 3: just not going to happen. There's too many power, powerful
Speaker 3: interests banging on the doors of their preserved areas. Who
Speaker 3: are more than willing to hire people who will accept
Speaker 3: money to go kill these people just to get this land.
Speaker 3: And by just leaving them alone, you're leaving them very vulnerable.
Speaker 3: Whereas if you plan out contact, then conceivably you can
Speaker 3: show them that there are things like medical treatment, there
Speaker 3: is better ways that you can protect them. You can
Speaker 3: kind of give them contact, and that even more so
Speaker 3: interviews with groups that have become have initiated contact or
Speaker 3: have had contact made with them said we would have
Speaker 3: made contact with you guys earlier, but we thought we
Speaker 3: were going to be enslaved or murdered or something. We
Speaker 3: had no idea that you wanted to actually help us.
Speaker 3: Had we known that, we would have contacted you guys
Speaker 3: decades ago. So those two things put together, these American
Speaker 3: anthropologists have said we endorse this, and fu NI and
Speaker 3: a lot of other groups, including the UN and human
Speaker 3: rights group in the UK called Survivors International, have said, no,
Speaker 3: that is totally disrespectful, that flies completely in the face
Speaker 3: of agreed upon procedure and protocol. Just be quiet, you're
Speaker 3: being neo colonialists. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I think it's interesting though, because what they're trying to
Speaker 2: do is, like you said, have very highly controlled contact,
Speaker 2: and the assumption that they don't want to be contacted,
Speaker 2: at least through their eyes, appears to be false because,
Speaker 2: like you mentioned, they're afraid of being kidnapped or something
Speaker 2: or overtaken. And if had they known, like, oh, you
Speaker 2: just want to give us some nice tools and maybe
Speaker 2: inoculate us, and we'd actually be.
Speaker 1: Down with that as long as you leave afterward.
Speaker 3: Right, And these two anthropologists said, like, you've got to
Speaker 3: do this smartly, Like you basically have to go in
Speaker 3: with cultural translators, usually tribes who have made contact with
Speaker 3: outsiders before, already ablished contact that live in the same area,
Speaker 3: who might be able to translate between the outsiders and
Speaker 3: the actual uncontacted tribes. And you need healthcare providers who
Speaker 3: are going to stay there for at least a year,
Speaker 3: at least a year of sustained care or else. Yes,
Speaker 3: they're going to die from these diseases you're going to
Speaker 3: bring in inevitable.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean they're good.
Speaker 2: They give good examples too in that article about how
Speaker 2: this is backfired with missionaries, like the your people, they
Speaker 2: were there for six months and the missionary said, well,
Speaker 2: let's go on vacation and then the Yora died a
Speaker 2: few weeks later, and then in nineteen seventy five, missionaries
Speaker 2: provided care to a community on Ake community they took
Speaker 2: a vacation and then they died as well. So they're
Speaker 2: saying like, you got to have a plan to go
Speaker 2: in and stay there. You can't just go in, bring
Speaker 2: them some food and machetes and acculate like spring break,
Speaker 2: and then then get out of there. But I get
Speaker 2: the idea that this is still a pretty hot topic
Speaker 2: of debate.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, no, that those anthropologists, they set off a
Speaker 3: huge debate, and I think it was sparked by the
Speaker 3: video that was released by Survivor International of the man
Speaker 3: and the Hole chopping down a tree. And the video
Speaker 3: was taken in twenty eleven, but they only just released
Speaker 3: it in July of twenty eighteen. And this is, yeah,
Speaker 3: this is very much still going on, this big debate
Speaker 3: and it's a huge it's a huge issue and you
Speaker 3: can kind of see both sides. Like I had just
Speaker 3: read about Fooneye's counter to it that like, look, dude,
Speaker 3: this is our thing. We got this. You just mind
Speaker 3: your own business. We have our own policy, stay out right,
Speaker 3: stay out of this. Yeah, But then if you read
Speaker 3: the anthropologists letters, you're like, actually, they have a couple
Speaker 3: of good points here. So it's it's not a clear
Speaker 3: cut a picture, sure, one way or the other. It's
Speaker 3: definitely there's a lot of nuance to it on both sides.
Speaker 3: All Right, let's take a respite, let's take a furlough
Speaker 3: or a vacation.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and we'll come back and talk a little bit
Speaker 2: more about the man in the hole.
Speaker 1: All right.
Speaker 2: So the reason they call him the man of the
Speaker 2: hole or the man in the hole is the odd
Speaker 2: thing of inside these thatched huts, of which he has
Speaker 2: several around this area. Inside the huts are these and
Speaker 2: all over the place there are these holes with like
Speaker 2: spikes for like trapping animals. But he has these six
Speaker 2: foot deep holes inside of his own huts, and apparently
Speaker 2: no other tribes around him have done this, and it's
Speaker 2: very unusual thing. And the belief is that he is
Speaker 2: it's for his own protection. I guess if he's being
Speaker 2: fired upon or something by loggers, he can jump down
Speaker 2: on one of these holes.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's the impression I have too, which is extraordinarily sad.
Speaker 1: It is.
Speaker 3: So the reason why they think that that he has
Speaker 3: these holes is because he's had terrible run ins. I
Speaker 3: guess this seems to be evidence that he is the
Speaker 3: survivor of a slaughter or a massacre, because this is
Speaker 3: not a normal technique that they've seen with other tribes,
Speaker 3: and they found it at every single one of the
Speaker 3: huts that they've come upon of his.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: They do know though, from tailing him or mon tailing him,
Speaker 2: monitoring him for the past couple of decades though, that
Speaker 2: he he hunts with a bone arrow. He farms probably
Speaker 2: at night and stays out of the you know, as
Speaker 2: much as he can. Stays inside during the day out
Speaker 2: of fear, which is also awful. But he farms like
Speaker 2: papaya and corn and other fruits and vegetables. He has
Speaker 2: all these traps set everywhere. Like I mentioned, they have
Speaker 2: found hand carved arrowheads, torches made from branches in Resin
Speaker 2: And at one point they actually tried to make.
Speaker 3: Contact, yes, several points.
Speaker 2: Well, at one point when they tried to make contact, though,
Speaker 2: he fired upon them with his bow and arrow and
Speaker 2: actually hit someone.
Speaker 3: In the chest, one of the food iye agents.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and they were like, all right, we're out of here.
Speaker 3: Yeah. At that point they stopped trying to initiate contact
Speaker 3: with this guy. And again, this is like peaceful contact
Speaker 3: they're trying to initiate, not like hey man, get off
Speaker 3: of this land. They're like saying, do you need anything?
Speaker 3: Do you want some food? What do you want? And
Speaker 3: the first few attempts to contact him resulted in him
Speaker 3: just basically slipping into the shadows in the jungle and
Speaker 3: just disappearing. Then it progressed into standoffs. Then it progressed
Speaker 3: into a shooting, and so they stepped back. Survivor International
Speaker 3: and FUNAI and some other groups stepped back and said,
Speaker 3: this guy is escalating in hostilities. He's showing us he
Speaker 3: doesn't want anything to do with us, like you. It
Speaker 3: would be something if like he'd shot the first time
Speaker 3: and then slipped away the second time and the hostilities
Speaker 3: were decreasing, but instead it's going the opposite way. The
Speaker 3: hostilities were increasing. So he's getting that he has the
Speaker 3: opportunity to contact these people who are coming with their
Speaker 3: hands up and like not trying to kill him, and
Speaker 3: he's still saying back off. So finally the government said
Speaker 3: we're just going to back off, and they backed off.
Speaker 3: They FUNAI established his policy of not contacting this guy,
Speaker 3: not even attempting to contact this guy, but instead monitoring him,
Speaker 3: making sure that his preserve is protected, and then leaving
Speaker 3: him things like the acts that he was seen using
Speaker 3: in that twenty eleven video, or seeds for some of
Speaker 3: the plants that he grows.
Speaker 2: Yeah, which a lot of times he doesn't even accept
Speaker 2: or take these gifts. Imagine he's not retrusting. And like
Speaker 2: you said, as far as protecting the area, in two
Speaker 2: thousand and seven, Funai and the government eventually increase the
Speaker 2: area to thirty one square miles around where he was
Speaker 2: is off limits to any trespassing or development, later expanded
Speaker 2: to three thousand hectares.
Speaker 3: So I think they added another three thousand.
Speaker 1: Hectares, okay to the already square mileage.
Speaker 3: Uh huh.
Speaker 2: And this is really ticked off the ranchers and the
Speaker 2: loggers because they're like, our business is being held back
Speaker 2: by this one guy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and they want to kill.
Speaker 3: Him, to kill him. As a matter of fact, when
Speaker 3: the government announced that it was not only keeping up
Speaker 3: the practice of preserving this guy's land thirty one square miles,
Speaker 3: but adding an extra three thousand hectares, which brought the
Speaker 3: total to forty two and a half square miles or
Speaker 3: one hundred and ten square kilometers that this man has
Speaker 3: to himself. The five ranches that surround this preserve hired
Speaker 3: somebody to go try to kill him. Yeah, Fu and
Speaker 3: I went and checked on him after a couple of
Speaker 3: weeks after that announcement was made public, and they found
Speaker 3: that their outpost was ransacked and that they had found
Speaker 3: the shotgun shells spent shotgun shells in the fourth floor.
Speaker 3: So there's clearly an attempt to made on the guy's life,
Speaker 3: and for a couple of years they had no idea
Speaker 3: if he'd survived until that video was made in twenty
Speaker 3: eleven that showed this guy who is now fifty. They've
Speaker 3: been tracking him since he was in his third fifties.
Speaker 3: Now they chopping down a tree. Yeah, chopping down a
Speaker 3: tree like it's nothing. So they knew that he was
Speaker 3: alive and in good health as of twenty eleven, and
Speaker 3: they're assuming that he's still alive.
Speaker 2: Man, how good would a movie be about this guy?
Speaker 2: I know, just have a lot of it play out
Speaker 2: in silence, you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that would be amazing.
Speaker 1: That would be cool.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's it's crazy to see a video of
Speaker 2: this guy from seven years ago. Like in the world
Speaker 2: we live in, to think about there's still places on
Speaker 2: earth where this guy it's almost like the Japanese straggler
Speaker 2: who had no idea that the war had been over
Speaker 2: for whatever thirty years living in the jungle. It's just
Speaker 2: amazing to think about the fact that this is the
Speaker 2: lone the lone guy out there by himself and what
Speaker 2: his life must be like.
Speaker 3: But not only that, it's like like when we did
Speaker 3: the paramedics episode, I think I said something like, there's
Speaker 3: there's no greater symbol of humanity than paramedics, you know,
Speaker 3: I think this is another really great symbol of paramedics
Speaker 3: in this guy. Well. No, the Funai Brazilian government's response
Speaker 3: to this that this man has been part of a tribe.
Speaker 3: He's the last of his tribe, and the Brazilian government
Speaker 3: has said, this man deserves to live his life out
Speaker 3: in peace in the way that he he wants to,
Speaker 3: in his traditional way, to be left alone. And we're
Speaker 3: going to designate one hundred and ten square kilometers that
Speaker 3: belong to no one but this man. Yeah, despite the
Speaker 3: fact that all around him is the outside world trying
Speaker 3: to press in. We're going to stand in the way
Speaker 3: of that so that this guy can live out his
Speaker 3: natural life. That just gets me, you know, right in
Speaker 3: the bread basket.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think the Disney version of this movie is
Speaker 2: they would find alone tribeswoman somewhere, drop her off and
Speaker 2: have them have them meet cute by the papie tree.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and the ranchers want to tickle him. But if
Speaker 3: it were live action these days, it would be they
Speaker 3: would hire either John Wayne or Fisher Stevens to play
Speaker 3: the last time.
Speaker 1: Fisher Stevens.
Speaker 3: Yeah, remember he played the Indian programmer in Short Circuit.
Speaker 1: Really well, that's right, yeah, geez.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that was as recently as the eighties.
Speaker 2: Right, It's not like Mickey Rooney, you playing an Asian
Speaker 2: man in the nineteen sixties. Not like that was any better. No, boy, Hollywood,
Speaker 2: you've been getting wrong for so long.
Speaker 3: They have. At least Mongol got it right though, right maybe, Yeah,
Speaker 3: we haven't seen him reserve judgment.
Speaker 1: Should we take another break?
Speaker 2: Yeah, all right, We'll take another break and talk a
Speaker 2: little bit more about some of these isolated tribes right
Speaker 2: after this.
Speaker 3: Okay, Chuck, So the last Tribesman, the man in the hole.
Speaker 3: He's being left alone, and that's policy in Brazil and Peru.
Speaker 3: From what I understand now, there are some tribes that
Speaker 3: have actually accepted contact and have made peaceful contact and
Speaker 3: have become I guess a little more integrated. I think
Speaker 3: there's three degrees that FUNAI separates tribes into indigenous tribes
Speaker 3: into there's totally uncontacted, which is like they are living
Speaker 3: off on their own, they outside world has nothing to
Speaker 3: do with them. There's partially contacted or partially assimilated, right,
Speaker 3: like they're they're living in their hut in the jungle,
Speaker 3: but they still have an iPhone, right. And then there's
Speaker 3: fully assimilated, where they like live in a city now
Speaker 3: or something like that, or they have like a job
Speaker 3: in the city or something like that. So it's not
Speaker 3: just in the Amazon. It's not just in Brazil where
Speaker 3: there are uncontacted tribes, although that is definitely the place
Speaker 3: where you're going to find the most. I think I
Speaker 3: saw somewhere between fifty eighty and one hundred and twenty
Speaker 3: uncontacted groups of indigenous people are presumed to be living
Speaker 3: in the Amazon still today.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean just those that random swath of numbers
Speaker 2: shows you that they there's still so much they don't know.
Speaker 3: For sure, but there's there are other parts of the
Speaker 3: world where there are uncontacted tribes, and you found an
Speaker 3: article that ran down a few of them. One that
Speaker 3: surprised me was just off the coast of India, on
Speaker 3: Sentinel Island in India, North Sentinel, a.
Speaker 2: Good ole cracked article which may have been done under
Speaker 2: the watch of our now colleague mister Jack O'Brien. Nice
Speaker 2: shout out to Jack and his daily Zeitgei, Zeitgei's podcast, Yeah,
Speaker 2: which I was on.
Speaker 3: Have you been on?
Speaker 1: You?
Speaker 3: You gotta be on. It's great, great fun. As a
Speaker 3: matter of fact, I'm gonna lap you. I'm gonna go
Speaker 3: on again.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well please.
Speaker 3: Do all right?
Speaker 2: Yeah, But the sentine Leese on North Sentinel Island, Indiana,
Speaker 2: they don't even know if that's their real name. They
Speaker 2: just call them that because I guess we have called
Speaker 2: it North Sentinel Island, not you and me, but other
Speaker 2: people who.
Speaker 3: Named it to I think the British.
Speaker 2: But apparently yeah, probably. We don't know a lot about them.
Speaker 2: But in two thousand and six, a couple of fishermen
Speaker 2: drifted there in their boat near the island and were
Speaker 2: killed and buried in shallow graves, and helicopters came and
Speaker 2: they were like, we got to find this burial site
Speaker 2: and get these guys back at least, and they started
Speaker 2: firing arrows at the helicopter and it was just out
Speaker 2: of there, and the local cops were like, now, we're
Speaker 2: just gonna leave those guys there, We're not going near it.
Speaker 3: They have actually for this has been going on for
Speaker 3: a very long time. Apparently Marco Polo remarked on them,
Speaker 3: wrote about them. He was traveling I think the twelfth
Speaker 3: or thirteenth century, so they've been fierce for years now,
Speaker 3: and apparently survived the two thousand and four tsunami. Yeah,
Speaker 3: Indonesia's tsunami. That's crazy because this is an island that
Speaker 3: the tsunami just swamped and they managed to hang on
Speaker 3: just fine.
Speaker 2: I think ancient people have survived more than one tsunami,
Speaker 2: you know.
Speaker 3: I guess you're right. That was a pretty bad one though.
Speaker 2: Yeah, pretty amazing. This other one, the coral Wai tribe
Speaker 2: of Papua Indonesia. They were contacted in the seventies by
Speaker 2: of course, missionaries and archaeologists, and they were using stone
Speaker 2: tools and living in tree huts and stuff like that,
Speaker 2: and their big belief as a tribe was that the
Speaker 2: world would be destroyed by an earthquake if they assimilated
Speaker 2: and changed their customs. So missionary said, all right, you
Speaker 2: know what, We're just going to leave you alone.
Speaker 3: What I think these people might have invented bungee jumping?
Speaker 3: Do you remember that land diving up isode them? They
Speaker 3: sound really familiar.
Speaker 2: I think it might be maybe so, But they are
Speaker 2: in the middle of nowhere, so it's a long way
Speaker 2: from even like other remote villages.
Speaker 3: Which is a I mean, that's a mark in your
Speaker 3: favor for now. But as the Amazon Basin has been
Speaker 3: showing us since the seventies and eighties, so much of
Speaker 3: it has disappeared due to clear cutting for ranching, logging,
Speaker 3: that you just have no idea how much longer that's
Speaker 3: going to hold up, no matter where you are in
Speaker 3: the world. Yeah, I mean, we're at seven and a
Speaker 3: half billion people now, and then I think the next
Speaker 3: thirty years we're expected to hit ten billion. That's a
Speaker 3: lot more people that not only need more land, but
Speaker 3: also are going to be using up those resources that
Speaker 3: are currently on that land.
Speaker 1: Right now, you know, yeah, for sure.
Speaker 3: I mean, like, if they discover oil where the Krawai
Speaker 3: tribe lives in Indonesia, there goes that isolation.
Speaker 1: Yeah, probably so.
Speaker 3: I think that's a real danger for all tribes. I
Speaker 3: think that's probably what those two anthropologists we're talking about.
Speaker 3: They're saying, like, long term, we need a plan here everybody.
Speaker 3: We can't just be like, well, we just won't contact
Speaker 3: them because it's just not viable, I think was their point.
Speaker 2: Yeah, what about this one really was interesting to me.
Speaker 1: The Old Believers. Have you ever heard of them?
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's like some GQ article in the last couple
Speaker 3: of years about that.
Speaker 1: Are they well dressed it?
Speaker 3: I think so? In burlap apparently.
Speaker 1: Yeah, these are Soviet Well, here's the deal.
Speaker 2: In nineteen seventy eight, there were these geologists in the
Speaker 2: Soviet Union that we're looking for iron ore. They were
Speaker 2: in a helicopter and they saw a cabin way out
Speaker 2: in the remote areas of Siberia, and they found a
Speaker 2: family there that actually spoke a language I guess, I mean,
Speaker 2: what would that be.
Speaker 1: What language?
Speaker 3: Old timey Russian?
Speaker 1: Old timey Russian, uh huh.
Speaker 2: And they were huddled in fear and they were yelling,
Speaker 2: this is for our sins. They were dressed in burlap
Speaker 2: and living off the land. And apparently they were a
Speaker 2: group of people called the Old Believers, which left the
Speaker 2: Russian Church, the main Russian church in the seventeenth century
Speaker 2: and had been I guess looked at you know, they
Speaker 2: kind of went everywhere.
Speaker 1: It was sort of.
Speaker 2: A diaspora for the Old Believers. Some of them just
Speaker 2: went to other countries and seeking asylum or whatever. And
Speaker 2: apparently some of them just looked to Siberia and were like,
Speaker 2: no one's there, so we'll go there.
Speaker 3: Nice.
Speaker 1: It sounds creepy though, the Old Believers.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, it's a terrible name for him. You know.
Speaker 3: It seems like they could scan you or something to
Speaker 3: make your head explode. Are they worship Cthulhu or something?
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So I almost feel like if we should look into
Speaker 3: them a little more, because I think they could probably
Speaker 3: hold up their own up.
Speaker 1: And I think he might be right.
Speaker 3: I also remember hearing about families that lived in the
Speaker 3: Ozark Mountains in the midwest of the United States, I
Speaker 3: think around Arkansas that had been out of contact, didn't
Speaker 3: even know the Civil War had happened. They were just
Speaker 3: that isolated. So yeah, you tend to think of as
Speaker 3: just strictly indigenous peoples and that it's just in the Amazon,
Speaker 3: but like, there's groups all over the world, fewer and
Speaker 3: further between outside of the Amazon because there's less unpopulated areas.
Speaker 3: But it happens.
Speaker 2: And one of the sad things about all of this
Speaker 2: is for one of these other tribes that you know,
Speaker 2: you can go read this cracked article.
Speaker 1: What's it called.
Speaker 3: I didn't see the title. Actually, it's just suddenly there
Speaker 3: were oh, five isolated groups who had no idea that
Speaker 3: civilization existed.
Speaker 1: Crrarect lists were always so great, are always so great.
Speaker 3: They've come in handy from time to time.
Speaker 2: But one of the sad things they point out for
Speaker 2: one of these other tribes is that in Peru, and
Speaker 2: I imagine in some other South American countries, are these
Speaker 2: awful things called human safaris where and they will take
Speaker 2: tourists around to look at uncontacted tribes from afar and
Speaker 2: close up.
Speaker 3: They're like, here, drain some of this iohusca through your nose,
Speaker 3: and we're going to go check out some tribes hanging
Speaker 3: out on a riverbank somewhere.
Speaker 1: Man, so weird.
Speaker 3: Well, I want to add one more thing. I came
Speaker 3: across an article that wasn't really apropos of what we
Speaker 3: were talking about, called the Right to Kill on Foreign
Speaker 3: Policy Magazine, and it's about like this other tangential issue
Speaker 3: that governments like Brazil have to deal with, which is, like,
Speaker 3: some of these isolated groups practice things that the outside
Speaker 3: world finds abhorrent or is illegal in the outside world. Specifically,
Speaker 3: in this article, in fanticide, if you're born with the disability,
Speaker 3: and I think about twenty of Brazil's isolated tribes, there's
Speaker 3: a chance that the community will decide that you need
Speaker 3: to die again. It's the practice of infanticide. And Brazil's like,
Speaker 3: we are not quite sure what to do about this
Speaker 3: because our constitution guarantees everyone in Brazil the right to live,
Speaker 3: but it also guarantees the indigenous groups the right to
Speaker 3: live according to their customs. So they have no idea
Speaker 3: what to do. And it's a big thing about, you know,
Speaker 3: moral relativism or moral absolutism and which one's correct. And
Speaker 3: it's really interesting that they're having to think about this
Speaker 3: right now. Yeah, for sure, it's a really interesting article.
Speaker 3: Definitely worth reading.
Speaker 1: Okay, I will check it out. Are you talking to me?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm talking to everybody, but specifically. Yeah. Well, if
Speaker 3: you want to know more about isolated tribes, you can
Speaker 3: look those words up anywhere on the internet and they're
Speaker 3: going to deliver you some amazing stuff. And since I
Speaker 3: said that, it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 2: Since you said amazing stuff, well look you here, dude,
Speaker 2: I have a handwritten letter on construction paper.
Speaker 3: Beautiful.
Speaker 1: That nice? Yes, I love it. Hey, guys, I hope
Speaker 1: this finds you. Well. My name is Claire and I'm
Speaker 1: twenty one.
Speaker 2: In fact, for my twenty first birthday, I came and
Speaker 2: saw you guys live in Cleveland.
Speaker 3: Awesome. That was a great show.
Speaker 1: It was.
Speaker 2: I got to here in college and I'm studying mathematics
Speaker 2: with a license and education, so I'll be teaching high
Speaker 2: school math benefan since twenty fifteen. Thank you for the
Speaker 2: many nights you have calmed me and all the information
Speaker 2: I've learned. And I've been wanting to write for a
Speaker 2: while just to say thanks and send appreciation, but also
Speaker 2: a request and a little something. Whenever you talk about
Speaker 2: math in any regard, please be more positive.
Speaker 3: Please stop getting it wrong, Please be.
Speaker 2: More positive and encouraging. We're well known for poopoing math
Speaker 2: and saying I hated math.
Speaker 3: Well, it's so intimidating, it's just so stupid.
Speaker 2: It is, but she says this math is hard and
Speaker 2: already has a stigma for people who hate it or
Speaker 2: to hate it. But as a future educator, since you
Speaker 2: too are sort of educators that reach a huge audience,
Speaker 2: your outlook and attitude about math is important. It's okay
Speaker 2: to not like math and think that it's hard, but
Speaker 2: know that you and anyone can do math. I know
Speaker 2: it's a silly thing to ask and point out, but
Speaker 2: I think you could both have a positive impact on
Speaker 2: the math stigma. I wish you and your wives and
Speaker 2: Chuck your daughter all the best. Thank you for all
Speaker 2: of your hard work, and thank Jerry too. Jerry has
Speaker 2: to put up with you two all the time, so
Speaker 2: she's definitely been working hard. And she writes sarcasm, smiley
Speaker 2: face the fabulous day, and that is from Claire and Claire,
Speaker 2: You're right, we just joke around, but we should take
Speaker 2: more care with our words about the maths.
Speaker 3: You know what, Frankly, Chuck, I think miss Claire makes
Speaker 3: a great point that we should just basically take all
Speaker 3: the jokes out of our podcasts entire just so no
Speaker 3: one takes it the wrong way. No, just make it
Speaker 3: nice and neutral. She is right, though, she is right,
Speaker 3: we should take it easy on.
Speaker 1: Math, she very nicely said, back off math.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like, did she draw little Yosemite sam at the
Speaker 3: bottom there? She did? Oh? Yeah, look at that. Nice. Well,
Speaker 3: if you want to get in touch with this, like
Speaker 3: Claire did, you can go to your local post office.
Speaker 3: We love that place. And you can also instead go
Speaker 3: to the internet go to stuff youshould Know dot com.
Speaker 3: Find all of our social media links there, or you
Speaker 3: can send us a newfangled electronic mail by addressing it
Speaker 3: to Stuff Podcasts and HowStuffWorks dot com.
Speaker 1: Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
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