My understanding is the term "uncontacted" actually means "isolated without sustained contact"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncontacted_peoples

Pretty sure you mean North Sentinel Island: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sentinel_Island

See here for context and explanation:

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C9kJ8o-ukLM

Decent chance they were using something like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spear-thrower

I think this comment is not intending to be anything other than curious, but it strikes me with a bit of techno-savior assimilation sentiment. These autonomous tribes have plenty of opportunities to reach out to modern western culture when they are interested in doing so. Suggesting how they should "enter into the modern world over some generations" seems presumptious, even culturally aggressive.

There are many indigenous tribes in Brazil for example (still surviving in more or less pre-colonial territory). I'm very far from a specialist (and specialists do exist), but I know there are many different attitudes. Some tribes have known technology but don't like it. Some use smartphones and wear clothes (usually those have some economic activity I guess). Some have an inbetween approach, and the leaders are reluctant to let technology in (it's interesting in Brazil usually the role of spiritual leader is different from the "executive leader" afaik, it's the Paje (more spiritual) and the Cacique (more executive)).

So it's a reality many actually don't want to mix with civilization.

I haven't gotten to read it yet, but I highly recommend Ailton Krenak's book "A vida não é Util"[1] (Life is Not Useful) and his other ones, he discusses some of those questions as an indigenous person.

Also, really most tribes in Brazil are in existential danger from many activities, specially illegal logging and mining. One significant role they perform is defend the forest since it's their territory and traditional livelihood.[2] Differently from elsewhere, tribes in Brazil are quite unique because many have been agricultural in pre-colonization times (I believe cassava is the staple crop generally), and have unique cultures like music, languages, garments and dishes.

But generally each tribes has its own unique culture and history and we cannot generalize much (some are more violent, some much less, etc. too).

[1] Seems to be available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Life-Not-Useful-Ailton-Krenak-ebook/d... (This time Amazon's name is fitting :) )

[2] Brazil has quite generous indigenous reservations I think and we generally quite value indigenous people culturally, but we are struggling to defend most forests from criminals and, what other word to use, evil business interests in the region.

(One significant cultural movement is Brazil from the early 20th century was the idea of "Anthropophagy", which is to value all cultures and learn what we can from them, absorb ("eat") what's good they have to teach us)

Your comment assumes that these tribes are not aware of us, I think that they have the exclusive right to choose when/if to reach out to the “civilized world”, we don’t have to make that choice for them.

We’ve seen what happens when we choose to meddle with these tribes when people tried to reach out to the Sentinel tribe. A missionary traveled to the island and tried to introduce them to Christianity (he was killed as a result), another group of people kidnapped six of the island’s inhabitants for the purpose of “studying” them. Eventually the situation got bad enough that the Indian government intervened and made it illegal to go the island by sea or air (they banned air travel because the sentinels would fire arrows at helicopters). We need to just leave these people alone and only observe from a great distance.

> It's interesting to think about why many people believe tribes like this should remain "uncontacted".

It's less "they should remain uncontacted", and more "any contact should be on their terms". If they prefer being left alone, that must be respected.

> Also, what is the long term fate of such tribes? Without genes flowing in, it's probably not good.

If contact was made, the short term fate of the tribes would likely be bad. They likely don't have immunity to all the diseases that we do. It could prove devasting.

There is a strong argument that they should remain uncontacted, because they are not exposed to our pathogens. Death rates of 90% are typical. This was the story on islands all over the Pacific. It still happens to Amazon tribes today.

It is a general pattern. Whenever the larger evolutionary pool encounters the smaller one, the larger pool's viruses spread like wildfire through the smaller population, wrecking it. And it's not just viruses. Whenever predators from Eurasia/Africa, the "Old World", the largest landmass, arrive on an island, it is an extinction event. How much destruction has the housecat wrought?

Now, perhaps this is, fundamentally, an unstable dynamic, literally in the dynamical-systems sense, and the situation cannot be maintained. Ultimately they will come into contact with these diseases; the only question is how and when.

(To strike a philosophical note, however, your death is also inevitable, yet you seek to delay it.)

So perhaps some protocol, as you suggest, of extremely careful, "clean room" contact, with vaccines, or something like that, might be possible and desirable. How to win sufficient trust, I don't know.

But the disease aspect is important.

I wonder how many of these tribe would actually prefer to remain isolated if they knew about the rest of the world.

Prefering the old ways is real.

Growing up (1960s) I was exposed to Western Desert language groups, in the mid 80's I spoke to the Pintupi Nine.

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-30500591

One brother turned back soon after, the others declined in health thanks to modern life and sugar.

It's interesting to contrast first hand experience with lifetime hunter gatherers with techbro manifests about how living with technology is so much better.

Given a real choice not everyone is convinced.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_Directive seems relevant.

if there was a civilization with full body on demand super virtual reality orgasm suits and free cocain, then you'd also join them i'm sure ... while in fact you are sitting so smart and diabetic behind your screen discussing online with people you'll never meet (okay, that's also my flaw - touché) believing that living longer and more comfortable equates to living fulfilled and happy.

> It feels like such a worthy cause to make sure they stay "uncontacted": they obviously used that fact to do great deeds.

Indeed they keep the tradition of carrying a great deed long lost for most humanity. The deed of still being able to thrive using just stone-age tech. I suspect that in case of sudden collapse that ends civilization, these groups will be among the few ones able to repopulate Earth, because the overwhelming majority of "civilized" people will die in a short time without all the technology they are used to. The continued existence of human groups living in stone age is an existential insurance policy for us.

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The Nomole in TFA probably have a pretty reasonable idea what local modernity looks like, because they regularly interact with their Piro cousins. I assure you that "modern" life in the rural Amazon is far from anything you'd identify with though.