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If you look at earth today, you'll find that there are seven point four billion humans living on it
including you right now watching this video.
About half of all of us on this planet are currently connected to the Internet, which means that we can
Instantly communicate with billions of other people all around the world whenever we want to.
But despite how much progress in technology the rest of the world we experience has made,
there still exists today hundreds of tribes consisting of thousands of people who live just like our ancient ancestors did
10,000 years ago, and many of them have no idea that the outside world, our world, exists.
Most continents don't have anybody living on them who are completely unaware of modern civilization.
The last Native American in the United States who lived most of his life completely removed
from American culture was found in 1911 and the last uncontacted Aboriginal hunter-gatherers
in Australia were found and contacted just in 1984.
So there's only a handful of places left in the world where you can still find these uncontacted people.
A handful in the congo basin of africa, a few on the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean and several on
the Pacific island of New Guinea, but by far the vast majority of uncontacted people remaining in the world,
97% of them are currently living on the South American continent,
primarily in the deep dark and hard to get to parts of the Amazon rainforest.
Over a hundred tribes consisting of thousands of people have been living here generation after generation
For thousands of years ever since humans first arrived on the continent roughly 15,000 years ago.
But how can it be that so many of these people still don't know about our modern world?
The answer largely has to do with geography.
The Amazon rainforest is enormous, larger than the entire Indian subcontinent
but with a population under 20 million, meaning that several cities across the world have more people than that.
The reason so few people live here is because really why would anybody want to?
It's covered with dense forests, dangerous wildlife and historically has never really been developed by any modern civilization.
There's only one bridge across the entire length of the Amazon River and
the largest city in the region called Manaus in Brazil is primarily only accessible by boat or by plane.
The rest of the Amazon interior is even more difficult to access,
so the uncontacted people who live here are both difficult to actually reach and it's difficult for them to leave even if they wanted to.
The other reason why they still exist is because the governments of the countries whose
territory they live in have decided to leave them alone and refrain from first contacts because
previous attempts to contact isolated tribes has ended in catastrophe.
When Europeans first started arriving in large numbers to the new world after Columbus's discovery
in 1492, 80% to 95% of the indigenous population of the Americas died within 150 years.
Mostly due to diseases like measles and smallpox brought by the European conquerors.
The indigenous people who had lived for thousands of years separated from the rest of the world
had not developed the immunities to disease as the Europeans did by living side-by-side
with animals like cattle and pigs. When the Europeans arrived the natives stood no chance to the biological
cancer that ravaged their continent. And the surviving uncontacted tribes of today faced that exact same
problem when encountering us. A tribe in Colombia for example was contacted a few decades ago by modern anthropologists
but the tribes population was cut down to less than half its size simply because of diseases the anthropologists accidentally exposed them to in addition to.
In addition to that first encounters with isolated tribes can sometimes result in violence.
Clashes in Equador between uncontacted tribes and loggers cutting down the forests around them erupted in 2006 and 2007
that left 30 tribes people and ten loggers dead. Loggers, oil prospectors, drug traffickers and hunters all
occasionally stumble upon an uncontacted tribe in the jungle by accident still today.
And the resulting encounters can obviously end up being pretty tense.
There's a man who lives in the Amazon in Brazil called the loneliest man in the world. An indigenous
uncontacted man who lives alone and is believed to be the last surviving member of his tribe. The language
he speaks is unknown as is the name of the tribe He once belonged to and his existence first became known about in 1996.
the Brazilian government sent numerous expeditions to find him that all failed until
2007 and when they finally encountered him,
He shot one of them in the chest with a bow and arrow. Later evidence found what was believed to be his old village,
bulldozed and destroyed by illegal loggers or settlers. After this incident the Brazilian government declared a 42 square mile
exclusion zone around him that's illegal for anybody to trespass into.
He's the only human that exists in that entire area and it's illegal for
anybody to visit him and he's still there because video was taken of him this year in 2018 cutting down a tree.
The Brazilian government maintains a policy today of zero contact with uncontacted peoples
but maintains occasional flyovers to check up on their numbers and how they're doing, which can yield some
incredible photographs like these
We can only speculate about what these people must be thinking at the sight of seeing an airplane flying above them,
but imagine for a moment if earth was considered an uncontacted area by some advanced alien species.
They may treat us the same way that we treat our uncontacted peoples.
We limit our contact out of respect for their own safety, but maintain occasional flyovers for check-ups and to satisfy our own curiosity.
Curiosity about the unknown is always fascinating to humans.
It's just part of what makes us who we are.
my friends at cheddar have created a very interesting video about why ships go missing in the Bermuda Triangle.
The link to their video and channel is in the description,
and I strongly encourage you to check it out and consider subscribing to them
if you enjoy the kinds of videos that I create.
They make informational videos about business technology and media and they just recently launched their channel.
So if you're looking to learn more about our world, go and check them out next.