5 ms·

Just think: A life without the damage wrought by modern antibiotics, dentistry, surgery, and preventative medicine! Where if you get sick with something that a

by derleth 13y ago

Just think: A life without the damage wrought by modern antibiotics, dentistry, surgery, and preventative medicine! Where if you get sick with something that a week's worth of pills would clear right up, you're gonna die in pain! Paradise! Yep, nothing quite like the Noble Savage, who has the dignity to die of something you've only heard about in old novels.

tnjm 13y ago
But... the choice is theirs, not yours or mine. It's clear they know the outside world exists. They have chosen not to engage. (To put it mildly.) As an aside, there are more than 100 'uncontacted' tribes in the world. All of them know of the outside world; all have chosen -- for now -- not to interact directly with mainstream society.
- derleth 13y ago
  > But... the choice is theirs, not yours or mine. How much do they really know, though? Do they know that some of their diseases could be cured, for example?
  - tnjm 13y ago
    I've been fortunate enough to interview several tribal people who were only recently 'contacted'. The latest came out of the forest in 2009. What is striking is how many of their friends and relatives died of outsiders' disease after making contact, and how fondly they spoke of their life before. When I spoke to them, some were considering leaving the village where they now live and returning to a life in the forest. With regards to healthcare -- the health services offered to settled tribal and indigenous people in many places is poor to nonexistent. Amazonian tribal peoples have dozens to hundreds of medicinal plants, many of which have been proven to have active pharmacological properties. Some are now used in Western medicine.
  - kaybe 13y ago
    But then, some of the plants in the jungle seem to be amazing. I read some books about expeditions to find them for western medicine. One talked about a black paste you put on a tooth and it will simply fall out, no pain and no problem. A plant that makes women infertile for 7 years (they give it to their teenagers, apparently). Also, great plants against many sorts of other problems like abscesses. Sadly, the results simply got ignored. The woman in the book was sent by a US pharmy company and brought back many plants and samples which she had won from the tribes in hard work (they don't just tell anyone). They probably still have them in a freezer somewhere. An experienced person I talked to said that it probably was too much trouble and costs to clear it for drugs since there often are side effects, often psychological. He took one or two of the jungle things and said it was intense. Still, it's a great loss for our civilisation that it played out like this so far. So, we'd have much to give, but also much to gain. Our diseases could be cured too.
    - ars 13y ago
      None of those plants sound real. Sorry to burst your bubble.
      - kaybe 13y ago
        I agree. The claim should still be checked, IMHO. You didn't reach my bubble yet..
    - ekianjo 13y ago
      Plants are limited resources. Even if you wanted to make drugs out of it, it does not scale very well. That's why most of our drugs are synthetic. That's scalable chemistry. Analyzing active ingredients in plants is a lengthy and costly process. And even if they worked as advertised, you would need to go through clinical trials to have them accepted in other countries. You don't put drugs on the market just like that. Net, it's very costly and it's been tried before, as far as I know, on several plants from the Amazon area. I need to find the source again, but from what I remember most plants failed against placebo. There's probably a lot of placebo effect in the efficacy claimed by people living in these areas.
- ekianjo 13y ago
  I'm not sure you have much choice when you are born in such a society. You are probably very much expected/forced to stay and be useful to your tribe. Freedom is very relative...
dirktheman 13y ago
Well, they seem to be doing allright for the past 65,000 years... I'm the first to admit that I probably wouldn't last a week there. It seems quite romantic, living on a deserted island, without the antics of our society. But gathering food and water is hard, or even near impossible for us. These people however, seem to have found a way to survive. I'm assuming that, because they have lived in such a closed ecosystem for so long, they have different diseases than we have. I'm also assuming that for the diseases and medical conditions they have, they probably can find medicinal plants in the forest. I doubt however they have the same life expectancy as we do!
- derleth 13y ago
  > Well, they seem to be doing allright for the past 65,000 years... They've survived. Humans can survive terrible things. > I'm assuming that, because they have lived in such a closed ecosystem for so long, they have different diseases than we have. Not really, because their ecosystem is not closed. Birds and fish and so on still bring parasites, insects fly around, and malaria is malaria wherever you go. > I'm also assuming that for the diseases and medical conditions they have, they probably can find medicinal plants in the forest. But not good ones. We've never once found plants which make anything nearly as good as penicillin, and there's no reason to expect that we ever will. > I doubt however they have the same life expectancy as we do! And they may well have to practice infanticide, and/or go on bloody campaigns to keep the population down low enough they don't starve.
  - Kliment 13y ago
    Penicillin is made by mold. I'm not sure if molds count as plants, but it's definitely not a synthetic substance.
    - dmayle 13y ago
      Yes and no. It's not synthetic, but it's not naturally occurring, either (at least, not at levels that are useful). A lot of work went into the production process before penicillin actually became viable as an antibiotic (hence the 16-year gap between discovery and first wide scale use): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penicillin#Mass_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penicillin#Mass_production
grbalaffa 13y ago
Just to pick one example, ancient people actually had very good teeth: http://news.discovery.com/human/evolution/ancestors-had-much-better-teeth-130219.htm http://news.discovery.com/human/evolution/ancestors-had-much...
6ren 13y ago
The archaeological record shows that tooth decay increased dramatically with agriculture, and prior to that, was much less frequent than today. It's one step forward, two steps back - at least, for dentistry. Many of our dramatically beneficial advances - such as covered sewage and vitamin-supplemented bread - solve problems that did not exist for less densely populated hunter-gatherers. The big problem for them was carrying capacity, meaning you had to migrate, fight the tribe next door... or practice infanticide. Overcoming these is the true achievement of our age. EDIT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel EDIT2 I'm saying pre-agriculture people had/have better teeth and gums than you do now.
- derleth 13y ago
  OK, nobody disputes that they have better teeth than my circa 1800 ancestors did, but I very likely have better teeth than they do now, so who really wins here? > The big problem for them was carrying capacity, meaning you had to migrate, fight the tribe next door... or practice infanticide. Overcoming these is the true achievement of our age. This is a point I wish I had made.
  - dirktheman 13y ago
    I get your point, and I think we can all agree that our standards of living are WAY better than theirs, but by OUR standards. Yes, our life expectancy is better, we have better teeth, we are healthier, we get to use all the shiny stuff that comes with our civilization. But those are our standards, not theirs. So there's no 'winner' here. Look at native Americans. They were also 'savages', and we didn't do very well imposing our superior western civilization upon them. That kind of thinking is old-fashioned and harmful. We can't just assume that our culture, civilization is somehow 'better'. Of course, I wouldn't like living the way they do, but given the ferocity of their defense against others, this goes the same for them.
    - chrischen 13y ago
      If an asteroid hits the Earth, who do you think will be best equipped to survive? Pretty sure whoever dies in that circumstance is the loser. I'm sure the dinosaurs were happy by their standards as well, but they're basically irrelevant now.
rndmize 13y ago
As compared to the Civilized Man, who has only solidly developed all the things you describe in the last couple hundred years and took thousands of years of war, famine, plague, slavery, and endless grinding inequality (still haven't quite fixed that one it seems) to get where we are now? Nothing quite like the modern man, where some tiny percentage of the world enjoys all its fruits and a few billion others try to live on subsistence farming, which by most anthropological analysis is a much worse life that the hunter/gatherer tribes of 10,000 years past.
- ekianjo 13y ago
  > a few billion others try to live on subsistence farming There has never been as few famines as in today's world. I'm not sure what you are referring to. And expect for a few countries, life expectancy around the world as well as life standards are increasing progressively. As posted several times on HN, the future is about abundance, not poverty. Even people in Africa nowadays have mobile phones everywhere. Take your blinkers off.
  - rndmize 13y ago
    Subsistence farming isn't a reference to famines, its a reference to inequality. My point was that even today, the majority of the civilized world spends their time doing endless agricultural labor for minimal benefit, even though one would think that we would have a better alternative implemented by this point (especially since anthro studies have shown that by and large hunter/gatherer societies spend much less time obtaining food and water than farming ones do). And my earlier point on famine was that it was a much bigger problem for heavy agricultural societies in centuries past than it was for tribal societies; a bad harvest one year for a civilization could have disastrous effects, while a tribe could generally pack up and move. And finally, while I agree that the future is abundance, I'm not convinced it's going to be abundance for everyone. Up to this point, wealth in every single civilization I can think of has been heavily stratified, with the top few percent taking the majority of everything (doesn't matter if its nobles, priests, corporate leaders or politicians). I don't really see this changing given our current political/cultural/economic systems, unless basic income becomes a thing (and even then, the stratification will remain; it'll just become irrelevant on a long enough scale of technological improvement).
plytheman 13y ago
Yeah? And who's going to pay for all their modern antibiotics, dentistry, surgery, and preventative medicine? I'm no expert on native/Western interactions but it's my understanding that typically the native population nose dives because of new diseases and those that survive are left to try and make money in a new, grander system of society which is completely different from what they've done for generations prior. Right now they have a way of life in which food is plentiful; they want fruit they pull it from a tree, they want fish they reach into their lagoon. I'm sure they have their share of injuries and sickness but is it really worth trading their current life away for? And what will they replace it with? Over-harvesting their food sources to sell away? Performing their rituals for gawking tourists until the very acts are meaningless? Being exposed to a slew of diseases they've never had to worry about before only to find out that our modern antibiotics cost too much for their measly incomes? Regardless of how they've done it these people have survived for what... 65,000 years? I don't think they need anything we have to offer. Meanwhile look at how nearly every other native population has fared after coming into contact with Westerners. Sure our society has plenty of great aspects and advantages to it but these things come with a cost. I don't think it's possible for our modern world to mesh with the Sentinelese without totally destroying their way of life if not a majority of their population. I now find myself wishing I'd read the copy of "The Coral Sea" by Alan Villiers which is sitting on my bookshelf at home. From my understanding it's a book, published some 50 or 60 years ago, chronicling the history of various Pacific Islands and how Western exploration and exploitation have effected them. The general synopsis from what I've read elsewhere has been that they haven't fared too well.
bargl 13y ago
I suggest you read the following link. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6069163 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6069163 Especially the answer to "But could this be because they don’t see the benefits of ‘our’ way of life? If they knew, might they want to join us?"
andrewcooke 13y ago
what makes you think they would be rich enough for any of those? as other posts point out - they aren't going to be automatically promoted to middle class americans in the burbs.

by derleth 13y ago

tnjm 13y ago

But... the choice is theirs, not yours or mine. It's clear they know the outside world exists. They have chosen not to engage. (To put it mildly.) As an aside, there are more than 100 'uncontacted' tribes in the world. All of them know of the outside world; all have chosen -- for now -- not to interact directly with mainstream society.

derleth 13y ago
> But... the choice is theirs, not yours or mine. How much do they really know, though? Do they know that some of their diseases could be cured, for example?
- tnjm 13y ago
  I've been fortunate enough to interview several tribal people who were only recently 'contacted'. The latest came out of the forest in 2009. What is striking is how many of their friends and relatives died of outsiders' disease after making contact, and how fondly they spoke of their life before. When I spoke to them, some were considering leaving the village where they now live and returning to a life in the forest. With regards to healthcare -- the health services offered to settled tribal and indigenous people in many places is poor to nonexistent. Amazonian tribal peoples have dozens to hundreds of medicinal plants, many of which have been proven to have active pharmacological properties. Some are now used in Western medicine.
- kaybe 13y ago
  But then, some of the plants in the jungle seem to be amazing. I read some books about expeditions to find them for western medicine. One talked about a black paste you put on a tooth and it will simply fall out, no pain and no problem. A plant that makes women infertile for 7 years (they give it to their teenagers, apparently). Also, great plants against many sorts of other problems like abscesses. Sadly, the results simply got ignored. The woman in the book was sent by a US pharmy company and brought back many plants and samples which she had won from the tribes in hard work (they don't just tell anyone). They probably still have them in a freezer somewhere. An experienced person I talked to said that it probably was too much trouble and costs to clear it for drugs since there often are side effects, often psychological. He took one or two of the jungle things and said it was intense. Still, it's a great loss for our civilisation that it played out like this so far. So, we'd have much to give, but also much to gain. Our diseases could be cured too.
  - ars 13y ago
    None of those plants sound real. Sorry to burst your bubble.
    - kaybe 13y ago
      I agree. The claim should still be checked, IMHO. You didn't reach my bubble yet..
  - ekianjo 13y ago
    Plants are limited resources. Even if you wanted to make drugs out of it, it does not scale very well. That's why most of our drugs are synthetic. That's scalable chemistry. Analyzing active ingredients in plants is a lengthy and costly process. And even if they worked as advertised, you would need to go through clinical trials to have them accepted in other countries. You don't put drugs on the market just like that. Net, it's very costly and it's been tried before, as far as I know, on several plants from the Amazon area. I need to find the source again, but from what I remember most plants failed against placebo. There's probably a lot of placebo effect in the efficacy claimed by people living in these areas.
ekianjo 13y ago
I'm not sure you have much choice when you are born in such a society. You are probably very much expected/forced to stay and be useful to your tribe. Freedom is very relative...

dirktheman 13y ago

Well, they seem to be doing allright for the past 65,000 years... I'm the first to admit that I probably wouldn't last a week there. It seems quite romantic, living on a deserted island, without the antics of our society. But gathering food and water is hard, or even near impossible for us. These people however, seem to have found a way to survive. I'm assuming that, because they have lived in such a closed ecosystem for so long, they have different diseases than we have. I'm also assuming that for the diseases and medical conditions they have, they probably can find medicinal plants in the forest. I doubt however they have the same life expectancy as we do!

derleth 13y ago
> Well, they seem to be doing allright for the past 65,000 years... They've survived. Humans can survive terrible things. > I'm assuming that, because they have lived in such a closed ecosystem for so long, they have different diseases than we have. Not really, because their ecosystem is not closed. Birds and fish and so on still bring parasites, insects fly around, and malaria is malaria wherever you go. > I'm also assuming that for the diseases and medical conditions they have, they probably can find medicinal plants in the forest. But not good ones. We've never once found plants which make anything nearly as good as penicillin, and there's no reason to expect that we ever will. > I doubt however they have the same life expectancy as we do! And they may well have to practice infanticide, and/or go on bloody campaigns to keep the population down low enough they don't starve.
- Kliment 13y ago
  Penicillin is made by mold. I'm not sure if molds count as plants, but it's definitely not a synthetic substance.
  - dmayle 13y ago
    Yes and no. It's not synthetic, but it's not naturally occurring, either (at least, not at levels that are useful). A lot of work went into the production process before penicillin actually became viable as an antibiotic (hence the 16-year gap between discovery and first wide scale use): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penicillin#Mass_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penicillin#Mass_production

grbalaffa 13y ago

Just to pick one example, ancient people actually had very good teeth: http://news.discovery.com/human/evolution/ancestors-had-much-better-teeth-130219.htm http://news.discovery.com/human/evolution/ancestors-had-much...

6ren 13y ago

The archaeological record shows that tooth decay increased dramatically with agriculture, and prior to that, was much less frequent than today. It's one step forward, two steps back - at least, for dentistry. Many of our dramatically beneficial advances - such as covered sewage and vitamin-supplemented bread - solve problems that did not exist for less densely populated hunter-gatherers. The big problem for them was carrying capacity, meaning you had to migrate, fight the tribe next door... or practice infanticide. Overcoming these is the true achievement of our age. EDIT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel EDIT2 I'm saying pre-agriculture people had/have better teeth and gums than you do now.

derleth 13y ago
OK, nobody disputes that they have better teeth than my circa 1800 ancestors did, but I very likely have better teeth than they do now, so who really wins here? > The big problem for them was carrying capacity, meaning you had to migrate, fight the tribe next door... or practice infanticide. Overcoming these is the true achievement of our age. This is a point I wish I had made.
- dirktheman 13y ago
  I get your point, and I think we can all agree that our standards of living are WAY better than theirs, but by OUR standards. Yes, our life expectancy is better, we have better teeth, we are healthier, we get to use all the shiny stuff that comes with our civilization. But those are our standards, not theirs. So there's no 'winner' here. Look at native Americans. They were also 'savages', and we didn't do very well imposing our superior western civilization upon them. That kind of thinking is old-fashioned and harmful. We can't just assume that our culture, civilization is somehow 'better'. Of course, I wouldn't like living the way they do, but given the ferocity of their defense against others, this goes the same for them.
  - chrischen 13y ago
    If an asteroid hits the Earth, who do you think will be best equipped to survive? Pretty sure whoever dies in that circumstance is the loser. I'm sure the dinosaurs were happy by their standards as well, but they're basically irrelevant now.

rndmize 13y ago

As compared to the Civilized Man, who has only solidly developed all the things you describe in the last couple hundred years and took thousands of years of war, famine, plague, slavery, and endless grinding inequality (still haven't quite fixed that one it seems) to get where we are now? Nothing quite like the modern man, where some tiny percentage of the world enjoys all its fruits and a few billion others try to live on subsistence farming, which by most anthropological analysis is a much worse life that the hunter/gatherer tribes of 10,000 years past.

ekianjo 13y ago
> a few billion others try to live on subsistence farming There has never been as few famines as in today's world. I'm not sure what you are referring to. And expect for a few countries, life expectancy around the world as well as life standards are increasing progressively. As posted several times on HN, the future is about abundance, not poverty. Even people in Africa nowadays have mobile phones everywhere. Take your blinkers off.
- rndmize 13y ago
  Subsistence farming isn't a reference to famines, its a reference to inequality. My point was that even today, the majority of the civilized world spends their time doing endless agricultural labor for minimal benefit, even though one would think that we would have a better alternative implemented by this point (especially since anthro studies have shown that by and large hunter/gatherer societies spend much less time obtaining food and water than farming ones do). And my earlier point on famine was that it was a much bigger problem for heavy agricultural societies in centuries past than it was for tribal societies; a bad harvest one year for a civilization could have disastrous effects, while a tribe could generally pack up and move. And finally, while I agree that the future is abundance, I'm not convinced it's going to be abundance for everyone. Up to this point, wealth in every single civilization I can think of has been heavily stratified, with the top few percent taking the majority of everything (doesn't matter if its nobles, priests, corporate leaders or politicians). I don't really see this changing given our current political/cultural/economic systems, unless basic income becomes a thing (and even then, the stratification will remain; it'll just become irrelevant on a long enough scale of technological improvement).

plytheman 13y ago

Yeah? And who's going to pay for all their modern antibiotics, dentistry, surgery, and preventative medicine? I'm no expert on native/Western interactions but it's my understanding that typically the native population nose dives because of new diseases and those that survive are left to try and make money in a new, grander system of society which is completely different from what they've done for generations prior. Right now they have a way of life in which food is plentiful; they want fruit they pull it from a tree, they want fish they reach into their lagoon. I'm sure they have their share of injuries and sickness but is it really worth trading their current life away for? And what will they replace it with? Over-harvesting their food sources to sell away? Performing their rituals for gawking tourists until the very acts are meaningless? Being exposed to a slew of diseases they've never had to worry about before only to find out that our modern antibiotics cost too much for their measly incomes? Regardless of how they've done it these people have survived for what... 65,000 years? I don't think they need anything we have to offer. Meanwhile look at how nearly every other native population has fared after coming into contact with Westerners. Sure our society has plenty of great aspects and advantages to it but these things come with a cost. I don't think it's possible for our modern world to mesh with the Sentinelese without totally destroying their way of life if not a majority of their population. I now find myself wishing I'd read the copy of "The Coral Sea" by Alan Villiers which is sitting on my bookshelf at home. From my understanding it's a book, published some 50 or 60 years ago, chronicling the history of various Pacific Islands and how Western exploration and exploitation have effected them. The general synopsis from what I've read elsewhere has been that they haven't fared too well.

bargl 13y ago

I suggest you read the following link. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6069163 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6069163 Especially the answer to "But could this be because they don’t see the benefits of ‘our’ way of life? If they knew, might they want to join us?"

andrewcooke 13y ago

what makes you think they would be rich enough for any of those? as other posts point out - they aren't going to be automatically promoted to middle class americans in the burbs.