Times Outside History 6: No Man is an Island

I'll Be Watching You: Lonely Tribal Survivor's Location as Depicted by Google Earth. Rondônia, Brazil: Slate.

Remember my piece on the South American tribe that was buzzed by their advocacy group and the highway that is being built through their territory? Slate is reporting on a similar isolated lone survivor of a near-extinct tribe in the Amazon.  He, too, is living in a dwindling territorial safe zone and has his own advocacy group that is planning to make contact: "The most isolated man on the planet will spend tonight inside a leafy palm-thatch hut in the Brazilian Amazon. As always, insects will darn the air. Spider monkeys will patrol the treetops. Wild pigs will root in the undergrowth. And the man will remain a quietly anonymous fixture of the landscape, camouflaged to the point of near invisibility."

Slate continues: "The man's isolation has been so well-established—and is so mind-bendingly extreme—that portraying him silently enduring another moment of utter solitude is a practical guarantee of reportorial accuracy. He's an Indian, and Brazilian officials have concluded that he's the last survivor of an uncontacted tribe. They first became aware of his existence nearly 15 years ago and for a decade launched numerous expeditions to track him, to ensure his safety, and to try to establish peaceful contact with him. In 2007, with ranching and logging closing in quickly on all sides, government officials declared a 31-square-mile area around him off-limits to trespassing and development."
 
For more blog posts on pieces of Prehistory surviving in our present day, go here.