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Comment by jim_h | Hacker News Reader

http://photoblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/02/01/5965571-newl...

This has better photos. According to NBC report in 2008, an agency has been aware of the tribe and have been tracking (and not contacting) them since 1910.

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They mostly likely have had contact with some people. In the first photo, you can make out a nice machete and a pot.

Supposedly this is due to intertribal trade, rather than direct contact with the larger outside communities.

Is there some number of links that would make this tribe 'contacted' then? I would have assumed 'uncontacted' meant 'no knowledge of outside world at all' but it seems not.

Having this tribe get a machete and pot and see a plane makes it feel pretty 'contacted'. Not that I want to quibble over some definition...

I would make a Facebook joke here, but...

I think that they mean that these people have not been in direct contact with non-tribal people. It sounds like most of them are very isolated. Even the other tribes that have contact with the mainstream society seem to have little to no contact with these "uncontacted" tribes.

This is mostly info I read on that website and related links, i.e. I'm not an expert.

If they like trading pots and knives with other tribes, maybe they would like to trade with the wider world if they were given the opportunity?

Someone of the comments even suggest that these pictures are a hoax, shot in someone's backyard, and from the ground, not in a helicopter. Others say that they could have found the machete and cooking pot in an abandoned camp. Whatever the truth, having a machete is certainly a 'contact' with modern civilisation, I think.

The child in the first picture has very big and modern looking blade on his hand and a metallic pot is on the ground as pointed out by Keyframe in an another comment. Far from uncontacted.

For all we know they found those items in the jungle that were left behind by travelers.

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