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Comment by TeeMassive | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised that there are no mentions of uncontacted tribes (ctrl-f of 'uncon' and 'native' yields no matches). It seems that violence and extreme xenophobia is the cultural norm, not the exception from a few psychopaths. And the methodology seems dubious, trying to estimate social behavior, norms and statistics based of people long gone and whose remains are scattered far and wide both in place and time.

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There’s a selection bias there. Only the most xenophobic and violent uncontacted tribes would remain uncontacted.

Isn't that what evolution is, a selection process? The other, less xenophobic tribes didn't survive.

there's a pretty big alternative: they survived by integrating with a larger group

(they could either maintain a subculture, or fully integrate and become indistinguishable. either way, they don't necessarily die off when they make contact)

"Integrating" is an interesting choice of words. From what I've seen of the integration, nothing of their genes really survive. Nothing of their culture survives. I don't think it's survival at all. They're absorbed, surely, but in the same way an amoeba absorbs some prey... little pieces of the prey move around doing what those pieces always do, at least for a little while. But eventually those pieces stop moving, and get broken down into ever smaller pieces, until nothing of them remains. And it's just a big amoeba.

Not sure what word is a better choice though. Maybe someone can reply with one.

do you have any citation for the idea that genes rarely survive?

i don't really have any idea what the ratio is. i do know that there are a ton of traceable groups from ancient times today. i don't know that there isn't an even larger number of groups that didn't make it

In the Amazon a lot of the "uncontacted tribes" have been contacted by illegal loggers, miners and in the past rubber harvesters, and have every reason to think we're all a bunch of demons. The ones who still hide out are often the victims of past massacres, and not even the prospect of shoes and plastic cups is enough to overcome their reaction to how they were treated in the past.

If that was true then the longer a tribe remains uncontacted then the more pacific and welcoming it would get. But remote tribes are just as violent than those closer to civilizations; or at least no such correlation have been observed.

It's in there, just not with those keywords:

> ethnographic data – contemporary studies of groups that existed until some modern contact

> an important challenge when interpreting evidence from ethnographies of modern hunter gatherers is determining which groups are likely to be representative of hunter gatherers who would have lived before the invention of agriculture.

"existed" not "exist"

To add another quote:

>"To avoid these problems, our ethnographic sample ... excludes groups who were only studied long after sustained contact with agricultural or state societies.

> and extreme xenophobia

Maybe it's the norm for tribes that have managed to survive and remain uncontacted in the modern world

This doesn't really make sense for tribes living on remote small islands who displays the same pattern of violence.

take it sentineleasy, it's an interesting read if a flawed method

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