Hacker News Reader

Comment by olalonde | Hacker News Reader

I watched a few documentaries about the North Sentinelese and uncontacted Amazonian tribes, and it's terrifying how violent they are compared to modern standards. They kill and ask questions later.

View on HN

It makes sense because the downside is very high (the stranger wants to kill you) but the upside is not (the stranger has something cool to show you or trade with you). It's not like you'd go to prison for murder either.

For what it's worth, cops in America in certain scenarios act the same way, faced with similar upside/downside risks.

That's the only reason they are uncontacted. If they welcomed visitors like the native Hawaiians did, they'd be speaking English today.

And “they” would arguably cease to exist.

Diversity and integration are good things

There's a pretty heavy survivorship bias on that, so you probably shouldn't extrapolate to all pre-civilization humans. For a group to remain largely uncontacted, it means they have to be remarkably insular, living somewhere other people don't want to be particularly bad (implying resource scarcity), and it definitely helps if they respond to attempts at contact with extreme violence.

Yeah this is selection bias. The remaining uncontacted tribes are uncontacted because they are very hostile to outsiders.

Only partly, they also live in extremely remote areas that don't have a lot to offer. It's not like all the other indigenous populations were pacifists, they fought wars, murdered, raided, etc. but they were living in areas that were much more desirable for conquest.

I think there's no other way it could be. If you're not violent you get wrecked by modern pathogens and die, or become integrated somewhat into modern society and can no longer be considered "uncontacted".

In fact there could be a direct link - the less reactive cultures were quickly subjugated by the colonialist cultures with advanced tech. Or the cultures that learned to strike back hard rather than welcome/integrate foreigners (see the lost American settler towns) are the ones that survived independently for longer.

> and it's terrifying how violent they are compared to modern standards

Not really, we just got better at it. Combat in the Ancient Near East consisted of bludgeoning your opponent with maces, clubs, and other blunt instruments. It took awhile to kill someone. We seem to equate "violence" with the duration spent killing someone (as though "dragging it out" is worse), but the end result between the millennia is the same: person A kills person B. We can just do it now in seconds with a single well-placed bullet instead of multiple minutes of agonized bludgeoning.

The alternative is to be potentially oppressed, subjugated, and colonized. A good example is the British Raj. Being peaceful is fine as long as you're able to use overwhelming force and win against someone who might harm you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Raj

Not even remotely similar. India had been trading with the rest of the world for millennia, was far more technologically developed than stone age tribes (in some ways ahead of pre-industrial revolution Britain) and was only conquered at all with the help of Indian allies, soldiers and even Indian financing. British people could not have conquered India alone.

Divide and rule, they say.

That is true but makes it sound too much as though it was entirely the clever British outsmarting and manipulating naive Indians.

The British Raj was not Britain conquering a peaceful people it was Britain winning a multi-century great game to replace the Mughal Empire.

> Being peaceful

I feel a straightforward example of exatcly this may be Moriori of Chatham Islands.

the Dark Forest theory on a micro scale.

contact, even if benevolent, would probably kill them all via disease. that doesn't include potential social and cultural upheavals, etc.

you either keep everyone out, hard, or you lose everything.

In the case of the North Sentinelese, this incident in 1880 might have something to do with their hostility to the outside world.

> After several days, six Sentinelese—an elderly couple and four children—were taken to Port Blair. The colonial officer in charge of the operation wrote that the entire group "sickened rapidly, and the old man and his wife died, so the four children were sent back to their home with quantities of presents".

After the 2004 tsunami, indian government sent helicopters to see if they had survived and they started firing arrows at the helicopter. It's possible that they think the foreigners caused the tsunami.

Some gangs are like that today.

> terrifying how violent they are compared to modern standards.

Oh you mean October 7th Hamas standards or the Israeli Gaza genocide standards, or maybe the US in Vietnam standards?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com