Anthropology: The sad truth about uncontacted tribes
bbc.com
bbc.com
http://news.sciencemag.org/archaeology/2014/07/uncontacted-t...
(Abstract only, main report is behind a paywall.) And the recent update:
http://news.sciencemag.org/health/2014/07/did-brazils-uncont...
The last paragraph reveals how serious the lack of medical attention can be:
"In the mid-1980s, a group of Yora tribespeople who made contact with loggers in their region in the Peruvian Amazon were first infected by influenza and later came down with pneumonia and other secondary infections. Without antibiotics, “the old people died and all the young kids died,” Hill says. A subsequent study by medical anthropologist Glenn Shepard of the Paraense Emilio Goeldi Museum in Belém, Brazil, revealed that some 300 people died, between 50% and 60% of the population."
It's a tragic illustration of one of the points of Jared Diamond's book Guns, Germs, and Steel.
The Sentinelese (mentioned in the OP) are somewhat special in that they actually attack any other humans that come near the island.
It's even worse than that. I recently read Jared Diamond's book The World Until Yesterday. In it he describes just how violent inter-group affairs can be among pre-industrial societies. Globally, the default is typically to kill anyone from another group before they have a chance to do the same to you.
Here's what Wikipedia says:
* The terms used to refer to Native Americans have been controversial. According to a 1995 U.S. Census Bureau set of home interviews, most of the respondents with an expressed preference refer to themselves as "American Indians" or simply "Indians"; this term has been adopted by major newspapers and some academic groups
Maybe just "natives" would be sufficient? Not all uncontacted tribes are in the Americas afaik (for example I've heard about a tribe in some Russian mountains).
It seems inevitable that any group of humans too long cut off from the majority of humanity is destined for destruction once contact is re-established due to cultural shock, unscrupulous or illegal activity, but chiefly by diseases against which they have no natural immunity.
Second: a bunch of formerly uncontacted people have been interviewed after contact was made and none of them indicated a desire to abstain from the evil outside world or to preserve their way of life... They were merely afraid and/or lacked appropriate opportunity for contact.
Further, none of them were wholly unaware of life outside their small isolated villages/reserves; people gossip and even the most isolated peoples have some knowledge of the rest of humanity.
Best we can tell this process is inevitable. The article has some suggestions for minimizing the damage but by and large there is little anyone can do despite the best intentions unless we were to forcibly isolate these people and prohibit them from making contact.
Contrary to popular belief, living in these societies would not be a fun experience. Well if you're a strong man happy to live to 50 they might be ok. To bad if you're a women.
But we allow them to continue by actively prohibiting people from helping them purely for our rich persons entertainment.
It is far from clear, though, that living as a hunter gatherer isn't fun. Reports from the 18th and 19th centuries mention the scandal that when white farmers were captured by indigenous tribes, they hardly ever wanted to go back. Foraging beat farming in terms of qalys, it seemed.
Interestingly enough, the recent history of the !Kung shows that settling down and joining the rest of civilization does not always benefit the fairer sex. !Kung society was much less sexist before contact than it is now, as the surrounding peoples they are now in contact with are not exactly the most egalitarian. Most archaeologists consider egalitarian social structure to be typical of hunter-gatherer societies, with rigid hierarchical structure being an innovation resulting from settlement. Consider the concept of being "rich" for example. In a nomadic pastoral culture, wealth might be owning a big herd. In a sedentary culture, wealth might take the form of housing or accumulated items. A hunter-gatherer does not own animals and has to carry everything he/she owns around. A hunter-gather's abilities are his/her wealth.
There are plenty of "civilized" places on Earth today where being poor is basically hell. There's ceaseless toil, no power or freedom, pollution, violence, poor nutrition, and no real access to the wonders of modern medicine that most of us are aghast at the thought of doing without. I'd far rather be among today's last few hunter-gatherer tribes than an immigrant worker in UAE or Qatar.
The habitat is the indigenous one. And the there are hardly any guests.