Search

Isolated indigenous societies who actively avoid sustained peaceful contact with the outside world are critically endangered. Last year, "Tanaru", the lone surviving man of his tribe for at least 35 years, died in Southwest Amazonia, marking the latest cultural extinction event in a long history of massacres, enslavement, and epidemics. Yet in the upper reaches of the Amazon Basin, dozens of resilient isolated tribes still manage to survive. Remote sensing is a reliable method of monitoring the population dynamics of uncontacted populations by quantifying the area cleared for gardens and villages, along with the fire detections associated with the burning of those clearings. Remote sensing also provides a method to document the number of residential structures and village fissioning. Only with these longitudinal assessments can we better evaluate the current no-contact policies by the United Nations and governments, along with the prospects for the long-term survival of isolated tribes. While the world's largest isolated indigenous metapopulation, Pano speakers in Acre, Brazil, appears to be thriving, other smaller isolated populations disconnected from metapopulations continue to be extremely vulnerable to external threats. Our applied anthropological conservation approach is to provide analyses of publicly available remote sensing datasets to help inform policies that enhance the survival and well-being of isolated cultural groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The evolution of the hominin hand has been widely linked to the use and production of flaked stone tool technologies. After the earliest handheld flake tools emerged, shifts in hominin hand anatomy allowing for greater force during precision gripping and ease when manipulating objects in-hand are observed in the fossil record. Previous research has demonstrated how biometric traits, such as hand and digit lengths and precision grip strength, impact functional performance and ergonomic relationships when using flake and core technologies. These studies are consistent with the idea that evolutionary selective pressures would have favoured individuals better able to efficiently and effectively produce and use flaked stone tools. After the advent of composite technologies during the Middle Stone Age and Middle Palaeolithic, fossil evidence reveals differences in hand anatomy between populations, but there is minimal evidence for an increase in precision gripping capabilities. Furthermore, there is little research investigating the selective pressures, if any, impacting manual anatomy after the introduction of hafted composite stone technologies ('handles'). Here we investigated the possible influence of tool-user biometric variation on the functional performance of 420 hafted Clovis knife replicas. Our results suggest there to be no statistical relationships between biometric variables and cutting performance. Therefore, we argue that the advent of hafted stone technologies may have acted as a 'performance equaliser' within populations and removed (or reduced) selective pressures favouring forceful precision gripping capabilities, which in turn could have increased the relative importance of cultural evolutionary selective pressures in the determination of a stone tool's performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lowland South America has long been a battle-ground between European colonization and indigenous survival. Initial waves of European colonization brought disease epidemics, slavery, and violence that had catastrophic impacts on indigenous cultures. In this paper we focus on the demography of 238 surviving populations in Brazil. We use longitudinal censuses from all known indigenous Brazilian societies to quantify three demographic metrics: 1) effects of European contact on indigenous populations; 2) empirical estimates of minimum viable population sizes; and 3) estimates of post-contact population growth rates. We use this information to conduct population viability analysis (PVA). Our results show that all surviving populations suffered extensive mortality during, and shortly after, contact. However, most surviving populations exhibit positive growth rates within the first decade post-contact. Our findings paint a positive demographic outlook for these indigenous populations, though long-term survival remains subject to powerful externalities, including politics, economics, and the pervasive illegal exploitation of indigenous lands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Across the planet the biogeographic distribution of human cultural diversity tends to correlate positively with biodiversity. In this paper we focus on the biogeographic distribution of mammal species and human cultural diversity. We show that not only are these forms of diversity similarly distributed in space, but they both scale superlinearly with environmental production. We develop theory that explains that as environmental productivity increases the ecological kinetics of diversity increases faster than expected because more complex environments are also more interactive. Using biogeographic databases of the global distributions of mammal species and human cultures we test a series of hypotheses derived from this theory and find support for each. For both mammals and cultures, we show that (1) both forms of diversity increase exponentially with ecological kinetics; (2) the kinetics of diversity is faster than the kinetics of productivity; (3) diversity scales superlinearly with environmental productivity; and (4) the kinetics of diversity is faster in increasingly productive environments. This biogeographic convergence is particularly striking because while the dynamics of biological and cultural evolution may be similar in principle the underlying mechanisms and time scales are very different. However, a common currency underlying all forms of diversity is ecological kinetics; the temperature-dependent fluxes of energy and biotic interactions that sustain all forms of life at all levels of organization. Diversity begets diversity in mammal species and human cultures because ecological kinetics drives superlinear scaling with environmental productivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

European expansion and contact with indigenous populations led to catastrophic depopulation primarily through the introduction of novel infectious diseases to which native peoples had limited exposure and immunity. In the Amazon Basin such contacts continue to occur with more than 50 isolated indigenous societies likely to make further contacts with the outside world in the near future. Ethnohistorical accounts are useful for quantifying trends in the severity and frequency of epidemics through time and may provide insight into the likely demographic consequences of future contacts. Here we compile information for 117 epidemics that affected 59 different indigenous societies in Greater Amazonia and caused over 11,000 deaths between 1875 and 2008, mostly (75%) from measles, influenza, and malaria. Results show that mortality rates from epidemics decline exponentially through time and, independently, with time since peaceful contact. The frequency of documented epidemics also decreases with time since contact. While previous work on virgin soil epidemics generally emphasizes the calamity of contacts, we focus instead on improvements through time. The prospects for better survivorship during future contacts are good provided modern health care procedures are implemented immediately. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]