Your common cold can wipe out an entire civilization. There are 196 groups of people alive right now who've never had sustained contact with the outside world. About 10,000 people total, spread across 10 countries. For them, a regular flu can kill half of them within a year of first meeting us.
That photo on the right was taken from a plane in May 2008 by FUNAI, Brazil's agency for protecting indigenous people. The people in it shot arrows at the aircraft. Nobody knows their name. Nobody knows their language. Brazil alone has 124 groups like this, mostly deep in the Amazon. Survival International, a group that tracks and advocates for these peoples, published the first full global count in October 2025.
"Uncontacted" is the wrong word, though. These groups know we exist. They've watched planes fly overhead for decades. Some trade with neighboring tribes for metal tools. The Sentinelese, a group living on a small island near India, have been pulling metal from old shipwrecks and using it for centuries. They choose to stay away. That choice usually traces back to what happened the last time outsiders showed up.
The Panará in Brazil numbered between 350 and 400 people in 1970. Nine villages. Complex layouts. Huge gardens. Then a highway got bulldozed straight through their land. Diseases followed the road in. Within eight years, four out of five Panará were dead. Only 69 people survived. Their leader Aké described it years later: everyone started dying in the village, others ran into the forest and died there, the survivors were too sick to bury the dead, and vultures ate the bodies.
That same pattern plays out again and again. The Matis lost more than half their people to flu in the 1970s, and with them nearly all their shamans, the elders who carried their entire medical tradition in their heads. In Peru, the Nahua lost over 50% after oil companies moved into their territory in the 1980s. Researchers tracked 117 epidemics that hit 59 groups across the Amazon between 1875 and 2008. Death rates ran from under 1% to 97%. The three most common killers were measles, influenza, and malaria.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, a French anthropologist who spent years in the 1930s living with tribes in the Brazilian Amazon, wrote something that's stuck with me: "A primitive people is not a backward or retarded people; indeed it may possess a genius for invention or action that leaves the achievements of civilized peoples far behind." Look at the Mashco Piro in Peru. Roughly 750 people. The largest uncontacted group on Earth. They've survived for centuries in the Amazon rainforest with no supply chain, no written language, no hospitals, nothing the modern world treats as a basic requirement for being alive.
They're losing ground fast, though. Survival International's 2025 report found 90% of these groups face logging, mining, or drilling on their land. A third deal with drug traffickers. One in six have missionaries trying to push in uninvited. And now there's a newer problem: social media influencers hiking into protected zones to film content. The report's projection: half of all 196 groups could be gone within 10 years.
In 2022, a man died alone in a patch of forest in Rondônia, Brazil. He'd spent about 30 years as the last living member of his tribe, digging deep holes in the ground to hide in or catch animals. The world called him "the Man of the Hole." Nobody ever learned his real name, his language, or which people he came from. When he died, an entire civilization went with him, and the only physical trace it ever existed was a series of pits in the dirt.
The two photos in this tweet aren't just existing at the same time. One is photographing the other from above, and historically, closing that distance is what kills.
Having a job and living alone is such a crazy combo. You go home, shower, eat, scroll through your phone, and stay silent until you talk to someone at work the next day.
Há apenas 6 anos, Portugal era um dos pouquíssimos países europeus sem extrema-direita no parlamento. Houve quem dissesse que era a “alma portuguesa”, o “trauma de uma ditadura recente” ou o “sermos um povo de emigrantes” que nos tornava imunes à vaga populista na Europa.
Lol.