Life Unchanged

I have a fascination with undiscovered peoples; that is, tribes or groups of people that have remained uncontacted and relatively unknown to modern civilization.  In past centuries, these must have been, if not commonplace, then at least numerous, as much of the world was fragmented, unconnected, and uncharted.  But in the modern era, when the whole world is mapped to a precision of mere feet and most land masses are populated by civilization, these people are few and far between, with most of them either in the jungles of South America or on islands of the Pacific and Indian  Oceans. 

Think of what life must be like for those living in these tribes.  Every day, these people live their lives in a manner almost exactly like the way our human ancestors lived theirs tens of thousands of years ago.  They hunt and gather to get food, and they make everything that they use with their own hands.  All the while, they have no idea that a whole different, massive, complex, and completely alien world exists on the rest of the planet.  They must see airplanes or boats go by from time to time, but they have no idea what they are.

I read a news article describing an incident in which several fishermen, who were illegally fishing off of the coast of an island which houses an uncontacted tribe, drifted onto the island and were killed by the tribesmen.  A helicopter was sent to recover their bodies, but was driven off by a hail of arrows sent by the natives.

Imagine being a native living on this island and seeing the helicopter coming to retrieve the bodies, having never seen anything more advanced than a bow and arrow in your life.  It must be similar to the popular perception of an alien abduction; it must have been completely out of their ability to comprehend.  And who can blame them for being hostile and defensive in the face of such unknown and alien happenings.  It must have been rather like the Aztecs greeting the Spanish conquistadors in the days of Cortéz and Montezuma, only the technological discrepancy is even greater.

These people, and many others like them, have been living in their homes for 10,000 years, and could go on living there for another 10,000.  My question is should we let them?  Do they have a right to the advances that civilization has created over thousands of years, advances that could save lives and increase their quality of life?  Does this outweigh their right to independence and self-determination?  Or maybe we could best serve them by leaving them alone, letting them live unchanged for the next thousand years; a living testament to the origin of our species.



Comments welcome.