Featured Image Credit: The Diary Of A CEO
Topics: World News, Community, Podcast
Daniel Murphy
An explorer has shared the one moment he found particularly 'haunting' when he found an uncontacted tribe deep in the Amazon jungle.
It's estimated that around 400 tribes still live in the Amazon rainforest, the gigantic and dense jungle that stretches across nine different South American countries.
Some of these ancient civilizations have remained uncontacted throughout history, as they have refused to interact with the modern world.
Though, sadly, the modern world has often found ways to defy their wishes.
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Continued deforestation of the Amazon has put the homes and lives of some tribes in peril, while interactions with loggers, miners and criminals bring significant danger.
Explorer Paul Rosolie's conservation group, Junglekeepers, works to protect the forest and its people from such threats, and they followed one particular tribe.
After living in the Amazon for two decades, Rosolie eventually built up enough trust to be allowed access to the tribe, a remarkable breakthrough that was documented. However, one moment in particular still haunts him to this day, as he explained on Steven Bartlett’s Diary Of A CEO podcast.
"This is the moment we gave them bananas," Rosolie explained, as footage showed a man pushing out a wooden canoe full of bananas into water and towards the tribe.
"What's haunting about this is the desperation that you see on them when they're all rushing to get the bananas and they're not necessarily taking them like they're going to share later.
"They're taking them like I get my bananas, you get your bananas."
"You see this?" he asked, as the footage showed the 17 tribesmen rushing towards the boat and grasping for as much fruit as they could carry.
"They're all rushing to get this little boatload and these are people that don't have boats. As they're doing this, they're talking at the same time. It was like a flock of parrots. It was just a cacophony of sound.
"And they're all fighting over these plantains. And then once they got them, each person held their own. They have rope and plantains and this interaction went on for several hours."
Rosolie - who once allowed a snake to try and 'eat him alive' - then revealed why his team have waited so long to release the groundbreaking images.
"This is just the footage we're allowed to release right now," he explained.
"There's a lot more that happened. That's why we waited a while to release this footage, because footage like this is incredibly sensitive for a number of reasons.
"You don't want people to go out and think that we went out and contacted these people who want to be left alone.
"You also don't want to encourage other people to indulge their misconceptions. People go: 'Oh, these are the last free people on Earth. They live perfectly in balance with nature'."
At this point, Rosolie shook his head before continuing: "No, people will go looking for them. Whereas for hundreds of years, these people have asked for one thing and one thing only, to be left alone."
Uncontacted tribes are naturally sceptical about any interaction with outsiders, as proven when they asked Rosolie how they could tell if they were the 'bad guys' or not.
There have been several incidents of tribes coming to blows with outsiders, and on occasion, they can be lethal.