'World's Loneliest Man' Dies 86
A tribe member who has been called the "loneliest man in the world" has died, officials say. The man, whose name was not known, had lived in total isolation for the past 26 years. The BBC reports: He was known as Man of the Hole because he dug deep holes, some of which he used to trap animals while others appear to be hiding spaces. His body was found on August 23 in a hammock outside his straw hut. There were no signs of violence. He is thought to have died of natural causes at an estimated age of 60. The man was the last of an indigenous group living in the Tanaru indigenous area in the state of Rondonia, which borders Bolivia.
The majority of his tribe are believed to have been killed as early as the 1970s by ranchers wanting to expand their land. In 1995, six of the remaining members of his tribe were killed in an attack by illegal miners, making him the sole survivor. Brazil's Indigenous Affairs Agency (Funai) only became aware of his survival in 1996, and had been monitoring the area ever since for his own safety. It was during a routine patrols that Funai agent Altair Jose Algayer found the man's body covered in macaw feathers in a hammock outside one of his straw huts. Indigenous expert Marcelo dos Santos told local media that he thought the man had placed the feathers on himself, knowing that he was about to die. "As he had avoided any contact with outsiders, it is not known what language the man spoke or which ethnic group he may have belonged to," adds the report. "A post-mortem will be carried out to try to determine whether he had contracted a disease."
The majority of his tribe are believed to have been killed as early as the 1970s by ranchers wanting to expand their land. In 1995, six of the remaining members of his tribe were killed in an attack by illegal miners, making him the sole survivor. Brazil's Indigenous Affairs Agency (Funai) only became aware of his survival in 1996, and had been monitoring the area ever since for his own safety. It was during a routine patrols that Funai agent Altair Jose Algayer found the man's body covered in macaw feathers in a hammock outside one of his straw huts. Indigenous expert Marcelo dos Santos told local media that he thought the man had placed the feathers on himself, knowing that he was about to die. "As he had avoided any contact with outsiders, it is not known what language the man spoke or which ethnic group he may have belonged to," adds the report. "A post-mortem will be carried out to try to determine whether he had contracted a disease."
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But rich people many times more than the poor ones.
CO2 emissions per capita:
Qatar: 37.29
Canada: 18.58
United States: 15.52
Germany: 9.44
China: 7.38
Botswana: 2.98
India: 1.91
https://www.worldometers.info/... [worldometers.info]
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Country (MT/C)
Palau (58.0)
Curaçao (52.1)
Qatar (38.2)
Trinidad and Tobago (26.2)
New Caledonia (26.2)
Kuwait (23.9)
United Arab Emirates (22.4)
Bahrain (21.8)
Gibraltar (19.6)
Saudi Arabia (18.6)
The US is #18
When you see someone complaining about "CO2 emissions per capita", you know they aren't talking about saving the planet, but something else.
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Obviously, I made a selection of just a few countries to make a point. Palau, Curacao, Trinidad and Tobago... those "countries" have such a low population it doesn't really matter in the big picture. What matters is that the developed world has a much larger footprint than the poor and developing economies.
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Montenegro $298
Uzbekistan: $454
Turkmenistan: $478
Ukraine: $481
Mongolia: $616
Trinidad and Tobago: $631
Kazakhstan: $702
Bosnia and Herzegovina: $703
Iran: $707
Libya: $723
(Interesting that Trinidad and Tobago shows up in this worst 10 list also...)
#17 India: $1,046
#24 China: $1,173
#115 United States: $3,888
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Re:Thier fate will be our fate (Score:5, Insightful)
What have CO2 emissions per capita got to do with rich people emitting more than poor ones? You haven't even defined what poor means, it sounds like you think "poor" means crappy US dollar exchange rate,
Not sure why I need to spell this out for you, but one obvious way to define poor and rich is GDP. And there is a big connection between GDP and CO2 emmissions.
China and India are large polluters overall, but when you start considering that they are producing cheap plastic toys, cheap appliances, cheap everything, mostly for us in the developed world, a huge chunk of China's and India's CO2 is pollution that we have outsourced to them.
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#1 Montenegro $298
#2 Uzbekistan: $454
#3 Turkmenistan: $478
#4 Ukraine: $481
#5 Mongolia: $616
#6 Trinidad and Tobago: $631
#7 Kazakhstan: $702
#8 Bosnia and Herzegovina: $703
#9 Iran: $707
#10 Libya: $723
#17 India: $1,046
#24 China: $1,173
#115 United States: $3,888
The US is far more efficient than China in this regard.
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Don’t delude yourself; it’s not just rich people doing it, it’s everybody.
so much bull, money is power, the rich make all the decisions
Meanwhile, it's people like you giving the powerful a free pass that lets this continue. Of course, when you're part of the problem, you're going to deny you're responsible obviously. Sure everyone is selfish and greedy, but the upper class is addicted to wealth and power and they are completely irresponsible and out of control. If they weren't hoarding most of the world's capital, and wasting it on self-aggrandizement, we could be dealing with th
Re: Thier fate will be our fate (Score:2)
We're all going to die regardless.
If he had been part of the modern society he could have been the illegal miner doing the shooting, if we were noble savages we could be the ones using infanticide for eugenics and population control. The human condition is a bit of a shit show, the only improvement is more progress.
Re:Thier fate will be our fate (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe he was the world's happiest man? Who knows.
"A post-mortem will be carried out to try to determine whether he had contracted a disease."
Oh, FFS. Does it matter?
Just leave him alone.
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It does matter, especially if he contracted a disease from an outsider to which his kind had no immunity. Outside diseases are a major threat to indigenous peoples, and finding out if that was the case and which disease it was might help us protect them.
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Protect who? His tribe is dead. He was the last. Literally the very last. There's no one left to protect.
I'm all for quenching knowledge when it provides some benefit. But all disturbing this man does is feed somebody's ego. You're certainly not going to protect him. And you aren't protecting a tribe of people that are already wiped out.
Sometimes, and I know this is tantamount to treason in the modern age, but sometimes allowing the dead their own small slice of dignity is OK. We don't have to decimate the
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Protect the other tribes out there. There are quite a few in South America, some in South Asia.
It is a bit of a tricky one. No way to know what we would have wanted after his death, a burial or cremation, or if he would have consented to an autopsy. In the circumstances we can only do what seems best for the most people.
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You've got the gist of it. There is an argument that the lands this man occupied should be set aside for indigenous people. That argument would be strengthened if it was found he died from Covid or another modern disease.
Clicking through the links, the chap wasn't completely untouched by modern society. He's using a steel axe in one of the videos. (You can't see it in the video, but the sound is distinctive. Stone and copper axes are used in a different way and sound very different.)
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The Brazil constitution does claim to protect lands occupied by indigenous people. The snag is that this rule is violated constantly, and people will openly violate it, burn forests, and even kill others, while the government looks away. Money trumps the law it seems. I suspect there will be lots of anger if that land is not opened up to exploitation.
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Protect who?
If he died by a communicable disease then someone else has the disease and can be spreading it. That is who to protect.
We don't have to decimate the man further by violating his corpse for the virtue signalers to clutch their pearls harder over whatever managed to finally end his life. People should feel guilty for what happened to his tribe, but why project that guilt into yet further insult?
I do not know where you live but the government in my area has an obligation to investigate unknown deaths. Was he murdered? Was he killed by a communicable disease that could be spreading in his area? Why you are injecting politics into a health and possibly criminal matter?
Re: Thier fate will be our fate (Score:2)
Why can't you just leave him alone, modern society has done enough to him already?
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Why can't you just leave him alone, modern society has done enough to him already?
So you are okay that if he was murdered that no one investigates that? If he died by a highly communicable disease, you are okay that it could be spreading in that area? No one is advocating that the he be put on display. A routine autopsy to ensure that he died by natural causes is what the state is doing.
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I'm OK with your highly unlikely scenarios, leave him alone.
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I think the rationale is: 1) as a general rule, when someone is found dead, an autopsy has to be made to exclude homicide. 2) Exception is tribal areas where we let the natives take care of their own affairs following their customary law. 3) Exception to the exception, he was the last, there is no more a tribal society to take care of him, we take initiative and providing him a service as good as we would for one of ours: determine cause of death and provide proper burial.
I imagine if the opposite happened:
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I imagine if the opposite happened: a family member of mine dies some place alone, a native tribe people find the body and decide to proceed according according to their police and religious customs. I'd find that nice of them, not letting my family member rot in the jungle.
...unless their custom is to place the bodies in hammocks, cover them in macaw feathers, and let them rot in the jungle... if so, "we" kind of dropped the ball.
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Which is of course not implausible given some the burial customs of some known cultures.
However without anyone around to tell us if we dropped the ball; I think the right thing to do is what the parent poster suggested. Treat the dead with the respect and dignity we would afford our own.
Re:Thier fate will be our fate (Score:4, Informative)
I think the right thing to do is what the parent poster suggested. Treat the dead with the respect and dignity we would afford our own.
So IOW, you'd perform an autopsy, which is fine.
Only the living care what happens to the dead, so if he has no living relatives, it really doesn't matter what you do with the body... except to purse-clutchers.
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So IOW, you'd perform an autopsy, which is fine.
Only the living care what happens to the dead, so if he has no living relatives, it really doesn't matter what you do with the body...
Let's take some pictures while we're at it and upload them to all the gore sites for a laugh.
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Let me just say now that if you want to fap to pictures of my corpse, I don't mind unless you killed me. And even then, only because I don't want to be killed to produce your wank material. Once I'm dead, I will give zero shits (well, maybe one last one.)
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Possible but unlikely. Most cultures quickly learn to dispose of their dead in a sanitary way, because if they don't they die out fast.
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Someone so isolated is interesting socially and medically. Was he healthy on that diet? Did parts of his brain atrophy without social contact? Did he have any infections with organisms we don't have recorded elsewhere?
Re: Thier fate will be our fate (Score:2)
rich people are wrecking everything for everybody
Everybody? I'd like to take issue with this remark. Things are just fine for the rich. You should become rich as well. Then everything will be fine for you too.
Kidding aside, the rich probably worry far more about the environment than the poor. Try living in a homeless camp and see how you like those piles of trash. They were not put there by the rich. And it doesn't take money to steal a rake and wheelbarrow from the local Home Depot and use it to tidy up the camp when your day is otherwise spent sleeping
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Oh and the CH4 chart is now going almost vertical. https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/tren... [noaa.gov]
Theme song for the future. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Relevant (Score:1)
Slashdot - news for nerds
Re:Relevant (Score:5, Insightful)
If you dont find anthropology interesting, your a pretty limited nerd.
Re: Relevant (Score:2)
There are a lot of nerds who just want to show others how to do it (often without explanation). Anthropology is effectively watching and studying how other people do things, so to these types, yes it's basically irrelevant...
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The problem with anthropology is there is no "control group". The minute you start introducing anything from the outside to these groups, you quickly have no idea how wrong things can go. This is the whole lore of the "prime directive" which IMO is something so paramount to our understanding as an evolved society that it's deeply discussed in the lore of Star Trek and even continued in the Orville series.
We are well aware from anthropological experiences that any influence or interaction can end poorly. If
Brazil is like California 100 years ago (Score:3, Interesting)
Brazil is about where California was 100 years ago in this regard. It sounds like they did better by him while alive. Now let's see if they can handle the remains in a more respectful manner. [hoodline.com]
Sad (Score:2)
If that's what my obituary is going to read like as well
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I doubt the autopsy will find that he died alone in the jungle with nothing but a tube of Astroglide and a macaw. Your epitaph is secure.
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Re:Justification for this title? (Score:5, Insightful)
Lonely? (Score:2)
You can be alone and not lonely. How do they know he was lonely? A lot of people are happy being hermits.
Re:Lonely? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well he didn't choose to be alone, he was alone because they killed the rest of his tribe. The fact that he didn't choose to be alone before that happened would tend to indicate that he wasn't a hermit by inclination. Of course, the trauma of having his people killed might have changed his personality in any number of ways, so there's no way to be sure.
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Some of them even post on Slashdot.
Fake news! (Score:2)
I am still alive, you insensitive clods!
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You're right. I checked https://slashdot.org/~ZiggyZig... [slashdot.org] and it says:
ZiggyZiggyZig (5490070) is all alone in the world.
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ZiggyZiggyZig (5490070) is all alone in the world.
Does he have a sufficient supply of macaw feathers?
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Are you sure it's not just a script?
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> And how does it make you feel that am I sure it's not just a script?
This article is about land use rights. (Score:5, Insightful)
Although it is interesting and sad to learn about this man and his life, this article is about land use rights. TFA states that the government was using this manâ(TM)s tribe as the rationale for preventing the deforestation of roughly 4000 square miles of rain forest.
What matters but is not addressed is how the government plans to maintain its preservation policies without the man, or why the man was even necessary to garner the political will to keep the forest undeveloped.
My guess is that land use rights and federal authority is a hotly contested issue in this country, mostly fought as physical skirmishes between interested parties. What is unclear is to what extent the presence of this man actually helped prevent land use, or if he was just a figurehead.
Re:This article is about land use rights. (Score:5, Interesting)
Land rights is a *massive* issue in Brazil. The current goose of a president, bolsonaro, has been aggressively pursuing land clearing in the amazon and trying to screw the local indigenous out of the rights, much to the horror of both indigenous folks, and environmentalists. This has emboldened illegal loggers and land clearing for illegal pastoral use and was likely indirectly responsible for the massive fires that went through there a year or so ago.
Its a loaded hot-button issue right now in Brasil.
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General trend of the last several years seems to be away from right wing strongmen Pinera, Duterte, Trump, Morrison, Johnson, Netanyahu all gone.
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Trump's not gone yet, alas. Putin is still in charge. Orban is so in charge he headlined CPAC, which tells you what Republicans think of facism... they're all in.
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You are being unfair to geese.
Re:This article is about land use rights. (Score:5, Informative)
That was an earlier government. The current one would sell its grandmothers, and is very much in favour of turning the rainforest into instant cash. However, there will be a presidential election in a month, so things may swing back towards preservation.
As to physical skirmishes: you must have missed the news about the murder in June of a journalist (Dom Phillips) who was reporting on the subject.
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However, there will be a presidential election in a month, so things may swing back towards preservation.
Given that Bolsonaro seems to be trying to be Brazil's Trump, I can imagine that this upcoming election will be .. "interesting"
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What is unclear is to what extent the presence of this man actually helped prevent land use, or if he was just a figurehead.
The article states that the land had protected status because of the presence of the indigenous tribe. The land could not be used as long as he was there, and Funai (the agency responsible for protecting indigenous people) had to make regular inspections to see if the man was still there in order to maintain the protected status of the land. Now that he is gone, the land can be released for other uses, and probably will.
Sad but characteristic (Score:3)
For how generally crap the human race is. This guy got a sample and decided he was not buying under any circumstances.
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This guy got a sample and decided he was not buying under any circumstances.
That's the problem with psuedorandom samples, and/or inadequate sample sizes...
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This guy got a sample and decided he was not buying under any circumstances.
That's the problem with psuedorandom samples, and/or inadequate sample sizes...
I would say what he got was pretty accurate. Probably more honest than what is customary today though.
Loneliest? (Score:2)
...or last person who died without a trace of being afflicted with the cancer of social media?
I can think of worse things than dying in a hammock covered in parrot feathers in a tropical wilderness .
Twitter, for one.
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Hey that would be a cool thing to tweet: "omg, I m dyn n #hammock w #parrot #wilderness"
Wrote a song about it. Like to hear it? Here it go (Score:2)
Stalks his prey in the night
And he's watching us all with the eyeeeeeeeeeeee
of the tiger
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Ahahawa, Thank 'ya very much!
Reads Like Typical Human Genocide (Score:2)
reminds me of Ishi (Score:3)
time to update the list (Score:2)
Now who is the world's lonliest man?
Significant loss (Score:3)
We will never know how his tribe fit into the scheme of things. We know that the tribes descend from older civilizations, such as the Mayans. Some descend from the farmers, others apparently from the priestly classes. For all we know, the tribe this man came from had held on to oral traditions that would have answered valuable questions about one of the ancient civilizations. We can't know, because apparently reducing the cost of chickens and cattle in fast food joints in Brazil is FAR more important.
Nor can we know anything about what this man knew, his language, his culture, his belief system. He must've had remarkable insights into medicine to survive for so long alone in such hostile environs, but we'll now never know what plants, animals, and insects he used or for what.
The autopsy is very unlikely to include a DNA test, but if it did, we'd at least know which group the tribe belonged to and how they connected up in the scheme of things. It'll probably go no further than establishing whether it was natural causes or the same gang intent on finishing his society off once and for all. Even there, why should we trust the results?
In the meantime, massacres continue - gunmen hired by mining companies and wannabe farmers continue to slaughter villages and sometimes entire tribes just to supply a few more traces of copper to America or a few more beefburgers to Brazilians. (Not for long, though. The mines work themselves out relatively quickly and the farmland becomes an unusable dustbowl in next to no time.)
Brazil and other South American countries seem unwilling to fix this obvious problem. Western countries could probably undercut commodities such as iron and copper by reprocessing ewaste (of which there is vast amounts) and landfills. At this point, I'm confident there's far more high-grade material that can be extracted from 20th and 21st century waste dumps at far lower cost than can be readily extracted from mountains in a jungle. For a start, you don't have to transport heavy machinery through gang-controlled lands onto some remote point where the nearest power socket is a few hundred - if not thousand - miles away. You also don't need to bribe officials. We also know where the waste is and we know that it's in a form that's easier to work with than ores.