The Mashco-Piro , one of the hundred or so uncontacted tribes remaining in the world, got a photo op but I’m not sure they wanted it. Apparently, they recently attacked some tourists and in a separate incident one of their arrows killed a local who was the only person capable of communicating with them in their language. The reason for the attacks seems to stem from a sense of being threatened, since their lands are increasingly being encroached upon by illegal loggers, eco-tourists and energy prospectors.

National Geographic reporter, Scott Wallace, was interviewed about his new book The Unconquered, where he follows Brazilian explorer and social activist Sydney Possuelo as he tracks one of the last uncontacted indigenous people on the planet, the flecheiros or Arrow People.

Q: What is at risk if the uncontacted/isolated peoples of the Amazon are not protected?

A: If the isolated tribes of the Amazon are not protected, they will disappear, just as surely as the hunting cultures and the buffalo vanished from the High Plains of North America. The frontier of modern society is advancing everywhere across the planet where resources have yet to be tapped.

The global economy’s insatiable appetite for gold, oil, land, timber-you name it-is threatening the Earth’s last bastions of pristine wilderness, and in the case of the deep Amazon, the very existence of fragile, vulnerable cultures. These cultures represent a tenuous link with our past. They deserve our respect and our protection.

http://www.clarionledger.com/article/20111209/FEAT05/112090311/Author-explores-world-Amazon-s-Arrow-People?odyssey=mod%7Cnewswell%7Ctext%7CHome%7Cs

Marine archeologists say that the ancient wreckage of a ship discovered in the seabed off the coast of Nagasaki, Japan, belongs to the ancient “lost fleet” of ships deployed by China’s 13th century Mongol ruler Kublai Khan.