Opinion: Expansion of park helps 'isolated' tribes in Colombia

The most fragile of Amazonian cultures are the isolated indigenous groups, those few "lost tribes " that have chosen to avoid contact with the outside world. The recent historic record amply demonstrates that contact can devastate these hunter-gatherer bands: within a few years of making contact, 50 percent of the Nukak tribe of the northwest Amazon and 80 percent of the Akuriyo tribe of the northeast Amazon had perished. And these fatalities were not equally distributed among all age groups: the most vulnerable were the very young and very old. When the elderly members of a small tribe die, because they typically are the repositories of tribal knowledge, much of the culture disappears with them.

Sooner or later, contact for still-isolated groups is all but inevitable. And recent history likely predicts their future: They will be "civilized" through settlement in large sedentary villages of other tribes. Once there, their changes in diet, lack of agricultural knowledge, and exposure to disease will prove disorienting and disheartening. Through the deaths of the elders and intermarriage into the dominant tribe, the once-isolated tribe's culture will rapidly begin to disintegrate.