I was responding to the statement:
If the consequences of contact are so disastrous, they must not be contacted, full stop.
I'm saying: that's not an option because you can't prevent these tribes from being contacted. All we can do is to minimize the impact of contact. Obviously, as the cited research shows, populations dramatically decline post-contact, and these are all populations in which the government is attempting cultural preservation.
Hence my suggestion that it's better to give up on cultural preservation altogether and focus on keeping these groups alive: vaccination programs, public health education, healthcare, schooling, training, and assimilation into Western society.
Finally, you say:
Corpses everywhere. No living members remain.
That is not at all what the paper says. Furthermore, even for the mortality figures that the paper states, I see little evidence in there. Most of the evidence is simply for population decline, which could well be due to migration.
I was responding to the statement:
If the consequences of contact are so disastrous, they must not be contacted, full stop.
I'm saying: that's not an option because you can't prevent these tribes from being contacted. All we can do is to minimize the impact of contact. Obviously, as the cited research shows, populations dramatically decline post-contact, and these are all populations in which the government is attempting cultural preservation.
Hence my suggestion that it's better to give up on cultural preservation altogether and focus on keeping these groups alive: vaccination programs, public health education, healthcare, schooling, training, and assimilation into Western society.
Finally, you say:
Corpses everywhere. No living members remain.
That is not at all what the paper says. Furthermore, even for the mortality figures that the paper states, I see little evidence in there. Most of the evidence is simply for population decline, which could well be due to migration.
>That is not at all what the paper says. Furthermore, even for the mortality figures that the paper states, I see little evidence in there. Most of the evidence is simply for population decline, which could well be due to migration.
You should re-read the paper - slowly this time - it has two sets of data and you're conflating them. Data-set one is the people who ALL DIE - that is complete extinction: this comprises 80% of those contacted.
The other data-set is what happens to the 20% of cultures where there are survivors. These cultures are frequently destroyed, their mortality rate gets much worse and they live in poverty - pulled into a world where they have no money and no knowledge of how to acquire it and money (rather than the skills they spent ten thousand years perfecting) is the requisite tool for acquiring the means to live.
In most cases - they never quite recover. The Mayan culture is not, contrary to what most people believe, extinct - they are one of the few cultures from the original Cortez contacts to have survived. There is still around 20-thousand Mayans living in central America, mostly in one town in Mexico - and to this day they live in abject poverty with a life expectancy far below the mean for their country. Number one cause of death: malnutrition.
You're conflating the decline in those populations that survive with the over-all mortality rate - but the paper clearly differentiates these. That decline is among those tribes that do not all die out within months of first-contact, and they represent only 20% of tribes contacted. This actually correlates almost exactly with what epidemiology would predict. Introducing a new pathogen into a population group (most of these tribes would be the same genetic ethnicity - they differ culturally not biologically) we predict between 10% and 20% survival rates as those whose immune systems can adapt fastest will make it through - and produce a next generation that can handle that pathogen well. Since immune system adaptability is a genetic trait, it makes perfect sense that this 10%-20% would be collected in clusters living together (families in fact) - so in some tribes you will find many of them - and those tribes will survive, and in some tribes none at all and they wlll die out.
This isn't even unique to Western contact - it happens whenever a population group encounters a brand new disease. I live in Africa - I was here when Ebola first broke out - I saw how some towns were entirely decimated - entire villages reduced to a pile of corpses, and I saw how others - while hit hard- nevertheless had large numbers of survivors. In one town the disease would kill everyone it came in contact with - in the next village, half the people would survive. Standard epidemiological model for a new pathogen - nothing surprising here.
What western contact with uncontacted tribes mean - is the sudden introduction of a massive amount of new pathogens, not one - but hundreds or even thousands into to the population group - most of which do not *have* vaccines (because thousands of years of exposure have made our population so immune to them that we don't even get sick anymore - we all carry them around and none of us even know about most of them).
