The American explorer said his companion was attacked by an Amazon tribe

American explorer and conservationist Paul Rosolie, who has more than 20 years of experience living in the Amazon rainforest, had a sharing session on February 2 with Steven Bartlett – the star of the show. Dragons’ Den – about the life and death moments in the confrontation with an isolated tribe in the Amazon jungle.

Last month, Paul caused a stir when he released the world’s first high-definition video of a tribe that has never had contact with civilization in Peru. According to him, previous images were often very blurry and were accidentally taken by people from hundreds of meters away.

In the video released on January 14, Paul and his colleagues approached a riverbank in the Amazon region. Here, a group of aboriginal people carrying weapons appeared amid a flock of flying butterflies. They gradually lowered their weapons and relaxed when they realized that the expedition group had no intention of threatening.

However, reality is not always so peaceful. When Steven asked about the ability to communicate with animals, Paul affirmed that veteran junglers can accurately simulate the calls of curl-tailed monkeys or birds. This is also when he remembered the warning from the father of a friend named JJ (Juan Julio Durand – co-founder of the non-profit organization Junglekeepers).

“He told me that, if you are in the forest and hear the sounds of wild animals that sound a bit unusual, or feel something is not right about the way they sound, then be careful. That’s when they (the tribes) have surrounded you, observing every move with bows and arrows in hand,” Paul said.

This conservationist describes how Aboriginal people used whistles to communicate. The jungler may suddenly realize that there are at least five people surrounding him without realizing it.

Paul shared more about a friend’s heartbreaking incident: “He once fell into that exact situation while in the stream with his father. The tribe’s people pretended to be animal sounds so that their prey, including humans, would not be suspicious. When the command was given, arrows more than two meters long would simultaneously launch down. Unfortunately, they shot his father in the stomach. He died from excessive blood loss, and the friend was lucky to escape to tell this story.”

Notably, until now Paul and his colleagues still cannot explain why that tribe decided to attack and kill people.

According to Paul, the world of the tribesmen has no concept of “happiness” in the usual way. Their lives are like grim apocalyptic movies. They care about calories, have to trade blood and blood to travel and steal women from other tribes to maintain their race.

He also told more about the expedition’s meeting with a tribe that had never had contact with the modern world in the Amazon forest. The expedition went downstream and George, a member of the group, took on the role of peace negotiator.

George continuously reassured and told everyone to bring more bananas for the tribe’s people. After that, George carefully advised everyone to lower their cameras if they didn’t want to be mistaken for guns.

One day after meeting the tribe, George sailed on the river again as usual and many tribesmen appeared again. This time, they were further upstream. Normally, when they leave, they will go deep into the forest, but that day they walked along the riverbank – something the expedition team did not expect. So when George’s boat appeared, they suddenly shot arrows.

Everyone on the boat promptly lay down under the thick wooden benches. However, George was hit by an arrow through his shoulder blade because he was driving. Soon after, George was evacuated by helicopter and miraculously survived.

“He was never the same again. There are hundreds of stories about the people they killed that I could tell,” Paul said during the podcast conversation. The Diary of a CEO on February 2.

Researchers estimate that globally there are still nearly 200 tribal groups that have never had contact with the world, most of them in the Amazon forests of Brazil and Peru.

Direct contact can lead to catastrophic consequences, information about these communities comes mainly from satellite images, aerial surveillance and reports from neighboring indigenous groups.

In 2018, 26-year-old American missionary John Allen Chau was killed while trying to contact the Sentinelese people on North Sentinel Island – one of the most isolated indigenous communities in the world.

Although India banned access to the island, Chau paid fishermen to take him ashore. He tried to introduce himself and preach, leaving gifts and recording the meeting in his diary. However, the Sentinelese killed Chau soon after he set foot on the island. His body was never found.

History shows that even short contacts can expose tribal communities to diseases that are “harmless in developed countries” but kill them due to lack of sufficient immunity. Biologists fear that accidentally introducing a virus into a tribe could cause rapid, sometimes total, population loss.

Discoveries of hidden tribes have increased in recent times as industrial activity is moving deeper into the forests. Illegal logging, mining and drug smuggling routes have shrunk the buffer zone that once kept these groups isolated.