It's estimated that there are at least 196 "uncontacted" Indigenous groups worldwide, living mainly in 10 countries in South America, Asia and the Pacific, including Brazil, Indonesia and India. They live in diverse environments, from islands, to deserts, and the forest-dense borderlands of the Amazon basin. These groups have had varying levels of contact with the outside world; while some have only sporadic encounters with neighboring Indigenous peoples, others more regularly encounter outsiders, sometimes against their will due to the presence of oil, logging, agriculture and mining industries that increasingly encroach on their lands.
While this question is difficult to answer, there are some candidates for the "least contacted" groups, experts told Live Science.
"Certainly there is a spectrum between permanent contact, initial contact, sporadic contact and none at all," he told Live Science.
One such candidate is a small group of Indigenous islanders known as the Sentinelese, who live on North Sentinel Island within India's Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Bay of Bengal. This group is so little known that anthropologists aren't even sure what they call themselves; their name is based on the roughly 23-square-mile (60 square kilometers) island where they live.
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"When they shoot bows and arrows, they are communicating," Simron Singh, a professor at the University of Waterloo in Ontario whose expertise is in island environments and the peoples of the Andaman and Nicobar islands, told Live Science. "It says they do not want to be disturbed."
Herlin Odicio Estrella, an Indigenous leader and president of the Native Federation of Kakataibo Communities, speaks at a press conference in Lima on May 4, 2023. The conference addressed how regional and municipal governments are failing to protect Indigenous communities from coca growers encroaching on their communities. (Image credit: ZUMA Press, Inc. via Alamy)
"They erase their footprints"
Survival International estimates that 95% of "uncontacted" and "isolated" peoples live in the Amazon Basin (though the term "voluntarily isolated peoples" is more commonly used to refer to such groups there, according to Beatriz Huertas, an anthropologist, independent researcher and special adviser on isolated peoples policy with Rainforest Foundation Norway).
"We know that this isolation is a protective strategy they have adopted" precisely because they have had contact with the outside and it has not been a positive experience, Huertas explained.
He noted that even in Brazil which has some of the most rigorous documentation policies, one Indigenous group was only documented in 2021, having eluded authorities up until that point. Very little is known about them, including their name.
Misconceptions about isolated peoples
This history of contact for even the most remote people on Earth shows that the term "uncontacted people" is misleading, Huertas said. In fact, the phrase has fed into unhelpful misconceptions that these groups are "stuck in the Stone Age, as if they were living in a bubble," she said. "In the social sciences, we know that no people remain completely isolated from what is happening in their surroundings and, therefore, no people have remained stuck at any particular stage in history."
In many cases historical experiences can explain why these groups would want to avoid the world beyond. By the mid-1900s, the Great Andamanese of nearby islands had experienced a population decline of up to 99% after bouts of conflict with British settlers and the influx of disease. The Sentinelese themselves had a historical encounter with British colonizers in the 1800s during which time some were kidnapped, infected with disease, and died, which may have shaped their current wariness of the outside world.
Related mysteriesSome researchers have argued that these groups should be contacted to better protect them from current and future harms. But groups like Survival International counter that a long history of forced contact shows that this ultimately leads to more harm than good for these peoples, their safety and their survival.
"It's not that they don't have the option [to seek contact] ... It's not rocket science to get on a boat and sail somewhere," Singh said. "It's a choice not to connect."
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