For at least 26 years a man known as Tanaru lived alone in a small forest in the south-western Brazilian Amazon, moving around his territory, building several houses, planting crops and hunting. He also dug large, mysterious holes inside his homes.
When a team from the National Indigenous Peoples Foundation (Funai) came across him in 1996, he resisted contact, aiming an arrow at them through a gap in his palm shelter, a scene captured in the 2009 documentary Corumbiara. In 2007, Funai officials made another attempt at contact. Again Tanaru repelled it, leaving one man with a bad arrow wound.
He lived undisturbed for another 15 years as the environmental destruction continued around him in Rondônia, one of Brazil’s most deforested Amazonian states. Some called him the “man of the hole” without knowing why he dug the holes.
In 2022, Tanaru lay down in his hammock and died; Algayer was the one who found him. His death, confirming the extinction of his people, made the future of his 8,000 hectares (19,800 acres) of rainforest contentious. Local lawyers argue against demarcating it as Indigenous land, citing a lack of native population. Government prosecutors insist the territory was historically occupied, so should be protected despite not having Indigenous people left in it. The dispute highlights the complexity surrounding the fight for Indigenous land rights, the impact of historical atrocities, and the ongoing risk to uncontacted people (isolados) in the Amazon.
There’s also this idea that maybe the Amazon was a food forest, like many places in the Americas
It’s not a regression, it’s an objectively better form of farming. Instead of cultivating the land, you cultivate the ecosystem. You plant the things you want frequently and cull the plants you don’t like over generations, and you have food everywhere all the time. The extra food supports critters and prey animals, giving you easy hunting. It’s a minimal work high reward farming style
The downside is you don’t get a lot of easily stored crops you need for cities and armies. And so you see both side by side - for example, the Inca would farm potatoes as taxes, which would be stored for traveling armies or disasters and sent back to the capital to support their higher population density
Well there’s no question they did soil management and the early Europeans who were later ignored talked about orchards, so they definitely did some sort of organized farming, so I think maybe some of it was just forest, but a lot of it was also organized agriculture.
I mean, beyond that, the practice is still around to this day
Here’s an article on chacas. They’re more local and personally managed, but they’re a textbook example of agroforestry
Here’s an article about the evidence the Amazon was intentionally cultivated
He’s an excerpt:
It’s not a particularly new theory, and the evidence fits the claims and practices of the surviving cultures - I think it just hasn’t caught on because of cultural bias. The Americas have a long history of sprawling empires and evidence of trade from Washington State to the Andes mountains.
Disease and outright genocide just destroyed most of these cultures, not because they were primitive (we have no problem praising their math and astronomy), but because they developed down a very different path