Alone

Now and then we hear of someone going off the grid - unhooking their tech, turning YouTube into NotMeTube, taking their Face out of the Book and moving on. I think the only way to appreciate giving up that lifestyle would be to have experienced it first. How else would you know how much you miss videos of cats playing the piano or people sliding down their icy driveways if you had never seen them?

That brings me to the story of a man so far off the beaten path that he did not even have a name that anyone knew. He is referred to as the last member of an uncontacted tribe in Brazil.

The only name by which anyone else knew him was "The man in the hole." 

For more that twenty years, he lived alone, isolated, as the last of an Indigenous tribe whose other members were most likely killed off by invading ranches who wanted their untouched rainforest land.

The "man in the hole" sobriquet comes from the deep pits he dug where he could hide out from well-intended folks who sought to bring him into our world of car crashes and Kardashians, fad diets and Dad fiats, streaming videos and steaming vegetables.

If he knew of the Amazon at all, he knew it was a river 688 miles and one ocean away, not a place that could send him ointments overnight.

He lived what plants he could grow and what animals he could catch. And when people from our world tried to enter his, he jumped into one of his holes to make it clear he was not in the least interested.  

The hut where he lived to the end.

Officials of the Tanaru Indigenous Territory, over in the Brazilian state of Rondônia, patrol the area, and last month, the patrol, seeing no sign of activity, approached his hut and found him in his hammock, dead of apparently natural causes.

Flávia Milhorance and André Spigariol of the New York Times made the point that, as sad as the passing of anyone is, this also means the first total disappearance of any uncontacted Brazilian. The fear is that more tribes will be gone soon, as well.

Survival International, a human rights group, studied the man's life, as well as possible, although they never found out his name, his ethnic background, or how he communicated with the others in his tribe when they lived. The Brazilian agency which tracks Indigenous people is called Funai. They determined, over a course of 26 years, that the man built 53 huts for himself. 

Little was known about the man—not his name, his ethnicity or the language he spoke to his fellow tribe members when they were still alive. Funai, Brazil’s federal agency for Indigenous affairs, says in a statement that it had tracked 53 huts the man made over the past 26 years. Near his residences, they found his crops: corn, cassava, papaya and bananas, as well as the sharp spearheads he used for hunting game.

There was a video shot in 2018, showing the man chopping down a tree, but he did not want people around to talk about his days, and he responded aggressively when approached.

“We can only imagine what horrors he had witnessed in his life, and the loneliness of his existence after the rest of his tribe were killed, but he determinedly resisted all attempts at contact, and made clear he just wanted to be left alone,” says Fiona Watson, Survival International’s research and advocacy director.

Experts figure the man lived to be about 60 years of age. There were no signs of violence or struggle around his corpse, but he was covered in feathers.

Marcelo dos Santos, an Indigenous expert, told the Times: “Was he waiting for his death? Who knows? There was never communication, not even with another ethnic group, to know more about him. So we can’t be sure of the reason.”

One of the hiding holes.

All that we know for sure about the man is that we know nothing for sure. Perhaps he was content living alone, perhaps not. But he was a member of the human race, and deserved respect for making it on his own. 

Not only did he not wish to have an Instagram account, he did not wish to be seen on any of ours, either, while he lived. And with his death closing the history of his tribe, that's all we will know about him: not much.