It's Rude to Stare

[posted by Callimachus]

You’ve spent 10,000 years getting there. It’s not pretty but it’s yours—the swamp, the forest, the tree house where you live. Bigger and stronger tribes drove you down from the better land higher up the slopes, so you retreated to a godforsaken place thick with reptiles, insects, and malarial encephalitis. Southern Papua’s rain forests are hell; but at least you feel safe and alone.

Then Zurück in die Steinzeit comes along—a party of Germans looking for tourism’s outer edge, an unknown and uncontacted tribe, a forest fastness to outfast any other. They have their cameras ready and this is what they’ve come for (Zurück in die Steinzeit means Back to the Stone Age)—stark naked little guys with bows and arrows and funny-looking penis sheaths and living in trees. They’re up there on a kind of platform gesticulating: even at $8000 a seat this show is worth the price.

More here.