In an editorial, the New York Times lamented that by leaving the jungle, the tribe had sundered the last barriers of our pre-civilized past. I see it differently. The ancestral ways of the Nukak tribe, and all tribes of humans like them, were doomed the day humankind began to abandon its hunting-gathering lifestyles by growing their own food and domesticating their animals. It may have taken six thousand years for that to happen, but it was inevitable.
Civilization made it possible to produce more food than we could eat and more wealth in terms of creature comforts than humankind knew before, but the distribution of that wealth has always been disproportionate: too much going to too few people, and not enough for many, many others. It also brings with it great hazards, not the least of which is the possibility of a nuclear or ecological holocaust that could not only wipe out all human life, but all life on this planet, period. That's the jungle we've created for ourselves. Maybe what the Nukaks are doing is sending us a signal that it's time we left our own jungle behind.
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