Our most natural type of group fighting is a bunch of guys raiding a rival settlement while everyone is asleep and killing them in their beds.

Fighting always works better when only your side is doing it.

> terrifying how violent they are compared to modern standards.

Oh you mean October 7th Hamas standards or the Israeli Gaza genocide standards, or maybe the US in Vietnam standards?

It makes sense because the downside is very high (the stranger wants to kill you) but the upside is not (the stranger has something cool to show you or trade with you). It's not like you'd go to prison for murder either.

For what it's worth, cops in America in certain scenarios act the same way, faced with similar upside/downside risks.

That's the only reason they are uncontacted. If they welcomed visitors like the native Hawaiians did, they'd be speaking English today.

I think there's no other way it could be. If you're not violent you get wrecked by modern pathogens and die, or become integrated somewhat into modern society and can no longer be considered "uncontacted".

Yeah this is selection bias. The remaining uncontacted tribes are uncontacted because they are very hostile to outsiders.

In the case of the North Sentinelese, this incident in 1880 might have something to do with their hostility to the outside world.

> After several days, six Sentinelese—an elderly couple and four children—were taken to Port Blair. The colonial officer in charge of the operation wrote that the entire group "sickened rapidly, and the old man and his wife died, so the four children were sent back to their home with quantities of presents".

The alternative is to be potentially oppressed, subjugated, and colonized. A good example is the British Raj. Being peaceful is fine as long as you're able to use overwhelming force and win against someone who might harm you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Raj

Some gangs are like that today.

They had had a long battle with what looks to be hundreds of participants and there were a few wounded, but nobody died. Compare with e.g. battles in the ancient Mediterranean, where the fighting would have continued until one side panics and tries to flee, and the winning side kills anyone who can't run away fast enough. Now maybe they're simply bad at warfare, but I think a more likely explanation is that they're intentionally not escalating to that level of violence and mostly stay at a standoff distance where fatalities are unlikely. The narrator also calls it a "formal battle" at one point.

In any case, I don't think you can ascribe much of their bow-and-arrow tactics to base instincts.

In addition, please check out Sentinelese tribe from the North Sentinel Islands in India [1]. It is more mindblogging than this, in my opinion.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sentinel_Island

3. Handing a people that can not progress, exponential tech, without which they regress, but which also kills them all when they regress, is a trapdoor function worthy of St.Fermi .

> we live on a planet that has such a society, along side one that had built nuclear weapons, and was soon to walk on the moon.

“The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed.”

― William Gibson

I disagree with the (2). The laws of war are and have been evolving, and there's plenty of evidence in recorded history. The first records we have come from Ancient Babylon and they have been modified and amended multiple times since. Another aspect of this development is the existence of international arbitrage with laws that also keep evolving, something that minimizes the need to go to war.

And there's more: the relationship between the state and its army changed a lot. The role, the rights and the duties of individual soldiers changed a lot. Just to give you some examples: the Lieber Code is the one created during the US Civil War -- it's perhaps the first to mention the concept of unlawful orders, exonerating the soldiers who wouldn't follow such orders. Traditionally, St. Maximilianus is described as the first conscientious objector to draft, a concept that, too, went through multiple iterations... And, really, we didn't even scratch the surface mentioning these. Military history is probably the most eventful and rich sub-field of history.

>Our modern society has not progressed at all from any of these base instincts, and in some cases & applications we have gotten worse.

Not at all surprising given that base instincts come from genetics and genes take tens to hundreds of thousands of years to change significantly.