Secret of the ‘lost’ tribe that wasn’t - Tribal guardian admits the Amazon Indians’ existence was already known, but he hoped the publicity would lift the threat of logging
They are the amazing pictures that were beamed around the globe: a handful of warriors from an ‘undiscovered tribe’ in the rainforest on the Brazilian-Peruvian border brandishing bows and arrows at the aircraft that photographed them.
Or so the story was told and sold. But it has now emerged that, far from being unknown, the tribe’s existence has been noted since 1910 and the mission to photograph them was undertaken in order to prove that ‘uncontacted’ tribes still existed in an area endangered by the menace of the logging industry.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jun/21/amazon