Peru’s government anthropologists will try to make contact with one of the country’s isolated tribes after its members killed a man from a nearby village in a bow-and-arrow attack, Reuters reports.
The experts will try to talk to the Mashco Piro, a group that has nearly no contact with the outside world, to get a sense of why its members have been emerging from the forest with increasing frequency over the past year. Reports indicate that they’ve been seeking food and machetes outside their jungle home in southeastern Peru’s Manu National Park.
It’s the first time the government will try to contact the tribe, though its members have run into tourists, missionaries and local villagers in the past.
The government prohibits outsiders from contacting the tribes to prevent them from contracting diseases that their immune system would not be able to fight off. A team of doctors several hours up the river will be available to treat the tribe in case a disease does break out.
The Mashco Piro have rejected contact from the outside world in the past, including missionaries.