Living Stone Age

Out of southeastern Brazil last week came a strange tale of Stone Age savages living furtive lives only a few score miles from modern civilization.

Sixteenth century Portuguese explorers heard rumors of unusually primitive Indians in the state of Parana. They saw none of them, and the steep, jungle-tangled Serra dos Dourados mountains in the western part of the state deflected both settlers, missionaries and slave hunters. Nothing more was reported about the primitives until 1906, when a Czech scientist named Albert Fritsch made a field trip into the region and met some comparatively advanced Indians dragging three captives who spoke an unknown tongue. He discovered that the captives called themselves Xetsa (pronounced shee-tahss). He studied their language superficially and then apparently dismissed them as a branch of the well-known Guarani people.

In 1950 a surveying crew surprised some Indian children in a jungle clearing. All fled except a ten-year-old boy who scurried up a palm tree and was caught. He went into paroxysms of trembling, sweating and moaning, but his captors treated him kindly, and after a while he quieted down, announced that his name was Koi and that he was a Xeta. He was sent to Curitiba, where he was taught to speak Portuguese and was brought up almost like a son by the director of the local office of the Indian Protection Service. In civilized clothes he did not look unusual except for a hole punched in his lower lip. This, Koi explained, was for a 2-in. tusk that Xeta males wear in the jungle to frighten off enemies and evil spirits.

Tusked Apparitions. Slowly the frontier of Brazilian settlement was pushing west from the coast into the jungle that sheltered the shadowy Xetas. In 1952 a gang of land clearers captured a naked young Xeta girl. While they were still debating what to do with their prize, they found themselves surrounded by weird-looking Indian men with tusks sticking out of their lower lips. The Indians spoke no words. They drew back the arrows on their bows; the girl ran to join them; and they all melted silently into the jungle.

Now both settlers and scientists knew that something very strange lived in the Serra dos Dourados. In 1955 an unusual frost hit northern Parana, destroying jungle fruit and game. Starving Indians crept out of the jungle to pillage the vegetable garden of the Fazenda Santa Rosa, a backwoods farmhouse. The frightened manager sent for help from the Indian Protection Service.

Out from Curitiba came Anthropology Professor Jose Loureiro of the University of Parana, bringing Koi with him. He had studied every reference to the mysterious Xetas and spent long, frustrating hours with the boy, who refused to answer most questions about his people.

By some instinct rather than memory, Koi led Loureiro to camps of his people, which proved to be pathetic palm-leaf shelters set in tiny jungle clearings. The camps were always empty, but piles of fresh coconut shells and animal bones proved that Xetas were near. Logs showed charred holes where fires had been kindled by friction. At last, in the sixth camp, Professor Loureiro" found a stone ax. "It was fantastic," he said. "A Stone Age implement in actual use by living hands."

Timid Warriors. That year he saw no living Xetas. But when he went back the next year, Koi led him to a clearing, and there 18 Xetas were huddled in five shelters. The Xetas looked ferocious, with contorted mouths and tusks sticking out of their chins. Actually they were scared to death. Two of the fierce-looking men bolted into the jungle. The rest accepted gifts of sugar with trembling hands. But overnight, they vanished.

Gradually Professor Loureiro won the Xetas' confidence, returning season after season to talk with them through Koi. He made taped records of their speech, whose strange sounds seem to blend with the calls and cries of the jungle. Said Czech Philologist Cestmir Loukotka, who studied the tapes: "It is an entirely new language. The Xetas are a people apart, with a culture and ethnic consciousness of their own, a Stone Age remnant now unique in the world."

What apparently happened, says Professor Loureiro, was that the small, timid Xetas were driven into the rugged Serra dos Dourados by stronger tribes. Some time during the last four centuries they must have had terrifying brushes with European frontiersmen. Their demonology is dominated by an ogre named Moeul who shows in figurines as a tall, long-legged, wide-eyed person, probably a white man grown into a tribal devil. Having seen enough of Moeul and his violent ways, the Xetas retired into the tangled heart of the Serra dos Dourados and managed to hide from the civilized world for several hundred years.

Last Remnant. The Xetas are a dying people. Not more than 250 of them now survive. They live in bands of 15 to 25, moving camp every few days. They have no agriculture, know no metal, make no pottery. They sleep on the ground instead of in hammocks as most Brazilian primitives do. Their weapons are bows and arrows and stone axes. Their knives are sharp flakes of stone. They eat everything that they can find or kill in the jungle-fruit, insects, snakes, roots too fibrous for white men's stomachs. In times of plenty, they make fermented drinks and go on binges.

Xeta men average about 5 ft. tall, wear a sort of fiber loincloth. But the childlike women go wholly naked. Sexual customs are informal, with women valued chiefly as workers. Affection seems to be absent; there is no word for love in the Xeta language.

The Xetas have no known gods, but they fear and venerate the jaguar and live in a world infested with evil spirits. Some of these can be bested in rather crude ways. An agent of the Indian Protection Service saw two Xeta women taking turns stamping on the head of a prostrate male. They explained that they were driving out a spirit that was the cause of a headache. After about 20 minutes of this treatment, the patient got up feeling fine.

Scientist Loureiro believes the Xetas are the most primitive humans surviving in the modern world, is trying to persuade the Brazilian government to seal them off in a jungle preserve before they are pushed to the wall by the advancing frontier. "It would be a crime against science," he says, "to destroy Xeta culture now. The Xetas must be saved intact in their natural jungle surroundings--at least until we can complete our study of them."

The Xetas themselves are the professor's worst opponents. Now that they have their peace with civilization after four centuries, they are coming out of the jungle, cutting their matted hair, switching from stone to metal implements. Koi is their leader in this respect. "Stone is no good," he declared last week. "Xeta life is no good; outside is better." Koi wants to be a taxi driver.

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