WIRED
In a remote part of the Amazon, anthropologists and neuroscientists are learning about life and health without an “embarrassment of riches.”
BESIDE THE SCHOOLHOUSE turned medical station in the northern Bolivian village of Las Maras, everyone is waiting for breakfast. Today’s meal is rice and eggs, generously salted and adorned with globs of mayo: hearty fuel for a workday of foraging and hunting animals. Sheltering from the rain under palms, rubber trees, and a series of large tarps, the people are aged from 40 to 80-plus—all of them Tsimane, an Indigenous group living in the lowlands of the Amazon.
Each has been asked to fast until after they’ve had a voluntary medical exam. Blood draws. Urine and stool samples. Respiratory tests under one tarp; artery stiffness measurements under another. While they wait to speak with a doctor, people give interviews to fellow Tsimane who are collecting anthropological data. Later—if they desire—the interviewees will take a drive to the nearby city of Trinidad to get their brains scanned.
Max G. Levy 