Brazilian Indians

Indigenous peoples in Brazil (Portuguese: povos indígenas no Brasil) or Indigenous Brazilians (Portuguese: indígenas brasileiros), comprise a large number of distinct ethnic groups who have inhabited what is now the country of Brazil since prior to the European contact around 1500. Unlike Christopher Columbus, who thought he had reached the East Indies, the Portuguese, most notably Vasco da Gama, had already reached India via the Indian Ocean route when they reached Brazil.Burial urnMarajoara bowlMarajoara vaseFunerary urn Indigenous peoples in Brazil (Portuguese: povos indígenas no Brasil) or Indigenous Brazilians (Portuguese: indígenas brasileiros), comprise a large number of distinct ethnic groups who have inhabited what is now the country of Brazil since prior to the European contact around 1500. Unlike Christopher Columbus, who thought he had reached the East Indies, the Portuguese, most notably Vasco da Gama, had already reached India via the Indian Ocean route when they reached Brazil. Nevertheless, the word índios ('Indians') was by then established to designate the people of the New World and continues to be used today in the Portuguese language to designate these people, while a person from India is called indiano in order to distinguish the two. At the time of European contact, some of the indigenous people were traditionally mostly semi-nomadic tribes who subsisted on hunting, fishing, gathering and migrant agriculture. Many of the estimated 2,000 nations and tribes which existed in the 16th century suffered extinction as a consequence of the European settlement and many were assimilated into the Brazilian population. The indigenous population was largely killed by European diseases, declining from a pre-Columbian high of millions to some 300,000 (1997), grouped into 200 tribes. However, the number could be much higher if the urban indigenous populations are counted in all the Brazilian cities today. A somewhat dated linguistic survey found 188 living indigenous languages with 155,000 total speakers. On January 18, 2007, FUNAI reported that it had confirmed the presence of 67 different uncontacted tribes in Brazil, up from 40 in 2005. With this addition, Brazil has now surpassed New Guinea as the country having the largest number of uncontacted peoples in the world. Brazilian indigenous people have made substantial and pervasive contributions to the world's medicine with knowledge used today by pharmaceutical corporations, material, and cultural development—such as the domestication of tobacco and cassava. In the last IBGE census (2010), 817,000 Brazilians classified themselves as indigenous. Questions about the original settlement of the Americas has produced a number of hypothetical models. The origins of these indigenous people are still a matter of dispute among archaeologists. Anthropological and genetic evidence indicates that most Amerindian people descended from migrant people from North Asia (Siberia) who entered the Americas across the Bering Strait or along the western coast of North America in at least three separate waves. In Brazil, particularly, most native tribes who were living in the land by 1500 are thought to be descended from the first Siberian wave of migrants, who are believed to have crossed the Bering Land Bridge at the end of the last Ice Age, between 13,000 and 17,000 years before the present. A migrant wave would have taken some time after initial entry to reach present-day Brazil, probably entering the Amazon River basin from the Northwest. (The second and third migratory waves from Siberia, which are thought to have generated the Athabaskan, Aleut, Inuit, and Yupik people, apparently did not reach farther than the southern United States and Canada, respectively.)