Last year, American anthropologists Robert Walker and Kim Hill - of the University of Missouri and Arizona State University respectively - took it upon themselves to write an editorial for the weekly journal Science, entitled "Protecting isolated tribes".

The tribes in question, according to Walker and Hill, are "about 50 isolated indigenous societies across lowland South America … with limited to no contact with the outside world".

According to the prominent human rights group Survival International, there aremore than 100 so-called "uncontacted" tribes living in voluntary isolation in the world, the vast majority of them in the South American Amazon.

Walker and Hill's strategy for "protecting" these groups is one of "controlled contact", in which governments initiate well-organised and sustained contact with the tribes and gradually integrate them into the official domestic fold, where their rights can allegedly be better protected.

As the anthropologists' reasoning goes, isolated existence is unviable in the long term given designs on the tribes' territory by groups such as "miners, loggers, and hunters", and governments should therefore pre-empt the damage.