The Amazon rainforest's "Bigfoot" he’s not, but a man reported to be the sole survivor of an indigenous tribe, and who has been uncontacted for 22 years, was recently sighted.
The Brazilian government believes the man, who appeared in an image posted to Facebook to be wearing a loincloth with his long hair tied back, has lived alone in the rainforst after his group was attacked by people looking to develop their land, The Independent reported.
"In the 1980s, disorderly colonization, the establishment of farms and illegal logging in [the Rondonia region] led to repeated attacks on the isolated indigenous peoples who had lived there until then, in a constant process of expulsion from their lands and death," said Funai, the country's National Indian Foundation.
"After the last farmer attack in late 1995, the group that was probably already small – from reports, the local staff believed [it] to be six people – became one person. The guilty were never punished."
Workers found the tribe's former living quarters in June 1996 and confirmed the presence of the man, nicknamed the "man in the hole." He now lives in an exclusion zone in the Tanaru indigenous reserve, The Independent said.
The Guardian reported that Funai has a policy of avoiding contact with isolated groups and has protected the man's area since the 1990s. He hunts forest pigs, birds and monkeys with a bow and arrow, and he traps prey in hidden holes filled with sharpened staves of wood.
"He is very well, hunting, maintaining some plantations of papaya, corn," said Altair Algayer, a regional coordinator for Funai in the Amazon state of Rondônia, according to The Guardian.
Algayer was with the team that filmed the man from a distance as he appeared to chop a tree.
"He has good health and a good physical shape doing all those exercises,” Algayer said.
Funai experts believe that as many as 113 uncontacted tribes are currently living in the Brazilian Amazon, 27 which have been confirmed.
Fiona Watson, the research and advocacy director of Survival International, a nonprofit group that works to protect indigenous peoples, said there are 15 uncontacted tribes in Peru, while others live in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Colombia
The tribes hunt with blowpipes and bows and arrows, and while their languages belong to linguistic groups, they can also differ wildly from each other, The Guardian said.
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