10 Peoples And Communities Cut Off From The World

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10 Peoples And Communities Cut Off From The World

All the notifications and bustle and crowdedness of the modern world can be pretty hard sometimes

Published 6 months ago in Wow

In an age when everybody is constantly connected, it’s hard to imagine not being a touch screen away from talking to anybody in the world. But there are various communities out there in the world who have been isolated from modern technology and society for as long as millennia.

Outside of uncontacted tribes who reject communication with modern civilization, there are also communities and groups of people who live in places where it’s just extremely hard to get to. These people are physically cut off from the world, hundreds and hundreds of miles from the nearest landmass.

All the notifications and bustle and crowdedness of the modern world can be pretty hard sometimes, but I’m glad I’m not hunting and gathering just to survive.

1
Moxihatetema
The Moxihatetema are an isolated tribe of roughly 100 people within the larger indigenous community of Yanomami people in the Amazon Rainforest. They have separated themselves from contact not only from the outside world, but also from other Yanomami tribes.

2
Yaifo and others
In Papua New Guinea, there may be more than 40 uncontacted tribes, including the Yaifo people. They mostly live a hunter-gatherer lifestyle and have little to no contact with the outside world. The tribes of Papua New Guinea are often associated with cannibalism or head hunting.

3
North Sentinel Island
The Sentinelese people of North Sentinel Island in India are an uncontacted tribe who have likely been isolated for thousands of years. Experts have called them the most isolated people in the world. They repel all attempts to visit or make contact, sometimes with lethal force.

4
Ayoreo
This reclusive tribe is native to the Gran Chaco, a huge forest in Paraguay that suffers from some of the worst deforestation in the world. The Ayoreo people spent years avoiding contact with outsiders, but that had to change when bulldozers came in to raze their forests. The Ayoreo have been working with human rights organizations to save their home but progress is slow.

5
Nomole
The Nomole people are nomadic hunter-gatherers who live in Manú National Park in Peru. They have made it clear they do not wish to be contacted, even amid the logging industry encroaching on their land. At least two loggers were killed by a group of Nomole in 2024.

6
The Pintupi Nine and the Richters
The Pintupi Nine and the Richters were two groups of Aboriginal Australian people who lived a hunter-gatherer way of life cut off from society in the deserts of Australia. They were uncontacted until they were found in the Gibson Desert and the Great Victoria Desert, respectively, in the 80s.

7
Tristan da Cunha
Tristan da Cunha is the most isolated archipelago in the world, a whopping 1,750 miles from the nearest land in South Africa. Less than 300 people permanently live there, and the island didn’t have its first resident until the year 1810. It’s considered a British Overseas Territory.

8
McMurdo Station
An American research station in Antarctica that was built on the site of British explorer Robert Falcon Scott’s 1902 expedition base. The station was started in 1956 and has around 1,200 residents, a number which understandably sharply drops in the winter. Though physically isolated from the world, McMurdo station does get internet, so it’s not completely cut off.

9
Ascension Island
Ascension Island is another island in the South Atlantic Ocean, about 1,000 miles from South Africa. The island’s total population is about 880, mostly made up of people working or stationed at the airfield used by US and UK militaries. It is impossible to become a citizen of Ascension Island. To live there, you must have an employment contract.

10
Whittier, Alaska
Whittier is a town in Southern Alaska that boasts around 270 residents as of the 2020 census. Whittier is only accessible by car through a tunnel, which only opens at certain hours of the day. The most unique thing about the town? Nearly all the residents live in one building, under the same roof.