Episode list

Bruce Parry joins the Matis, an Amazonian tribe wrongly nicknamed the jaguar people, in the 1980s nearly extinguished by exposure to Western germs, still quite a problem, and much of the shamans' herbal medicine was lost with them. Even bringing the imposed gift stipulated by Brazil's Indian agency PENA, the chief would refuse filming, till he is convinced the BBC is not here to exploit them as a primitive spectacle like earlier crews (even asked to pretend they still went naked) but to show their real life and transition with many modern introductions, such as soccer. Bruce shares his host Tumi's home with various vermin and partakes in social life, which happens largely in the long-house, including meals and rituals such as dripping a gruesome root-juice in their eyes and his as preparation for an exhausting hunt, notably for peccary after a dance imitating that boar's sounds and capture, covered in mud which is washed off. Blowpipes even shoot monkeys from high trees, some babies are adopted as pets. Evening entertainment includes story-telling and nature-imitating dances, salsa learned by young men in town -they prefer their own lifestyle still- has its village premiere in Bruce's presence. Fresh-cut switches, flexible enough to whip around the belly, are used on the bare back to give hunters courage, and by foliage-dressed 'forest spirits' on pregnant women and otherwise never chastised children to stimulate growth and cure laziness. Frog poison is administered trough small wounds as a vomiting-inducing ritual hunter's ordeal. Domestic fun includes body painting, which has lost any symbolical meaning. After his greatest hunt and the meal, Bruce gets a warm send-off.

Bruce passes five icy winter weeks with a traditional nomadic group -half live in modern villages- of the Nenets, a pastoral people on the Northern Siberian Yamal peninsula, inside the Arctic Circle, which holds a quarter of the world's known natural gas reserve. They live in tents, following reindeer herds, which are wild except for the semi-domesticated beasts of burden, given the huge distance a five month annual tundra migration. Everything is made and organized for the polar climate, actually too complicated for a novice guest to be much use. They also fish in the ice.

On Anuta, an extremely isolated small island, part of the (formerly British) Solomon Islands, Bruce gets the chief's permission to share 3 weeks the arguably most authentic Polynesian way of life with its 250 inhabitants, just 24 families who form a single, close community, bound by 'aropa', the principle that all produce -the entire atoll, behind low reefs, is gardened- and fishery catch -in the shallow using tidally flooded walls, and by canoe at sea- is shared, which facilitated the conversion to now devoutly practiced Anglicanism. Schooling in the distant national capital Honiara implies some westernizing, yet medicine remains so primitive -the chief refused a popularly desired clinic, claiming prayer helps best- that Bruce's first aid kit, mainly the antibiotics, must save a man's life with a badly infected foot. The traditional woven bark has given way, except for ceremonial use, to textile sarongs or Western dress. Native names are replaced in practice by Western ones, one boy was even called Mel Gibson- his father and another man went missing fishing a sea, presumed dead.

In this episode Bruce stays a month with the Atie, a hunter-gatherer tribe, which lives in Tanzania, surrounded by the far more numerous, pastoral Maasai, who look down upon them as 'cattle-less primitives' and soil the pools by washing in them, so the Atie generally must drink dirty water. They significantly supplement their meager hunting harvest by braving bees for honey, for Bruce a personal phobia.

Bruce spends a month in Laya, a village of the Luna people in the inaccessible north of Himalayan Budhist kingdom Bhutan. The local spiritual (and social) headman teaches him about ascetic detachment, but the traditions are more animistic. Even by yak, the local bovine and burden animal, traveling to even higher Lunana has to be abandoned. Returning also means participating in the three days annual festival, including an archery competition

Bruce joins one of the last authentic nomadic hunter-gatherer bands of the Penan people in the Malaysian state of Sarawak in northern Borneo. he's charmed by their kind, clever way to live in harmony with neither and each-other. But most of all he's sadly impressed by the tragic ruin of their ancient way of life by government-authorized logging, which ruins the primary rain-forest forever: even when it grown back, the resulting secondary forest never regains the necessary rich variety to properly support wildlife and the Penan.