Word: loureiro
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...from Curitiba came Anthropology Professor Jose Loureiro of the University of Parana, bringing Koi with him. He had studied every reference to the mysterious Xetás and spent long, frustrating hours with the boy, who refused to answer most questions about his people...
...some instinct rather than memory, Koi led Loureiro to camps of his people, which proved to be pathetic palm-leaf shelters set in tiny jungle clearings. The camps were always empty, but piles of fresh coconut shells and animal bones proved that Xetás were near. Logs showed charred holes where fires had been kindled by friction. At last, in the sixth camp, Professor Loureiro" found a stone ax. "It was fantastic," he said. "A Stone Age implement in actual use by living hands...
Gradually Professor Loureiro won the Xetás' confidence, returning season after season to talk with them through Koi. He made taped records of their speech, whose strange sounds seem to blend with the calls and cries of the jungle. Said Czech Philologist Cestmir Loukotka, who studied the tapes: "It is an entirely new language. The Xetás are a people apart, with a culture and ethnic consciousness of their own, a Stone Age remnant now unique in the world...
What apparently happened, says Professor Loureiro, was that the small, timid Xetás were driven into the rugged Serra dos Dourados by stronger tribes. Some time during the last four centuries they must have had terrifying brushes with European frontiersmen. Their demonology is dominated by an ogre named Möul who shows in figurines as a tall, long-legged, wide-eyed person, probably a white man grown into a tribal devil. Having seen enough of Möul and his violent ways, the Xetás retired into the tangled heart of the Serra dos Dourados and managed...
Scientist Loureiro believes the Xetás are the most primitive humans surviving in the modern world, is trying to persuade the Brazilian government to seal them off in a jungle preserve before they are pushed to the wall by the advancing frontier. "It would be a crime against science," he says, "to destroy Xetá culture now. The Xetás must be saved intact in their natural jungle surroundings-at least until we can complete our study of them...