Word: professor
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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...
...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...
...themselves are the professor's worst opponents. Now that they have their peace with civilization after four centuries, they are coming out of the jungle, cutting their matted hair, switching from stone to metal implements. Koi is their leader in this respect. "Stone is no good," he declared last week. "Xetá life is no good; outside is better." Koi wants to be a taxi driver...