During the October 2024 first-contact encounter, the Mashco Piro warriors approached in visible fear, and after being given offerings of bananas and rope, tensions eased into a peaceful, curious exchange rather than violence.

46:22know. But they shot him. And then the other thing is the thing with the necklace. I've asked anthropologists about this, and their answer was that at this point they said, "You know more than we do." Because two of them had the exact same item around their necks, and it seems to be a Brazil nut and then some sort of casing around the side, and it looked like animal teeth

46:52positioned in there. And it's like, what are you carrying? Are you carrying medicine? Are you carrying some sort of a totem? But both of them... and it's not a comfortable thing to wear around your neck— you know, grapefruit-sized or bigger. - Do you have a sense if that's a container or is it just like a totem? - It seems like a container. If they didn't let it get wet, they cared

47:12for it. The guy in this picture, he's got this... this is a piece of tree fiber that he has it on him, and then he's gotten his hands on Brazil nut sacks, plastic sacks from one of the farms across the river. And so they just take, they take. And one of them got a machete and he was walking. As they were leaving, again, during that period where they got

47:31friendly, he was leaving and he had the machete, playing with it and swinging it at butterflies. And one of my friends, this guy Bacho, he goes, "Oye, deja mi machete." He's like, "Drop the machete." And the guy just looked at him and was like, "Yeah, come and get it." You know, it's like, "Yeah, you cross the river and see what happens." - Do you think he figured out, or they later figured out, how to use a machete?

47:51- Oh, they know the machete. - They understand the machete? - Yeah, they do raids for machetes. - They understand the power of sharpened metal. - It's an Excalibur sword to them. But yeah, that one has stuck with me because I wonder, what were they carrying in there? - So what are some of the questions? Like if you could know everything you'd want to know about them—

48:14Maybe in the space of communication and language, that's really interesting. You mentioned that there's all kinds of calls, animal calls. So they obviously know how to fake animal calls. - Yeah, they can use animal calls with enough complexity that they can do basic commands. They can speak in Capuchin; they use Tinamou calls. Some of our rangers were upriver a few months ago. This is recently, they were upriver and they found a Nomole trail, a Mashco-Piro trail,