The Punan people of the island of Borneo were once rumored to have tails, so elusive did they seem to their neighbors in the 19th century. Over decades, the Indonesian government stripped the Punan of their ancestral lands and encouraged them, sometimes forcibly, to settle in ready-built villages. By the 1990s, anthropologists believed that the group’s traditional hunter-gatherer lifestyle had vanished. In 2002, a census of the Punan in eastern Borneo focused only on the villages, because so few nomads were thought to exist. But with funding from the National Science Foundation, the scientists made contact with the nomadic group in 2018, and began collecting data with the aim of ensuring their health and welfare.

---

Persons: Stephen Lansing, Pradiptajati Organizations: Santa Fe Institute, Riady, for Nanotechnology, National Science Foundation Locations: Borneo, Indonesian, Tangerang, Indonesia