Whenever a modern uncontacted tribe is found, it seems curiously consistent that they are barely even agricultural at best-much less even up to pace with most of the world’s society. What makes it so we never seem to discover unheard of industrial societies? They had as much time as anyone else to have come to the same conclusions. What causes one group to be splitting atoms while the other is still using bows and arrows?
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Uncontacted tribes are just that, uncontacted. We’re aware of them, we’re just respecting their decision not to be in touch with us. Vice versa, most uncontacted tribes are aware of us and choose to have nothing to do with us.
It’s really hard to hide an industrial society. They’re not exactly well hidden. And they require a certain population size before they can become industrial. You can’t really have miners, factory workers, and the like until you have sufficient food production to support people who do nothing but study, invent, mine, work in a factory, and so on.
Industrial societies also don’t want to be isolated. Once you industrialize a production process, you can produce a lot of the things you industrialized. So many that you want to open up trade relations with other nations.
All of which takes invention. And necessity is the mother of all invention. The most advanced nations tend to be the ones with the greatest need for progress. Because their climate made it hard to feed the population. Because strife with their neighbours promoted research. For a lot of reasons really.
Most uncontacted tribes live in tropical regions where food can be grown year long, the climates are warm and soft, nature provides plenty of meat, fish, fruit, nuts and so on. Or places so harsh that there was little opportunity to develop beyond wringing a living out of the land.
Progress is a snowball effect. If you never have a need or an opportunity to get the ball rolling, nothing much changes.
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