INDONESIA: Korowai, Cannibal Tribes Of Papua, Indonesia

In the dense tropical forests of Guinea, Indonesia, scattered across mountain ranges, there lives a jungle tribe known as the Korowai. Their first contact with the outside world was in 1970’s, when a group of missionaries discovered a group of people living in timber treehouses and using stone tools.

The primitive Korowai tribe of Papua, Indonesia was first contacted in the 1970s by archaeologists and missionaries, at which point they were still using stone tools and living in wooden treehouses. Since then, they pretty much still just do the stone tool and treehouse scene.

The Korowai believed that the entire world would be destroyed by an earthquake if they ever changed their customs. The indigenous Korowai tribe have been building their towering tree houses probably long before we ever had skyscrapers, on the isolated island of New Guinea, part of Papua in the Indonesian Rainforest.

Now that's either a batshit crazy level of commitment to tradition or a really killer excuse for when whitey comes around and asks you to stop living in your bitchin' treehouse. Regardless, it worked: The missionaries decided to take a hands-off approach and not risk the angry earthquake god of the Korowai.

More importantly, the Korowai's location is so densely forested and mountainous that most of its villages don't even have contact with each other, let alone with the outside world. When the tribe was surveyed by census officials in 2010, they first had to walk for two weeks -- after a long trip by boat from the nearest (still extremely friggin' remote) villages.

Plus, instead of discouraging tourism via a liberal application of murder, like the Sentinelese, the Korowai seem content to just prank society until it goes away. In addition to the totally-for-real earthquake that they "swear" will happen if they "ever put on pants," the Korowai also duped an Australian news team who trekked out to the area in 2006. The tribe put forward a young boy for the reporters to film, telling them a heart-rending story about how he was in danger of being eaten by cannibals. After the team somberly filmed the story and left, another news crew flew in to stage a dramatic on-screen rescue ... and was immediately arrested for not having visas, presumably to the tune of raucous Korowai laughter.

An expert on the tribe insists that this is exactly the kind of thing they do and assured reporters that the cannibalism story was embellished from the start, that the Korowai are likely just a tree-bound band of merry pranksters and that the only thing they want with the modern world is to see the looks on our faces.