Yamanas

Arrived in Ushuaia at about 6pm last night and disembarked at 8am today. Spent the morning in Ushuaia as my flight is not until 8pm this evening. Visited the museum and learned a little about the indigenous people of this part of Tierra del Fuego. They went by the name of Yamanas, stone age people who hunted seals in canoes (the Yamanas were in the canoes, not the seals!). The blurb said that sea lions were their main source of food but the English was rather quaint and I wonder if it meant seals? They had developed layers of fat to stay warm and did not wear clothes, as they would have been permanently wet in the canoes.  When Europeans first encountered the Yamanas they thought they were incredibly primitive (even someone as perspicacious as Darwin thought they might be intermediate between apes and homo sapiens).  Europeans assumed they must be miserable and cold and pressured them to wear clothes.  When they started wearing clothes they just got wet and filthy and disease (and probably hypothermia) contributed to the demise of the whole people. They were better off, and probably perfectly happy, naked in their canoes.  The last Yamana died at the beginning of the 20th century. Today's blip is a photo of a photo in the museum (hope that's acceptable within the blipfoto rules?, obviously it's not my photo).  The lower picture shows some Yamanas standing in a European boat. The upper picture shows some wearing clothes and standing outside a hovel of European construction. Their traditional dwellings were made of sealskin.
I fly to Buenos Aires tonight and then back home tomorrow. It's been a fantastic trip, even the naturalists on the expedition team said they had never seen so much wildlife and we got lucky with the weather, made almost all the landings and had blue skies and sunshine on Deception Island. Even the Drake Passage gave us excitement, just on the right side of scary! So back to auld claithes and purridge. It's such a pity M couldn't be here.