Hidden in beautiful Southeast Asia, a unique tribe of people has existed for centuries specifically to perform one task. Over time, their bodies adapted to their needs, leading scientists to believe that they are evolved superhumans...
Far Away From Society...
You may have seen pictures of them in National Geographic, but you probably don’t know who they are. This is the Bajau Laut tribe. They’re located on several of the beautiful shores of Southeast Asia. They have been living on the water for centuries, sustaining themselves entirely from the fruits of the ocean and the shore. This type of lifestyle is unique to the Bajau Laut tribe exclusively, there is no other society like theirs on Earth...
Unlike Anyone Else
The average member of the Bajau Laut tribe spends 60% of their lives in and on water. These tribes have been able to survive by strictly consuming food and water sourced from the ocean and the surrounding areas. Needless to say, this lifestyle has changed the way these individuals develop physically over time. Due to the centuries-old bloodline and the rigid lifestyle restrictions that these individuals have put themselves under, the Bajau Laut tribe’s genetic structure evolved differently from the average land-dwelling human. In fact, some scientists think that they’re superhumans…
Pieces of a Whole
Sometimes referred to as “sea nomads,” the Bajau Laut tribe lives in several different areas around Southeast Asia. Although they have settlements in other places, the Bajau Laut has key settlements in the Philippines, Brunei, and Malaysia. Their major settlements, or “hubs,” are placed in areas with habitable shores and fruitful vegetation nearby. There are intermittent settlements in between the hub settlements to provide places for traveling tribe members to eat and rest.
A Dangerous Set of Skills
It’s estimated that the Bajau Laut tribe has around one million members, although that information will never truly be collected because they do not share their tribal history with the outside world. However, they do share their rituals and skills to help them stay afloat (financially). The Bajau Laut tribe has been mastering a particular skill for centuries that has allowed them to become a wealthy and modernized group. This particular skill is so dangerous and difficult that nobody else on Earth can perform it, making them an invaluable resource to society…
Diving into It
The reason that the Bajau Laut tribe has houses on the water is so they can rest and eat in between sessions of diving. Strong members of the tribe will take boats, called “lepa-lepa” in their common tongue, out on the water and dive to enormous depths to collect fish and mollusks to resell when they return to shore. That is the existence of a member of the Bajau Laut tribe, they wake up early, dive deep into the ocean, head to shore to sell their extremely rare goods, and return back again the next day. But how do they do this?
A Genetic Abnormality
The majority of the goods that the tribe sources are deep underwater. There are some urchins and clams that can fetch between $50-100 USD apiece located 100+ feet under the surface, and in order to grab them, the strongest members of the tribe need to hold their breath for extremely long periods of time under unbelievable pressure. Freediving is an activity that takes just as much genetic luck as it does practice and skill, but for some reason, the majority of the Bajau Laut tribe has the ability to free dive past certain depths that would terrify a hobbyist freediver with ease. Scientists were perplexed by the biological makeup that would allow a member of this tribe to have this innate ability, and they came up with a shocking conclusion...
Selecting the Future
Children of the Bajau Laut tribe are trained extremely early to become comfortable diving deep underwater. In fact, if a child doesn’t pass a rigorous swimming test by age 10, they are stationed on the shore and in boats to make sure that their fellow tribe members stay safe while diving. Those who do not dive manage the cooking, cleaning, bed making, and scheduling for those who dive to make the tribe money.
The Way of the Tribe
If a child does pass the rigorous swimming test, they are then pushed to start diving deeper and deeper. Once they start becoming comfortable acclimating and reacclimating, they get pushed to go farther and into waters with varying temperatures and current patterns. They’re closely monitored by the mentors of the tribe, but before they’re allowed to start fishing and collecting crustaceans, they are forced to go through a life-altering physical transition that is both horribly painful and difficult to endure…
The Ultimate Test
This initiation is a “trial by fire” type of experiment that is necessary for the divers to endure before they can start doing what they train for professionally. The mentor divers bring the young ones down as deep as they can, and in some cases, the children pass out because their lungs and bodies cannot withstand the pressure. The mentors push them lower and lower until they notice blood coming from the young diver’s ears, then, and only then, will they bring them up to the surface.
Learning the Way
The mentor divers then place the young divers on platforms that are suspended in the sea. They make sure that the young divers are comfortable, breathing, and unharmed, then they let them sit as their ears and noses bleed. This brutal and terrifying process is a rite of passage in the Bajau Laut tribe, and this act is actually medically necessary for the young divers to perform their jobs effectively...
Necessity of Lifestyle
When the mentor divers bring the young divers down deep underwater, the intention is to rupture their eardrums. Every diver in the Bajau Laut tribe has to undergo this process to make sure that they have the physical capability to withstand the extreme pressure conditions that they are regularly put under. Although it is brutal, this personal mutilation is necessary, and it does not affect the hearing of the young individuals after the ruptures heal.
The Recovery
After performing the rituals, the young divers are instructed to lay down for an entire week to allow their wounds to heal. Due to their eardrums rupturing, the young divers are rarely even able to stand because of their lack of equilibrium. After their injuries heal, they are ready to start learning how to dive professionally, which is where their actual physical mutations are useful...
Evolution Over Time
In order to get to the bottom of why these people are the way they are, first, you must understand what happens when cultures meld with each other. Evolution is a non-linear process that has been changing, adapting, and recreating itself since the dawn of humanity. Humans used to travel in packs (also known as tribes), so evolution was originally predicated on genetic changes within those microcosms. As humanity became more widespread, and the world became a genetic melting pot—physical evolution became less important, and societal evolution became paramount.
The Dawn of Recorded History
Since the Bajau Laut tribe has not assimilated with general society, nor are there any individuals of the tribe that came from different ethnicities at any point, their group evolved internally for centuries until this point. In fact, there is early evidence that the Bajau Laut tribe ruled the shores of Southeast Asia centuries before this point. Documentation of the Bajau Laut tribe’s physical attributes started all the way back in the early 1500s, with the observations that were recorded by a European seafarer…
The Origin Story
According to members of the tribe, their origin story varies from settlement to settlement, but the earliest recorded story sounded a little something like this… Evidently, the tribe began as a shore dwelling village that was run by a singular monarch. This monarch was the single father of a princess who ended up going missing one day.
Not So Simple
Different settlements of the Bajau Laut tribe have different retellings of this particular part of their story, but the most prevalent retelling is that the king ordered his entire tribe to go out into the sea to find his daughter. When they were unable to locate her, the whole tribe opted to stay in the sea to avoid their king’s wrath when they returned to shore. However, other subsects of the Bajau Laut tribe did not see the story end in that way, in fact, there was much more that occurred afterward...
Conflicting Love
According to one legend, the princess had disappeared because of a member of the Malaysian side of the tribe's efforts to kidnap and marry her. The prince of the royal family of the Malaysian subsect fell in love with the princess but discovered that she was to be wed to another. In retaliation, he took members of the Borneo tribe on a journey to claim his beloved...
The Great Battle
Evidently, the man who was to wed the princess was the sultan of the Brunei side of the tribe, and when he caught word that the Malaysian prince was headed his way to try and capture his wife-to-be. In a grand clash of ambushes, the three subsects meshed in a three-sided civil war for the hand of the beautiful princess. After a great battle, the prince of Borneo came out victorious, but while they were battling, the princess was swept up in a great flood…
Saved by the Stingray
The prince searched far and wide, but the princess was nowhere to be found. In the great flood, the princess was swept up by a giant stingray that brought her to shore safely on the shores of Indonesia, where she met a member of the Gowan royal family, which was the smallest subsect of the Bajau Laut tribe. The princess decided to marry the kind and gentle prince of Gowan. After the royal families caught word of this, they were inspired to drop arms and live harmoniously with the rest of the tribe for good.
The Great Protector
It is part of the general lore of the tribe that the stingray that carried the princess to safety watched over them and made sure that none of the tribe’s members would drown. It was said that if a member of the tribe were to be trapped underwater the stingray would sweep them up and bring them back to their boats. This gave the tribe confidence to dive as deeply as they do, which brings us back to the centuries-old lifestyle that allowed them to genetically mutate themselves to where they are today…
Mastering the Art
The Bajau Laut construct their own diving gear that is significantly stronger than the industry standard for freedivers. Their goggles are constructed of glass and factory-grade rubber, and their spears are individually forged by master craftsmen. Strangely enough, none of this would matter if they didn’t share some strange genetic traits with seals…
Similar to Seals
Seals have a larger lung capacity than most other semi-aquatic mammals, similar to the individuals in the Bajau Laut tribe. But, something they both share is a strong chest that is innately able to withstand underwater atmospheric pressure. Without this, members of the tribe would not be able to dive deeper than 100 feet…
The Spoils of Evolution
In a 2018 study, some members of the Bajau Laut tribe were selected to undergo some medical examinations to discover why they’re so good at what they do. Outside of their ruptured eardrums, the chest of the average member of the tribe is close to 2x as strong as the typical human. This is not because of repetitive subjection to pressure, it’s completely genetic…
Stronger By Generation
Natural selection of individuals over hundreds of generations has made Bajau Laut tribe members give birth to babies with significantly stronger ribcages and a denser muscular structure around the sternum. It’s incredibly dangerous to dive deep underwater by proxy, but one of the largest dangers is having the chest cavity collapse internally and cause the diver’s lungs to compress. This would push all of the oxygenated air out of the diver’s system and force their body to reacclimate under extreme pressure…
The Dangers of Diving
Needless to say, this would cause the diver to drown, or at least pass out. Even though the Bajau Laut tribe has this genetic failsafe built into their bodies, they are still not completely immune to the effects of drowning. Roughly 4-40 members of the tribe drown annually, and that’s with all of the protective measures that they already have in place to avoid this. However, there is one particularly dangerous phenomenon that claims more lives than drowning and old age annually combined…
Stop and Go
“The bends” occur when the body is acclimated to serious underwater pressure and the swimmer returns to the surface too quickly. In order to avoid getting the bends, divers are instructed to stop every 10-20 feet and allow their bodies to decompress as they come up. If they don’t do this, they risk suffering an embolism, and in some cases, death…
Dangerous Decompression
The Bajau Laut tribe members' bodies have mutated to a point that they are less likely to get the bends since they have evolved to withstand extreme pressure situations. However, at the end of the day, this is the largest danger to members of the tribe. Without a standardized method of medical treatment, nobody is capable of putting suffering members of the tribe in stasis…
More Research Unfolds
The greatest defense that these divers have is another genetic abnormality that links them to the common seal. Seals have larger spleens than any other semi-aquatic mammal, which they use to store oxygenized blood in emergency scenarios. If a seal is drowning, the blood deposit in their spleens will engage and allow them to stay awake, and the divers of the Bajau Laut tribe have a similar organ…
Bigger Spleens
Part of the discoveries that were made in the 2018 biological study of the Bajau Laut tribe indicated that those who are freedivers have enlarged spleens that function similarly to that of seals. These enlarged spleens take the place of the kidneys in the pelvis, as the Bajau Laut tribe has evolved to have smaller kidneys than the average person. If a member of the tribe is drowning, their spleens will engage and they will stay awake as previously mentioned. However, this does not protect them from their greatest danger of all…
The Future Looks Rough
The Indonesian government has been threatening to derail the tribe’s traditions now that tourism has increased in Southeast Asia. More recently, people from Europe and America have been invading the shores that these tribe members call home and destroying the ecosystem that the tribe sustains itself off of. In fact, the minimal impact that they already have on the Earth might be even more devastating than expected…
No Dumping
The members of the Bajau Laut tribe do not produce any trash. They sustain themselves off of food and water from the sea and surrounding areas, everything they consume has a biodegradable shell or other characteristics that benefit the ecosystem when disposed of. With the influx of tourism, the Indonesian government is forced to hire trash removal services that bring cars and trucks onto the previously lush shorelines that the Bajau Laut tribe inhabits…
Financial Intervention
Because they make so much money off of tourism, the Bajau Laut tribe is being threatened by the Indonesian government because of their lack of willingness to assimilate. The government is using their lack of standardized medical practice to say that the lifestyle of the Bajau Laut tribe is inhumane, and they prevent their members from surviving in otherwise survivable situations. In fact, the tribe believes that this is the opposite case based on their ideals…
Looking into the Future
The Members of the Bajau Laut tribe believe that their way of life is natural and calm, much like the folk tale of the princess and her dedication to simplicity. The tribe believes that they evolved to do exactly what they do better than anyone else, and if they lose that, they will have nothing. Their story is poetic and inspiring, but their fate may be sealed within the next few years as the necessity for capital overweighs the centuries-old traditions that the tribe uniquely holds.