COMMENT | Imagine this, a man covered in macaw feathers lying still in a hammock outside a straw hut in the middle of a rainforest. Without context, it conjures up a serene picture of a man at rest.

Actually, it was the corpse of a man who was the last member of his indigenous tribe in Brazil, marking the first recorded disappearance of an uncontacted tribe in the South American nation’s history.

Indigenous experts in Brazil believed the man placed the macaw feathers on himself in the knowledge that he was on the verge of dying.

He is deemed to have died of natural causes and while the deceased’s name remains a mystery, he is known to the world as “the Man of the Hole” because of the dozens of holes he dug over the years in his territory.

Officials from Brazil’s indigenous protection agency Funai - who have been monitoring his survival since the 1990s - guessed that he was just about 60 years old.

It is believed that the majority of his tribe had been killed as early as the 1970s by ranchers.

In 1995, six remaining members of his tribe were...