A Mlabri Man in Nan Privince, 1959 (Thailand)
Photographer: Boonserm Satrabhaya (the link is to a three-page illustrated biography). Image URL here.
The following is a quote from myself, taken from an August 27 post at my blog at Blogger.com:
Apparently back in 1936, an Austrian anthropologist/photographer by the name of Hugo Bernatzik performed a survey on the tribe -- whatever the Heck that is supposed to have entailed. He came upon them in the jungles of Nan province.
I'm not positive, but I get the impression that this may have been the first documented contact with these people.
Only when the Siam Society discovered them on August 10, 1962, did the Mlabri or Mrabri (or Mra Bri) -- called the Yellow Leaf People -- become "known."
They were nomads -- hunter-gatherers -- who did no farming. They would instead make their shelters and stay in one place only long enough for the leaves of their shelters to start to turn yellow; and then they would move on to a new location where the food was again more readily available.
I previously posted about this tribe here on Tumblr: The Yellow Leaf People.