Ubirajara discovered quickly that the greatest obstacle for a modern man in the Neolithic isn't the lack of technology, but the crushing presence of reality.
That morning, he had attempted his first diplomatic maneuver. Seated near one of the longhouse pillars, he gathered a few resting warriors and tried to describe the Portuguese: pale-skinned men with faces covered in thick beards, wearing clothes that hid their entire bodies, arriving from the sea in giant ships.
The response was a mixture of laughter and mockery.
"White men? With beards?" Abaeté, a warrior whose arm scars told stories of conflicts Ubirajara hoped never to see, tilted his head. "You speak of Jaci Jaterê, the protector of the yerba mate? They say he wanders the forest guarding what is sacred, but he is small, Ubirajara. And he doesn't come in ships, only with mischief and disappearances."
Ubirajara sighed. If even the tribe's myths didn't come close to describing a European, the conclusion was inevitable: there were no Portuguese. No Spanish. No French.
He was at some point in the timeline before 1500, or perhaps before 1492.
"If there is no one here, I need to search in other villages," Ubirajara suggested, trying to keep his voice steady. "Someone must have seen something beyond the horizon."
The silence that followed was cold. Abaeté stopped sharpening his bone tip and stared at him with a seriousness that made the hair on Ubirajara arms stand up.
"You want to walk alone to our neighbors' lands?" Abaeté asked. "They are in need of a new guest of honor for the banquet, Ubirajara. You are strong, you have good muscles. They would be honored to eat your flesh to absorb your courage before the next moon. Their cauim would taste sweet mixed with your blood."
The word anthropophagy ceased to be an exotic textbook concept and became an immediate biological threat. Ubirajara felt his stomach turn. Diplomacy, in this society, wasn't conducted with handshakes, but with the risk of becoming the main course.
Without prestige, without an army, and without knowledge of the terrain, he was just a walking piece of protein.
Disheartened, he walked away, returning to the gloom of the maloca. He needed a new approach. If he couldn't flee to "civilization," he would have to create it. And to create a civilization, he needed political power.
"Power grows out of the barrel of a gun," went a saying he had read once. But here, it would be born from the arrow or the spirit. Religion and military prowess. The two oldest institutions of humanity.
He realized that structures managing large masses of people always resembled religion; even the modern nationalism he knew was just a cult of the State with flags instead of idols.
He needed to become indispensable. He began to observe the village with the eyes of an analyst.
The maloca where he lived was a complex micro-society. He estimated about fifteen families living under the same thatched roof. But they weren't families like those in São Paulo.
There was no isolation of "father, mother, and children." It was an extended and collective network. He saw children being breastfed by women who weren't their biological mothers and men teaching archery to nephews with the same dedication they would have for their own sons.
The idea of "mine" was diluted by "ours."
He noticed polygamy in some nuclei. It wasn't lust; it was pure politics. Chiefs and great warriors had multiple wives to create ties with other villages, ensuring that, in case of war, they had more brothers-in-law and fathers-in-law to fight by their side.
The women, in turn, were not submissive. They had autonomy, managed the agriculture, and could simply leave if the husband wasn't a good provider.
It was a structured and well-defined division of labor; survival here was based on human connections, not currency.
As he processed this, a sudden chill ran down his spine.
"And the original Ubirajara?"
The question hit him like a punch. He had woken up in this body after a fever. If he was here, where was the consciousness that inhabited this chest before?
He imagined, with horror, a Tupi warrior waking up in his thirty-square-meter apartment, trying to hunt pigeons in the city square or being restrained by nurses while screaming for Tupã.
"My family..." Ubirajara thought, feeling a pang of guilt. He hoped the original Ubirajara wouldn't end up as a social pariah in the 21st century, though he knew there was nothing he could do.
He was in a body that wasn't his, in a time that wasn't his own.
He left the maloca with two clear objectives: to understand his circumstances to gain political capital, and to begin a training regimen. He didn't have the instinct of a natural hunter; he would have to compensate with physical prowess.
Taking advantage of the siesta hour a sacred custom to avoid the heat and, according to local legend, avoid encountering Jaci Jaterê, Ubirajara withdrew to an isolated corner near the fields.
He started with calisthenics. Push-ups, squats, planks. Ubirajara's body was already strong, but Ubirajara wanted functional, explosive strength.
Then, he began to run, but not a steady jog; he applied the concept of HIIT (High-Intensity Interval Training), alternating sprints with brisk walking to increase his cardiovascular endurance.
"Even if I can't be the best warrior, I will be the most tenacious and persistent," he promised himself.
As he exercised, he watched the women working in the fields. They were the guarantors of material continuity: food and children. The men, on the other hand, guaranteed social continuity: defense and prestige.
He saw the division of labor as a monolith; men didn't plant manioc because it was linked to female fertility. Changing that now would be seen as heresy.
The Tupi-Guarani didn't organize labor to accumulate wealth, but to guarantee the group's subsistence.
They produced with a margin and predictability, not at the edge of starvation, but without transforming surplus into power or permanent stock. What was left over was consumed in rituals, parties, and alliances, not hoarded. Work served social life, not economic growth.
"A different division of labor would generate surplus," he thought, wiping away sweat.
"But without political power, I'm just a madman trying to teach a priest how to say mass."
His contemplation was interrupted by a tall shadow. It was Abaeté.
"Ubirajara. Enough talking to the wind and fighting with nothing," the warrior said.
"I had a dream. I saw a white-lipped peccary cross the river in silence, leaving no track in the mud. An animal like that doesn't come without warning. Besides, we received news that an allied village will visit us in two suns. Receiving friends without meat is a shame. Manioc sustains the body, but meat honors the guest. Let's hunt."
Ubirajara felt a tightness in his chest. Hunting. He was apprehensive about whether he was capable; after all, he had never hunted in his life.
He took the bow, a magnificent piece of dark wood and followed the group. They departed when the day was still undecided, the light filtered by the treetops creating a labyrinth of shadows.
They walked in single file, stepping exactly where the man in front stepped.
Ubirajara tried to imitate the lightness of the other warriors, but his mind was busy analyzing the biomechanics of walking on uneven terrain. His foot sought the ground with a millisecond delay.
Crack.
A dry branch snapped under his weight. The sound seemed like a cannon shot in the silence of the jungle. Abaeté didn't turn around, but Ubirajara felt the weight of the leader's judgment on the back of his neck. The silence grew denser, charged with invisible reproach.
Hours later, they spotted the tracks. The group split up like shadows dissolving into the foliage. Ubirajara was left on the edge, a flank position where the wind shifted constantly. It was the worst position for a clean shot, a clear sign they didn't trust him with the main kill.
Suddenly, the brush stirred. The peccary emerged from a bush less than ten meters away.
Ubirajara felt the adrenaline spike. He pulled the bowstring. His logical mind began to calculate: Distance: 8 meters. Wind speed: negligible. Arrow drop: minimal.
He fired too soon.
The arrow flew with force, but mental calculation didn't replace the lack of instinct. The bone tip merely sliced the leaves above the animal. The peccary let out a warning grunt and bolted.
Ubirajara watched, with a lump in his throat, as another hunter, a youth barely old enough to be a warrior leaped from behind a tree and felled the animal with a perfect shot to the neck.
The kill was quick. The silence that followed was worse than any scolding.
On the way back, Ubirajara carried a hindquarter of the peccary tied to his back. The weight was real, the meat was real, but the prestige was nonexistent.
He was just a porter now. Abaeté walked ahead, without saying a single word, but his posture said it all: Ubirajara was a stranger in his own body, a hunter who had lost his ear for the forest.
Upon arriving at the village, while handing the meat to the women to begin preparation, Ubirajara looked at his hands stained with blood. He realized that physical strength and calisthenics wouldn't be enough. He would never be the best archer in this jungle.
"If I can't be the person with the most dexterity," he muttered to himself, watching the warriors celebrate, "then I will be the smartest."
He sat near his hammock and began to draw on the beaten earth with a stick. He remembered the engineering traps he had seen in survival videos. Levers, tension triggers, pits with stakes.
If he couldn't hit a running animal, he would make the animal stay still.
While sketching the design of a torsion trigger, Ubirajara observed the dynamics around the central fire. He realized something crucial: knowing how to hunt didn't make him special.
In that society, bringing meat was the minimum. Almost every adult male knew how to handle a bow. Hunting was the basis of subsistence, not the stepping stone to power.
What separated a "made man" from a "useful boy" wasn't the pile of dead animals, but the weight of his word, participation in war, and the network of alliances he managed to weave.
He was about seventeen years old, he estimated by looking at his reflection in the water. For the Tupi, that meant he was on the border. He had physical vigor, which allowed for his early union, but he had no authority.
He was a hunter, not a Morubixaba. Without children to create ties with other families and without enemies killed in his name, he was politically irrelevant.
"Great," he thought sarcastically. "I'm an intern in the Stone Age."
A different shadow fell over his scribbles, lighter than Abaeté's.
Ubirajara raised his head. A woman was standing before him. She didn't have the exotic beauty idealized in old romances; she had common features, strong and practical.
What caught the eye was the body painting. Unlike the red annatto most used, she was covered in geometric patterns made with genipapo, a black, indelible ink that marked the skin like a temporary tattoo.
"Is the forest still spinning inside your head, Ubirajara?" she asked. The voice wasn't sweet, but carried a domestic familiarity, devoid of ceremony.
Ubirajara froze. His brain went into maximum alert mode. Who is she? Sister? Cousin? Nosy neighbor?
"The dizziness has passed," he replied cautiously, testing the waters.
She crouched beside him, not as a servant, but as an equal. She took a piece of beiju she had brought and held it out to him.
"You try too hard," she said, looking at the warriors cleaning the peccary. "You always have. Ever since you were brought here."
Brought here? Ubirajara bit into the beiju to buy time, chewing slowly while processing the information.
"Someone has to try," he grumbled, hoping she would say more.
"You don't need to prove anything to Abaeté today," she continued, wiping a smudge of dirt from his shoulder with a naturalness only intimacy permits.
"They know your blood is from another land, but you grew up here. You are one of us now, even if your original tribe has turned to ash and memory. That war is over, Ubirajara. You are no longer the orphan who cried in hiding. You are my husband."
Ubirajara nearly choked on the manioc flour.
Husband.
The word dropped like an anvil. He looked at her. Tainá. The name surfaced in his mind like an air bubble rising to the surface of a deep lake. Tainá. His wife.
The pieces of the puzzle of his social life snapped violently into place. He was an outsider. A war orphan adopted by the tribe after the conquest of his original people.
This explained everything: the original Ubirajara's desperate need to prove himself, the insecurity in the hunt, the marginal position in search formations.
He wasn't just a common youth; he was someone assimilated into this society, desperately trying to be more Tupi than the Tupis themselves to avoid the stigma of being an "other."
And he was married.
He glanced discreetly at her belly and the surroundings. No child came running to grab his legs. Zero children. An immense relief washed over his body. Having to take care of children would be a nightmare.
The absence of children made sense. He was young, a novice hunter with no prestige. Children in that society were not just the fruit of desire, but of stability and consolidated alliances.
He still wasn't strong enough to sustain a lineage.
"Tainá," he said the name, feeling the weight of responsibility. "I wasn't trying to prove anything to Abaeté. I was trying to contribute."
She looked at the drawings in the dirt, the mechanical diagrams of traps that to her must have looked like the scribbles of a feverish mind.
"Contribute by drawing in the sand?" She smiled, a brief, practical smile. "Come eat before the meat gets cold. If you didn't hunt, at least help eat. Tomorrow you try again."
She stood up and walked toward the maloca, expecting him to follow.
Ubirajara remained seated for a second longer, staring at the back of his unknown wife. His situation was more precarious than he imagined.
But, curiously, this gave him an advantage.
"An outsider doesn't have the bindings of tradition tied so tight," he thought, erasing the drawings with his foot so no one would understand.
If the original Ubirajara was already seen as different, Ubirajara could use this eccentricity as camouflage for his innovations. He stood up, wiped the dirt from his hands, and followed Tainá.