Pume

The Pumé, whom early Spanish explorers knew as Yaruro, are a people of the Venezuelan llanos west of the Orinoco. They call themselves Pumé, meaning real human, and divide into the River Pumé, who keep manioc gardens and more fixed villages, and the Savanna Pumé, hunter-gatherers who move between seasonal camps.

Savanna men hunt with long palm-wood bows, women gather wild tubers, and in the dry season families fish the lagoons with arrows, hooks and fish poison. Their Pumé tongue is a language isolate, identified as unrelated to any known family in Filippo Gilii's Saggio di storia americana of 1782.

The Pumé had encountered Europeans since at least the 1600s, but contact remained thin, especially for the savanna bands far from river routes, allowing their nomadic foraging life and language to survive the colonial centuries with little change.