Yaghan

The Yahgan, also called Yámana, were the southernmost people on Earth, occupying the islands and channels south of Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego as far as Cape Horn in five canoe-borne groups. Their language, Yámana, is an isolate.

They were nomadic hunter-gatherers who lived almost entirely from the sea: men harpooned sea lions from bark canoes, women dived for shellfish, and everyone gathered berries, mushrooms and the meat of stranded whales. They went mostly naked beside fires, slept in domed huts and kept Fuegian dogs.

Ferdinand Magellan sighted their fires in 1520, but sustained contact came only in the nineteenth century. In 1830 Robert FitzRoy of HMS Beagle seized four Yahgan, including the youth Jemmy Button, carried them to England and presented them at court, then brought them home on the voyage of 1832 that carried Charles Darwin.