Bora-Huitoto

Bora-Huitoto is the proposed grouping of two closely situated language families of the western Amazon rainforest, Boran and Witotoan, spoken in the jungle lowlands between the Napo, Putumayo and Caquetá rivers. Whether the two families truly share a common ancestor remains debated among linguists.

The Bora, whose Miraña kin formed a closely related people, lived by slash-and-burn farming, hunting and river fishing, while the Witoto or Huitoto were once a loose nation of villages sharing long communal maloca houses and summoning one another across the forest with great maguare drums during coca rituals.

Shielded by forest and swamp from the Andean empires, these peoples had no recorded contact with Europeans until the early 1600s, and outsiders rarely penetrated their territory, so the languages passed through the following centuries largely untouched by Spanish.