Is She the Oldest Person in the Amazon?

After more than 100 years in the rainforest, Varî Vãti Marubo walks with a stick and, as she always has, barefoot.

So when her Indigenous tribe, the Marubo, gathered for meetings this year in a village that would require a 13-mile hike across streams, fallen logs and dense forest to reach, everyone knew it would be difficult for her to attend.

But, as she has for a century, Varî Vãti dealt with the elements. She caught a ride on the only transportation available: her son’s back.

“Be careful with me!” she shrieked to her son, Tama Txano Marubo (all Marubo use the same surname), as he climbed down a muddy embankment with a machete in one hand and his mother on his back. Her weight sat on a blue strip of fabric that stretched tight across his forehead. “Call a truck to come get me!” she shouted to laughing relatives. “This is too much.”

She made it just fine.

Varî Vãti’s son, Tama Txano Marubo, carried his mother 13 miles across the forest via a strip of fabric stretched across his head.

Beyond being the senior elder in the 2,000-member Marubo tribe, Varî Vãti is likely one of the oldest people still living deep in the Amazon rainforest. Her official government document, based on an estimate from an anthropologist, says she turns 107 in September, though her family believes she is even older. Fellow tribe members describe her as over 120.