Humanity Mosaic Add your world

Humanity Mosaic

One planet. Thousands of peoples. One humanity.

Thousands of distinct human worlds are still alive on Earth. Most of us know almost nothing about them. This is a living atlas of those worlds, built with the people who carry them — and it begins here.

Explore the atlas Add your world

Founding edition. The index below names 139 peoples across twelve cultural worlds.

Siberia & Far East

  • Chukchi
  • Koryak
  • Itelmen
  • Even
  • Evenki
  • Sakha
  • Nenets
  • Nganasan
  • Dolgan
  • Khanty
  • Mansi
  • Nivkh
  • Yukaghir
  • Selkup
  • Tuvan
  • Buryat

Arctic

  • Sámi
  • Kalaallit
  • Inuit
  • Iñupiat
  • Yupik
  • Unangan
  • Inuvialuit
  • Nunavimmiut

Central Asia

  • Kazakh
  • Kyrgyz
  • Mongol
  • Tsaatan
  • Pamiri
  • Karakalpak
  • Turkmen
  • Altai
  • Uyghur
  • Hazara
  • Wakhi

Caucasus

  • Svan
  • Tushetian
  • Khevsur
  • Avar
  • Lezgin
  • Tsez
  • Hinukh
  • Ossetian
  • Abkhaz
  • Chechen
  • Udi
  • Laz
  • Kubachi

Himalaya

  • Ladakhi
  • Sherpa
  • Lo-pa
  • Kalash
  • Burusho
  • Tamang
  • Lepcha
  • Bhutia
  • Monpa
  • Drokpa
  • Dolpo-pa

South-East Asian Highlands

  • Hmong
  • Dao
  • Akha
  • Karen
  • Lisu
  • Khmu
  • Wa
  • Naxi
  • Tay
  • Bru
  • Lahu
  • Mien
  • Ede
  • Cham

Pacific

  • Marshallese
  • Yapese
  • Marquesan
  • Māori
  • Trobriander
  • Bajau
  • Tongan
  • Chamorro
  • Kanak
  • Torres Strait Islanders
  • Rapa Nui

Andes

  • Quechua
  • Aymara
  • Uru
  • Mapuche
  • Kallawaya
  • Chachi
  • Kichwa
  • Q'ero

Amazonia

  • Shipibo
  • Asháninka
  • Kayapó
  • Yanomami
  • Waorani
  • Tikuna
  • Matsés
  • Huni Kuin
  • Awajún

Sahara & Sahel

  • Tuareg
  • Fulani
  • Wodaabe
  • Amazigh
  • Beja
  • Toubou
  • Songhai
  • Dogon
  • Zaghawa

East Africa

  • Maasai
  • Samburu
  • Turkana
  • Hadza
  • Dinka
  • Borana
  • Afar
  • Datoga
  • Karamojong
  • Nuer
  • Rendille

Europe

  • Kihnu
  • Seto
  • Livonian
  • Karelian
  • Faroese
  • Sardinian
  • Basque
  • Sorb
  • Aromanian
  • Pomak
  • Gorani
  • Hutsul
  • Walser
  • Roma
  • Arbëreshë
  • Ladin
  • Cornish
  • Old Believers

139 peoples named here. Thousands more belong in the mosaic.

Indigenous people worldwide (UN estimate)
476 million
Different cultures represented by Indigenous peoples
5,000
Languages spoken worldwide, most of them by Indigenous peoples
~7,000
Of the world's languages threatened with extinction
40%+

Indigenous peoples are only the first layer. Beyond them are thousands of ethnolinguistic, nomadic, mountain, island, maritime and regional communities, each a complete world.

Sources: United Nations, International Day of the World's Indigenous Peoples · UNESCO, "Is Culture the Key to Safeguarding Indigenous Rights?" and UN DESA, International Year of Indigenous Languages (40% of about 6,700 languages at risk of disappearing).

The world is far less uniform than the internet makes it appear.

A people of forty thousand in the Siberian taiga may have a two-paragraph encyclopedia entry, a few papers behind paywalls and a handful of social accounts in a language no algorithm surfaces. Their food, their calendar, their words for snow, the way they name a child and bury a parent, what they read in the river — none of it is findable by a curious sixteen-year-old in Manila or Manchester.

This is the hidden human world. Not hidden by secrecy, but by scale, by language and by the shape of the internet. Humanity Mosaic makes it visible, people by people, world by world.

Outside

“I had no idea humans lived like this.”

Discovery is the magnet.
Inside

“We are building a backup of humanity's cultural memory.”

Preservation is the mission.

Open the planet by worlds, not borders.

The atlas is organised the way the mosaic is: by peoples, environments, cultural zones, themes and how alive a practice still is. Modern states appear only as faint context. What you see here is a preview index: the structure is complete, the first worlds are opening, and no world or theme has published pieces yet.

Six kinds of piece.

The atlas is built from small, credited pieces of real worlds. Each kind does one job; together they make a people legible from the inside. The first pieces are being assembled — the examples below show the formats.

DoorEditorial example

How can fish be bread?

On Kamchatka, Koryak and Itelmen families have long dried salmon into yukola — fish split and hung to dry in the open air — a staple of the winter diet. One question, one world, one thing you did not know.

Koryak · ItelmenSiberia & Far EastAlive
WordEditorial example

skerpikjøt

Faroese. Mutton hung for months in a hjallur — a drying shed with slatted walls that let the sea air pass through — until it is wind-cured. A word that only exists where the practice does.

FaroeseEurope
VoiceFormat preview · awaiting first contributor voice

Original voice will live here.

Every recorded voice in the atlas stays in its own language, beside a translation, with the speaker's credit, their community, the recording date and full provenance. No voice is ever invented, reconstructed or generated.

SpeakerCommunityRecording dateProvenance
ObjectEditorial example

The Sakha ice cellar

A cellar dug into the permafrost beneath or beside the house, used in Yakutia to keep meat, fish and dairy frozen through the summer without any machinery.

SakhaSiberia & Far EastAlive
SeamEditorial example

Same frost, two answers

Aymara, Altiplano

Potatoes are spread out on winter nights to freeze, trodden by day to press out water, and dried into chuño — a food that keeps for years.

Sámi, Sápmi

Reindeer meat is salted and hung in the March wind, when the air is dry and cold enough to cure but not yet warm enough to spoil.

Two peoples, one problemAlive
WorldEditorial example

Kihnu

Island · Gulf of Riga · Estonia · ~600 people

A Baltic island where women have run the community for generations while men were at sea; where a striped skirt still tells you who is mourning, who is marrying, who is a girl.

World page openingAlive

Editorial examples illustrate each format and are written from widely documented practices. Entries in the archive itself will carry the speaker, contributor, community, recording date, consent status and sources for every piece.

Every people is a complete world.

Humanity is a mosaic. Each people, language, memory, ritual and local solution is one whole piece. Remove enough pieces and humanity stays biologically human while becoming culturally uniform. The project does not freeze anyone in the past. It records the diversity that is alive now — including how it is changing.

Thousands of peoples. Thousands of worlds. One humanity.

Who

  • People
  • Language

Where

  • Land
  • Seasons
  • Home

Life

  • Food
  • Family
  • Childhood
  • Love & marriage
  • Death & ancestors

Mind

  • Belief & sacred
  • Taboo & custom
  • Stories, songs & memory

Hands

  • Craft & tools
  • Healing
  • Survival knowledge

Sixteen dimensions, the same for a Chukchi sea hunter, a Sardinian shepherd and a Hmong weaver — so that worlds can be compared, and so that an empty section is visible as an invitation.

Add your world to the mosaic.

What is ordinary to you may be extraordinary to the rest of humanity.

You do not need to be a filmmaker, a scholar or a writer. One short video, a voice recording, a photograph, a recipe, a word, an object, a family memory, or an explanation from a parent or grandparent is enough to begin. You bring the story. We bring it to the world.

Share a piece of your world

Text and public links, in any language. Nothing is published automatically: every submission is private and read by an editor first. Prefer to help without sending a piece? Offer to help document a world.

What happens to a submission

  • It is stored privately and given a reference
  • An editor reads it; nothing is published automatically
  • You are contacted before any piece is considered for publication
  • You can withdraw at any time by writing to [email protected] with your reference

What accepted, published pieces receive

  • Credit exactly as agreed with you in writing — by name, pseudonym or withheld
  • A link back to your original post or channel where one exists
  • Your original wording and language kept beside any translation
  • A place on the relevant world page, with its own link to share

Contributor profiles, recorded voices and paid documenter roles are planned for later stages and are not promised by sending a form.

The network we are building

Witness
Sends one piece.
Contributor
Documents a community over time.
Steward
A community member who reviews what is published about their own people, with a veto on sacred content — agreed with the community, not self-appointed.
Correspondent
Finds and supports contributors across a cultural zone.

We do not collect peoples. We help people document their worlds.

The newest technology for the oldest memory.

Globalisation, urbanisation, dominant languages and digital standardisation have been flattening cultural difference for decades. The same technology can be pointed the other way. Humanity Mosaic uses AI to find local documenters across languages, transcribe and translate recordings, classify and connect pieces across continents, and make a community of three thousand as searchable as a nation.

Original human testimony is the record. AI never replaces the speaker, never reconstructs a custom or a voice, and every machine-assisted step is labelled in the provenance of each piece.

  1. Discover
  2. Contact
  3. Consent
  4. Document
  5. Verify context
  6. Credit
  7. Preserve
  8. Connect

Tradition, experience and evidence are kept apart in every entry. Cultural health practice is never presented as medical advice. Sacred or restricted knowledge is not published against a community's wishes.

Help keep the mosaic whole.

Humanity Mosaic begins as an independent project. A transparent way to support it will be announced when it is ready; until then, the most valuable support is a piece from your world.