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Those 100-foot Korowai tree houses are mostly built for film crews

Ellsworth Toohey
May 18, 2026
∙ Paid

Image: Depositphotos.com

The BBC’s Human Planet showed a Korowai family in Papua climbing a bamboo ladder into a hut roughly 100 feet up in an ironwood tree, while the narrator declared height equals prestige in their culture.

British tabloids later revealed the scene was staged — the BBC paid a family to build the house for the cameras, then apologized t…

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