The Jarawa, the last tribe to be contacted, has already suffered measles. But these visits have now ceased, in part because of what contact with other Andaman Island tribes has brought. The Islanders took away some coconuts and the visiting anthropologist’s spectacles, while we outsiders snatched a few fleeting glimpses of Sentinelese society. Eventually, the landing parties were met with less hostility, but never without suspicion, and the cultural exchange that occurred was minor. Without contact, however, we can only guess how they have had to adapt their lives to their new coastal environment.ĭuring the 1980s and 1990s, several official attempts to establish contact were made by the Indian Anthropological Survey. But clearly, the Sentinelese had not been wiped out and made it clear they wanted nothing from the outside world. “That event lifted their island some 1.5 meters out of the sea, exposing their coastal reefs”, explains Mike Searle, Professor of Earth Sciences, who visited the Andaman Islands shortly after the event. In 2004, newspapers the world over ran a picture of a man aiming his bow at another chopper sent to check whether the Sentinelese required assistance following the aforementioned earthquake. The pilot may have expected this greeting since. A helicopter sent to retrieve their bodies was repelled by archers. And in 2006, two fishermen were captured and killed after their boat drifted into the island’s shallows. They had to fend off attacks for a week before being rescued. The mariners of the Primrose received a similar welcome when their ship ran aground on the island’s north-western reefs in. This was the greeting received by a documentary film crew that landed on the island in 1974, the director took an arrow in the thigh. Poachers and fishermen may illegally approach the island, but a hostile reception almost certainly awaits them. “In recent years there have been no attempts by anthropologists or anyone else to make official contact with the Sentinelese”, says Sophie Grig, Senior Campaigner. Should then we pursue it? The Indian authorities currently forbid anyone to set foot on this tribal reserve island. But this unique laboratory, this microcosm of humanity that may hold clues to all our beginnings, is their world, and the Sentinelese people are not lab rats but people who seek no contact with outsiders. All the Andaman Islands endured the 2004 Indonesian earthquake and accompanying a tsunami. Studying them could also reveal how a society with virtually no technology could even exist.
Indeed, these people may be among the oldest living groups of humans and therefore hold a key to fascinating information about our genetic and cultural evolution.
They may have lived their hunter-gatherer lifestyle in isolation for 60000 years. The Sentinelese considered being descendants of an early wave of migrants from Africa. Intruders are usually considered as threats and rectified immediately with arrows.
The people of this tiny world of just 28 square miles are famed for fiercely defending it. We call them the Sentinelese because on nautical charts their Indian Ocean home is marked as North Sentinel Island, but nobody knows what they call themselves or how many he or she may be? Estimates vary from scores to a few hundred. People living on this island speak an unknown language, whose customs are largely a mystery, whose culture is an enigma. There is an island in the Andaman where no one is allowed to go.
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