
An Indian Ocean island with a community that has been there for 60K years (2015) - empressplay
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/travel_news/article-3049022/The-island-dangerous-visit-Mysterious-Sentinelese-tribe-rejected-outsiders-60-000-years-try-kill-sets-foot-land.html
======
bunderbunder
The "avoid contact for 60,000 years" bit is quite the embellishment. We only
have detailed history being recorded about the island going back for, what, a
couple centuries, maybe? For the rest of that time, we've got nothing.

Other sources tell a very different story from this site, which seems to be
cherry-picking the historical record. The Wikipedia article documents several
probable periods of contact in relatively recent history. That time in the
19th century where a large group of people shipwrecked on the island and lived
there for a while before being rescued certainly counts. It wasn't peaceful
contact at all, but it was prolonged, and a couple decades later British
explorers were able to land on the island and explore - finding a largely
depopulated landscape, presumably as a result of disease.

See also this account of peaceful contact a couple decades ago:
[http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/islanders-running-
ou...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/islanders-running-out-of-
isolation-tim-mcgirk-in-the-andaman-islands-reports-on-the-fate-of-
the-1477566.html)

(edit: Looks like the title and link have both been updated. The "avoid
contact for 60,000 years" was a direct quote from the original title, and the
original link went to [http://themindunleashed.com/2015/07/the-people-of-this-
isola...](http://themindunleashed.com/2015/07/the-people-of-this-isolated-
tribe-kill-anyone-approaching-their-island.html))

~~~
ganeshkrishnan
There are couple of tribes on those Islands (Andaman and Nicobar). Some of the
tribes have been contacted, some have never been reached (and are off-limits)
while some tribals have moved mainland in search of jobs and have mingled with
the mainlanders.

One of the tribal language went extinct because most of their tribe moved
mainland and learnt Hindi/English/Tamil
[http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1964610,00...](http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1964610,00.html)

This article should talk about specifically the Sentinelese tribe (but they
are mixing up Bo and Andamanese tribes with Sentinelese). As far as we know
there has been no contact with them ever.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese)

The rare sighting of them was during the boxing day tsunami and they had
enough knowledge to predict it few hours before and move to higher ground.

~~~
bunderbunder
The Independent article I linked specifies that it's talking about the
Sentinelese of North Sentinel Island. The account it gives is from a
researcher who was involved in the contact efforts the Wikipedia article you
link briefly mentions in the paragraph that begins, "In the early 1990s. . . "

Also, look at the Wikipedia page for North Sentinel Island. The two articles
give different lists of encounters with the Sentinelese that are only
partially overlapping.

------
lando2319
I originally heard about North Sentinel Island right here on Hacker News via
this story [1]. One thing I found really interesting is how people credit
their proximity to more desirable islands as one of the reason they have
survived in (relative) isolation so long, since the other Andaman Islands were
first to be exploited.

Also interesting is how the Sentelese didn't sail great distances like many
Polynesian groups, they used small boats with long sticks which could only be
operated in shallow waters. This kept them relatively tethered to the island.

I can't help but wonder what it's like there, what's the day to day like? I
understand the ethical concerns, nevertheless I can't help but wonder what we
could learn from a youtube live feed of the main camp site.

[1] [http://www.neatorama.com/2013/07/08/The-Forbidden-
Island/](http://www.neatorama.com/2013/07/08/The-Forbidden-Island/)

~~~
mr_overalls
Maria sighed at the TV. The Suitor had gotten boring this season - same old
petty drama, same self-absorbed contestants using the facade of competition to
build their personal "brands" for acting careers.

So after making sure that the kids were asleep, Maria logged into her VPN,
activated Torta, and navigated to a tomato that was rumored to be hosted out
of Kyrgyzstan. It was called "Dark Island".

For three years now, the series had surveilled the lives of an isolated tribe,
the Etcamanese, to whom fire and agriculture were unknown. It was apparently
filmed from an array of a dozen or so high-end video cameras embedded in
biomimetic robotic vultures, so the coverage was spotty.

But despite the alien language and the majority of Etcamanese life happening
outside of the video feeds, bits and pieces of the usual human drama were
obvious: domestic squabbles over leaking huts, rivalries in love, medical
emergencies due to snakebite.

And because there were only 272 people on the island, a regular cast of
characters had emerged. Old man Onge, leader of the largest village, seemingly
blind to the abusive behavior of his two sons. Gentle-voiced Senga,
clubfooted, but the most skilled weaver of fishing nets - would she ever find
love?

The number of people on the island, mysteriously enough, never seemed to
change. Births always occurred the same day as deaths, with women apparently
ingesting herbs to induce premature delivery if necessary. There suggestions
of infanticide as well. It was a favorite topic on the discussion forums.

And although the language was still untranslated, some clever NLP algorithms
by a group Pakistani Island-heads had begun to yield tantalizing clues. Led by
UxBhutto07, they had determined that Etc1, the everyday dialect, had a
strangely consistent grammar, with a system of tenses and declensions that
seemed to contain no irregular forms. Their system of numbers seemed unusually
complex as well, in base 8, with a suffix indicating prime numbers. (There
were related, heated threads about the strange taboos concerning thumbs.)
Etc2, a sung language, seemed to be used only at night, and in a ritual
context. It was completely different from Etc1, and had eluded all attempts at
decryption.

The site's main page loaded more slowly than usual, and Maria saw that the
number of forum threads had tripled from the day before. The top thread was:
"Where did 27 new people come from? And why is everyone singing?"

------
narrator
I wonder sometimes if North Sentinel Island is Earth, the Sentinelese are us
and the rest of the world is the rest of the galaxy.

~~~
johan_larson
Do we have a history of killing alien visitors?

~~~
satysin
Maybe? NASA have been hiding a second sun from us for all these years who
knows what they are up to! ;)

~~~
kobeya
I know you're joking but what is this in reference to?

~~~
johan_larson
The hypothesized Planet Nine? It's predicted to be way smaller than a star,
though.

~~~
pault
That's nothing. The real outrage is the cover up of anti-earth.

~~~
johan_larson
I'm just waiting for the day some hapless clerk clicks the wrong checkbox and
accidentally reveals the Savage Land to the world.

------
mrkgnao
Related, probably from an old HN story:

[http://www.probashionline.com/madhumala-chattopadhyay-
first-...](http://www.probashionline.com/madhumala-chattopadhyay-first-
friendly-contact-with-the-sentinelese-jarawa-andamans/)

------
brudgers
Wikipedia on the Sentinelese:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese)

On North Sentinel Island:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sentinel_Island](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sentinel_Island)

------
zeristor
Whilst there is a concern of them being exposed to the common or garden
pathogens, I imagine they don't have the population to sustain much genetic
diversity.

The survivors of the Bounty Mutiny suffered heavily from inbreeding after
several generations.

~~~
anotheryou
[http://www.livescience.com/289-north-america-
settled-70-peop...](http://www.livescience.com/289-north-america-
settled-70-people-study-concludes.html)

------
Pica_soO
Not even observations with a disinfected drone?

~~~
bayesian_horse
Drones (in the quadcopter-sense) are too noisy to make observations on Human
groups without getting their attention. And then they would still throw stuff
at the drones.

If at all, you'd need something alike a military surveillance drone, and even
then the tree cover would make it difficult.

~~~
terminado
Not entirely true. At 200 meters in altitude, many quad-copters under 5
kilograms are pretty much inaudible.

With a telephoto lens, and 40 minuets of flight time inbound, 15 minutes of
loitering, and 40 minutes of return flight, you could probably begin to
catalog substantial data, without being invasive.

You wouldn't be able to ingress beyond tree canopy, but quad-copter drones
aren't the greatest at negotiating tree cover to begin with. You'd only be
able to capture the beaches. Sticking to the beaches, and remaining above a
certain altitude, the sound of the ocean would probably cover up much of the
actual propeller and motor noise that reaches the ground.

This would be a very expensive operation, given the remote destination.
Nothing an individual could accomplish. But it's a concept within reach, using
off-the-shelve consumer technology, if you've got the budget, and the
logistical support to pull it off.

~~~
bayesian_horse
At 200 meters of altitude they still see the drone.

With telephoto lenses, it doesn't make sense to use multicopters any more, in
my opinion. Not even a quadcopter can track objects on the ground precisely
enough, just by positioning its body, so the camera needs a gimbal, with some
kind of automatic tracking. At that point, a bigger, fixed wing drone would be
better, I think.

------
redsummer
It's a shame that any significant contact would wipe the Sentinelese out. Even
a common cold infection would be the end of them.

If we wanted to learn anything about the Sentinelese, then perhaps we could
use well-camouflaged camera traps, and other electronic eavesdropping devices.
The moral considerations are difficult - it's a privacy breach, but the
information would also be valuable not only to their descendants (should
contact be made), but also to science generally. I think I would be happy if
my Viking ancestors had been filmed 1000 years ago.

~~~
blisterpeanuts
The trick is to install the devices. It's their island and they probably know
every inch of it. How to land on the beach, sneak around and plant
surveillance devices (that ideally are solar powered and broadcast their data
to some offshore station), and get off undetected? And hope the devices aren't
discovered and tossed into the ocean? Also, the equipment would need to be
totally sterile.

Mighty though our civilization is, we lack the technology to spy on an
isolated Stone Age tribe like this. Rather humbling.

~~~
Klathmon
Personally I don't think we lack the technology at all, just the motivation.

------
glitcher
> To protect the Sentinelese people - and visitors - the Indian government has
> established a three-mile exclusion zone

I was curious if I could find any other notable features visible from the
satellite images, and noticed a boat well within the "exlclusion zone":

[https://www.google.com/maps/@11.5271578,92.2834124,478a,35y,...](https://www.google.com/maps/@11.5271578,92.2834124,478a,35y,4.31h/data=!3m1!1e3?hl=en)

~~~
ocschwar
It's a shipwreck from the 1970's.

The crew was attacked by natives, and had to be rescued by helicopters.

Natives and invaders have been reclaiming the wreck's iron ever since.

------
s3arch
When I read about them long time ago, they reminded me of those tribes in the
movies "The Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest" and "The Gods must be
crazy."

Those tribes always consider outsiders to be a threat.

I wonder what theories might Sentinelese have formulated about the world. When
they see and hear loud voices of planes. Or distant light on the night sea.
What do they conclude?

~~~
machbio
reading this incidence of contact by British
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese#Incidents_of_conta...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese#Incidents_of_contact))
- might have had a very bad perception of modern humans - they kidnapped an
elderly couple and four children, the elderly couple died and those four
children might have gone through some horrors that might have influenced them
to be aggressive towards the modern humans

~~~
saalweachter
Minor nit: you have to be careful with the term "modern humans"; the islanders
in question are also modern humans.

------
partycoder
One reason of why the Sentinelese remain uncontacted is because they might not
be immune to diseases and contact could kill them.

~~~
bayesian_horse
They don't know that. But it is one of the reasons why contact has been
prohibited by law.

~~~
partycoder
In the middle ages they didn't knew about infectious diseases, but they did
blame foreigners for plagues or simply "bad luck".

~~~
pessimizer
"In January 1880, an armed British expedition to the island led by 20-year-old
Maurice Vidal Portman, the local colonial administrator, arrived to conduct a
survey of the island, and to take a prisoner, in accordance with British
policy regarding unwelcoming tribes at the time, which was to kidnap a member
of the tribe, treat them well and give them gifts, and release them back to
the tribe, hoping to demonstrate friendliness. Portman's expedition of the
island is believed to be the first by outsiders. While the Sentinelese tended
to disappear into the jungle whenever outsiders were spotted approaching,
Portman's expedition found an elderly couple and four children after several
days. They were taken prisoner and brought to Port Blair. The elderly couple
became ill and died, probably from contracting diseases to which they did not
have immunity. The four children were returned to the island, given gifts, and
released. The children then disappeared into the jungle. After this incident,
the British did not try to contact the Sentinelese again and instead focused
on other tribes."

I imagine that what those children spread amongst the islanders could be what
makes them so aggressive to outside contact now.

------
em3rgent0rdr
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese)

------
ptaipale
The ways of the people at Andaman Islands were popularized by Arthur Conan
Doyle in the Sherlock Holmes novel "The Sign Of The Four".

------
Fzzr
With such a small population, wouldn't inbreeding be a problem?

~~~
peterwwillis
Not according to some studies. During a period of the last ice age, only
around 1,000 reproductive homo sapiens were around, possibly as low as 40
breeding pairs (after the Tuba eruption)

------
snambi
Looks like click-bait.

------
saintPirelli
Careful with that source though, they post some pretty questionable stuff on
their facebook.

~~~
hydrogen18
The 60,000 year figure is pretty dubious. Also saying they've avoided contact
or still live in the stone age probably isn't true. Obviously they are
ignorant of the workings of helicopters and modern fishing vessels, but they
likely understand what the purpose of them is. So they've been contacted, they
just prefer not to interact.

Given that they live on an island, I'll bet they make use of all sorts of
materials that wash ashore. Even a torn plastic tarp is very useful compared
to having to make one by hand from some plant material.

So culturally they are likely completely isolated, but likely very aware of
the changes going on in the world outside their island.

~~~
67726e
Considering the origin of the term "cargo cult" I sincerely doubt they
understand what technology they've seen.

------
sjclemmy
> While privileged people are eating £15 burgers and splashing £100 on new
> trainers, the near-naked Sentinelese are surviving off the land and hunting
> for sea creatures.

Ah, The daily mail. Let's open a McDonald's and ship in some Adidas. That'll
make them happy.

I'm surprised they didn't use the word savages.

~~~
yummyfajitas
If there is an advanced civilization with better shoes than Aasics and better
food than Shiv Sagar restaurant, I'd love it if they made contact and let me
buy some of their stuff. Doubly so if they also have cures for heart disease,
cancer, old age and other things that are likely to kill me.

How would you justify depriving the sentinelese of these wonders, as the
Indian government is currently doing?

~~~
sjclemmy
You'd have to buy their stuff using their currency, which you could only get
by engaging in unfamiliar activities they called 'work', which you probabably
wouldn't understand and wouldn't be very good at. In fact the only work you
would be able to get would be making said 'aasics', the pay for which wouldn't
be enough for you to buy a pair. How ironic! Etc. Etc...

~~~
yummyfajitas
Yeah, the idea of living in an advanced civilization and learning new things
sounds horrible! I hope I never need to leave the place I was born or be
exposed to new cultures. That would be so awful!

(Oh wait, I'm writing this from a city about 10,000 miles from where I was
born. I haven't spoken to anyone from my own country in over a month. Should I
also be suffering in some way?)

------
gonmf
Right now, somewhere in that island is a child that wished she could live to
be older than 30, while we culturally sensitive outsiders do not dare disturb
her way of life.

~~~
taway_1212
Is life expectancy that low in such communities? I know it was around 30 in
medieval Europe, but it had worse climate, epidemics carried over across the
continent, overpopulation, constant wars and kings/lords/church robbing people
of a big part of their food.

~~~
Mikeb85
There's a myth (perpetuated by Paleo diet people and others) that hunter
gatherers were in ideal health and agriculture ruined it.

The opposite is in fact true, hunter gatherers were short lived and
agriculture is what gave humans the first great advance in longevity.

~~~
cgh
That is incorrect. Once you account for infant mortality, life expectancy at
birth dropped with the advent of agriculture.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy)

That said, diet probably isn't as crucial to longevity as we'd like to think.
Hunter/gatherer populations got (and get) a lot of exercise and lead
relatively low-stress lives. For example, the Tsimane of Bolivia eat animals
and starch and have practically no heart disease. They walk around a lot and
are generally a happy bunch. Probably the only thing that would increase life
expectancies more would be actual medical care, particularly regarding
parasites.

~~~
ptaipale
Drop of infant mortality (particularly, through having enough food) is what
the advent of agriculture achieved, so this is like saying "people died
younger, except those who didn't".

~~~
deelowe
What does modern agriculture have to do with infant mortality? It makes sense
to exclude infants, because the reduction of those deaths are likely due to
improvements in modern medicine and personal hygiene.

~~~
ptaipale
The thread above was not about modern agriculture; it was about the pre-
historic time when agriculture was adopted and the availability of more food
enabled more children to survive.

~~~
deelowe
I dont but that at all. Infants dont eat anything that comes from a farm
unless we're arguing that formula is somehow part of all this.

~~~
ptaipale
Infants eat breast milk, and if the mother does not have enough to eat, there
is not enough milk. Sufficient and stable nutrition for mother is important to
avoid child mortality.

In context of ancient world, nutrition of the family also had other mechanisms
that impact the survival of children (strength to build housing, or strength
to defend against hostile people, etc).

~~~
deelowe
And your hypothesis is that insufficient breast milk production affects the
mortality rates more so than modern medicine?

~~~
ptaipale
I still did not write about modern medicine; I don't know why you bring that
up. This was about the transition from hunter-gatherers to farming, first in
Mesopotamia and a few other places, about 10 000 years ago or so.

That was the "advent of agriculture", also known as "Neolithic revolution".

However, overall I'd say that starvation vs. having sufficient food impacts
mortality rates more than modern medicine. You can't eat the best of hygiene
and medication doesn't nourish you.

------
hive_mind
Unbelievable. I hope they can be studied with compassion and care. Not with
violence and hate. And I hope they can be gently introduced to modernity
without reducing them to janitors in Mumbai.

Also, the article claims it's located between Myanmar and Indonesia. That's
just wrong. It's apparently located in the Andaman Islands, which are claimed
by India.

~~~
ra1n85
What makes you think they'll be treated with violence and hate?

I would avoid introducing them to modernity at all. They've been there for
thousands of years without issue, why interrupt now? Let them be.

~~~
hive_mind
> What makes you think they'll be treated with violence and hate?

"Upper caste" Indians (Brahmins / Kshatriyas) have a history of treating
marginalized tribal groups with violence and hatred. Forcibly removing them to
exploit natural resources.

Source: I'm Indian. I've seen quite a bit of this happen during my life.
Here's an example:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narmada_Bachao_Andolan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narmada_Bachao_Andolan)

~~~
sremani
You are trying too hard, even if I subscribe to the evils of brahmin priests
you are talking about Sentalese who are far far away from Indian mainland.

India claims Andamans on technicality, those islands were at best a way point
for Indian sailors in the past.

Please give better points of and sources of exploitation, to call Narmada
Bachao Andolan which was a protest against building a dam, as something only
Brahmins and Kshatriyas only benefited is a stretch.

