SENTINELESE : World’s Last Stone Age Tribe

SENTINELESE : World’s last Stone Age Tribe What life is REALLY like on the island cut off from everyone for 30,000 years where locals repel all visitors with poison arrows - and killed a young missionary . Poison arrows, knives, spears, clubs, axes, rocks — all of them have been waved very angrily. Over the years, the message from the natives of the tiny island of North Sentinel in the Bay of Bengal could not have been clearer. ‘Keep away. Go home. Buzz off. Visitors not welcome. We want to be alone.’ Of course they do. The Sentinelese are one of a very few remaining ‘uncontacted peoples’ in the world and they are determined to keep it that way. Which means we know tantalizingly little about their language, their culture, their belief system or even how many of them there are. But what we do know is that they have lived happily and largely healthily on their tiny, lush, mangrove-swamped 20-square-mile island for at least 30,000 years. During which time, they have feasted on wild pig, clams, berries and honey and repelled pretty much every visitor (well-meaning or threatening) with a flurry of poison arrows and razor sharp machetes. So it wasn’t such a surprise last weekend when John Allen Chau, a 26-year-old American Christian missionary-cum-thrill-seeking explorer who visited the island was felled by a poison arrow . Apparently Chau, a graduate of the evangelical Oral Roberts University, Oklahoma, who had previously declared visiting North Sentinel as his ‘must-do adventure’, had decided his life’s calling was converting the Sentinelese to Christianity. Poor well-intentioned Chau. Under Indian law, it is illegal for anyone to be within five nautical miles of the islands and, since last year, even filming the natives in the Andaman Islands — which include North Sentinel — has been illegal. This is partly to protect visitors such as Chau, from the natives’ deadly tendencies. But more importantly, it is to ensure the continued survival of the world’s last pre-neolithic tribe. A people, so isolated, so apart from, so unexposed to modern life that they are unlikely to have any resistance common illnesses such as flu, measles or even a cold. As Sophie Grig, a senior researcher with Survival International, put it: ‘This is one of the most vulnerable tribes on the planet. He could be passing on diseases that could literally wipe them all out.’ Which as well as being a disaster for them, would be an anthropological catastrophe. Because the Sentinelese are the only surviving direct descendants of the first humans in Asia. More than 75,000 years ago they made their way from Africa to the Middle East, Burma and India Eventually, they reached the Andaman Islands. Some moved on, but others stayed on North Sentinel, drawn by the lush mangrove jungles, perfect white sandy beaches and a natural bounty so rich and easy to plunder there was no need to cultivate the land. The men hunted turtle, pigs and fish with spears, bows and arrows tipped with bone and hardwood. The women gathered tubers, coconuts berries and clams and caught fish in homemade nets. In the summer they collected honey, smearing their bodies with a special bee-repellent leaf paste. All went naked (but for a few leaves, fibre strings and ornaments) and lived in huts in small family-based groups. And that’s how they still live 30,000 years on, protected by the sea and their own latent aggression from modernisation, gadgets, plastic, stress and other humans. The first documented contact with the tribe was made over 1,000 years ago by Chinese and Arabian explorers who were driven back with a barrage of arrows and described the natives as being three feet tall with human bodies and bird beaks. Pretty much every attempt to visit them since has ended in disaster. When Marco Polo encountered the islands in the 13th century, he wrote: ‘They are a most violent and cruel generation who seem to eat everybody they catch.’ And, in 1563, a sailor, Master Caesar Frederick, warned: ‘If any ship, by ill fortune, stop at these islands, no one comes back alive.’ So for a long time, even when the rest of the Andaman and nearby Nicobar islands were colonised by the British in 1850 and turned into a penal colony, the Sentinelese were left alone to hunt, eat and generally make merry in their fecund island paradise. #Sentinelese #SentinelesePeople #andamanandnicobarislands