Archive for the 'Sentinelese' Category

In yesterday’s article, I talked about a hunter-gatherer tribe called the Sentinelese who live on North Sentinel Island in the Indian Ocean.

As a follow-up article, I want to talk about their current status. The arrow attack on the Indian Air Force helicopter demonstrated, the Sentinelese survived the immediate impact of the 2004 tsunami. However, their long-term survival was uncertain because the massive earthquake that caused the tsunami had uplifted much of the coral reef where the Sentinelese fish.

True to their policy, the Indian government allowed no interference with the tribe after the helicopter incident so nobody knew if the Sentinelese could survive the damage to their food supply. (I have to say the Sentinelese weren’t given enough credit because I’m sure they have survived far worse tsunamis in their 30,000-60,000 years on North Sentinel Island). However, this question was answered in a tragic way for the modern world on January 2006. Two very drunk fisherman illegally fishing near the island did a bad job of anchoring their boat before going to sleep (that is, they passed out after too much palm wine) and their boat mistakenly drifted near shore during the night. The outcome of this mistake was predictable and tragic as the fisherman were killed by Sentinelese defenders.

Indian authorities attempted to recover the bodies, but Sentinelese warriors armed with arrows made it impossible for the recovery helicopter to land. According to every source I could find, no further attempts were made to recover the bodies buried in swallow graves on the beach. (To the surprise of many, the crude stereotype of “savage tribesmen” practicing cannibalism by boiling their victims in a giant bowl wasn’t true for the Sentinelese.)

While nobody should celebrate what happened (one can only imagine how terrifying the fishermen’s last moments were), the father of one of the victims said it well: “My son Pandit got his own justice. He was breaking the law, poaching and trespassing on land that wasn’t his own and he was murdered. What more is there to say? As far as I am concerned the Sentinelese are the victims in this, not my son. They live in constant terror of heavily armed poachers from Myanmar [Burma] and Port Blair. They were only defending themselves with bows and arrows and rocks in the only way they know how. What I do want is my son’s body back so my wife and I can bury him; we don’t want retribution. It is an impossible case to prosecute anyway.”

Stay tuned for more on the Sentinelese. They are fascinating from an anthropology standpoint, but the image of them firing Stone Age arrows at a 21st century helicopter is really compelling to me. You have to respect their fiercely independent “don’t tread on me” stance towards outsiders. While it’s impossible to know exactly what they are thinking when they see helicopters and outsiders, they are correct to assume being friendly could possibly mean the end of their existence as they know it via disease and daunting task of trying assimilate into today’s modern world. I would compare it the modern world’s potential reaction to invading aliens (even if they were friendly like in the movie E.T.)

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Posted by Tim Roth, author of the political blog Think Anew and Act Anew

Sources:
1. “North Sentinel Island”

2. “Survival comes first for the last Stone Age tribe world” by Dan McDougall

In this current period of rapid globalization, the rise of technically advanced societies is unprecedented. This particular period of technological growth is rapid and very noticeable. It’s strange to think that the large scale public Internet as we know it today is a very recent development. I was baby-sitting for a friend’s 10-year old the other day and was helping him do a report on owls. He had found some good websites as source material and I felt like saying in a mocking elderly voice “back in the good ol’ days (I was his age 15 years ago), we walked barefoot in the snow, uphill both ways to library to lift a heavy Encyclopedia Britannica off the shelf to take notes on index cards.”

While I wax nostalgic about the “primitive” pre-Wikipedia days of Encyclopedia Britannica, there are still parts of this world where humans still live a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. In the midst of the tragic news coming out of Southeast Asia after the massive December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, I remembered hearing a fascinating story about the Indian Air Force running helicopter sorties to survey the tsumani’s impact on numerous small islands in the Indian Ocean.

One of the islands the Indian Air Force checked on was the North Sentinel Island. When the helicopter came in for closer look, the inhabitants of the island attempted to shoot down the helicopters…with arrows. These inhabitants, known simply as the Sentinelese (nobody has been to figure out what they call themselves), are among the last remaining groups on the planet that have maintained complete isolation from the outside world and modern day technology.

This complete isolation is hard to believe in the 21st century, but every attempt to establish contact in the past has been met with fierce resistant thanks to the Sentinelese skill with the bow and arrow along with a overwhelming amount of courage and fearlessness. This unblinking foreign policy position has probably been maintained for thousands of years. Maybe even longer since the Sentinelese are part of the Negrito tribes that are believed to have arrived to the Great Andaman archipelago 30,000-60,000 years ago. DNA evidence has shown that they may be descendants of the earliest humans to migrate out of Africa.

At least for the time being, they will stay “frozen in time” because the Indian government has decided to simply leave them alone. In fact, the Indian Navy even runs patrols to make sure fisherman and curious tourists don’t venture into the 5 kilometer (~3 miles) buffer zone around the island.

Due to the scope of the 2004 tsunami, it was feared that even with these protections the Sentinelese could have been wiped out. The vigorous response to the helicopters showed otherwise. An interesting theory explaining their survival is 60,000 years of experience may have taught them to move inland when they feel earthquakes. Also, the hunter-gatherer lifestyle leads to a deep understanding of the environment and animals. Since many animals show behavior changes before storms and earthquakes, this have tipped them off to the situation even before sophisticated tsunami warning systems would have.

Stay tuned for more about the fascinating story of the Sentinelese.

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Posted by Tim Roth, author of the political blog Think Anew and Act Anew

Sources:
1. “Did Island Tribes Use Ancient Lore to Evade Tsunami?”

2.Stone Age tribe kills fisherman