Northern Sentinel Island is located in the Indian Ocean, and is more than a thousand kilometers away from any port on mainland India. And very little is known about the people who live there. Natives often react with arrows to any attempt at contact.
The mystery that surrounds the tribe that lives on North Sentinel Island is such that it is not known what language its members speak and how many.
North Sentinel is one of the islands of the Andaman archipelago, in the Bay of Bengal, in the Indian Ocean, and is more than a thousand kilometers away from any port on mainland India.
The island’s inhabitants are so unknown that even in India, little is known about their existence, said Ayeshe Perera, editor of the BBC’s Hindi Seva (the Hindu section of Vishwa Seva) in Delhi in 2018.
“The last time they received attention was after the 2004 tsunami, when the Indian government needed to investigate whether they survived the disaster,” Perera said.
American tourist John Chow was shot dead in 2018. It is not clear whether he went to the North Watchtower to preach Christianity or take an adventure.
A group of indigenous people, the Sentinelese, live in the north of the island. Sentinels are extremely hostile, rejecting any contact with other people. Interestingly, they are among the last humans to be completely untouched by modern civilization.
What is not known about them is that their origins lie in migration that originated in Africa 60 thousand years ago, and today they live in a small area of forest. It is one of the few hunter-gatherer tribes in the world.
Sentinels also stand out for their use of the bow and arrow, an object with which they hunt and defend themselves – and they are hostile to foreigners.
It is estimated that there are 50 to 150 people of the tribe on the island, whose travel is prohibited – mainly due to the risk of contamination by diseases from outside the natives.
In 1974, a film director visiting the site found an arrow in the leg. His crew was trying to film a documentary for National Geographic.
After the 2004 tsunami, which affected the Indian Ocean basin, officials in India used helicopters and met arrows to check the status of the tribe.
Aishe Pereira said, “His resistance to all contact with the outside world made any approach impossible.”
There are also many non-contact tribes in Brazil and other South American countries such as Ecuador and Peru.
Source: bbc brazil
