They huddled there for three days before the Sentinelese evidently decided the intruders had overstayed their welcome - a point they made with bows and iron-tipped arrows. 86 passengers and 20 crew managed to swim and splash their way to the beach. But the ship was on a hydrographic survey mission and had no reason to stop, so the Sentinelese remained undisturbed for nearly a century, until an Indian merchant ship called the Nineveh ran aground on the reef. One night in 1771, an East India Company vessel sailed past Sentinel Island and saw lights gleaming on the shore. (AP Photo/Gautam Singh, File) ASSOCIATED PRESS A rights group that works to protect tribal people has urged Indian authorities to abandon efforts to recover the body of an American man who was thought to be killed by inhabitants of an island where outsiders are effectively forbidden by Indian law. southeastern Andaman and Nicobar Islands. 14, 2005 file photo, clouds hang over the North Sentinel Island, in India's. Many of those tools and weapons are tipped with iron, which the Sentinelese probably find washed ashore and work to suit their needs.įILE -In this Nov. They carry bows and arrows, as well as spears and knives, and unwelcome visitors have learned to respect their skill with all of the above. They're hunter-gatherers, and if their lifestyle is anything like that of related Andamanese peoples, they probably live on fruits and tubers that grow wild on the island, eggs from seagulls or turtles, and small game like wild pigs or birds. From those canoes, the Sentinelese fish and harvest crabs. We know that they build small, narrow outrigger canoes, which they maneuver with long poles in the relatively shallow, calm waters inside the reef. The Sentinelese people are related to other indigenous groups in the Andaman Islands, a chain of islands in India's Bay of Bengal, but they've been isolated for long enough that other Andaman groups, like the Onge and the Jarawa, can't understand their language.īased on a single visit to a Sentinelese village in 1967, we know that they live in lean-to huts with slanted roofs Pandit described a group of huts, built facing one another, with a carefully-tended fire outside each one. But they're not entirely uncontacted over the last 200 years, outsiders have visited the island several times, and it often ended badly for both sides.Īccording to a 2011 census effort, and based on anthropologists' estimates of how many people the island could support, there are probably somewhere between 80 and 150 people on North Sentinel Island, although it could be as many as 500 or as few as 15. They're one of the few mostly "uncontacted" groups left in the world, and they owe that isolation partly to geography - North Sentinel is a small island, off the main shipping routes, surrounded by a shallow reef with no natural harbors - partly to protective laws enforced by the Indian government, and partly to their own fierce defense of their home and their privacy. The death of an American tourist who illegally visited the isolated North Sentinel Island had drawn the world's attention to the small island's reclusive inhabitants. (AP Photo/Anthropological Survey of India, HO) ASSOCIATED PRESS
Government officials and anthropologists believe that ancient knowledge of the movement of wind, sea and birds may have saved the five indigenous tribes on the Indian archipelago of Andaman and Nicobar islands from the tsunami that hit the Asian coastline Dec. their canoe in Indias Andaman and Nicobar archipelago.
In this undated photo released by the Anthropological Survey of India, Sentinelese tribe men row.
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