North Sentinelese: The Last Known Stone Age Tribe On Earth

Yuli Ban · Oct 8, 2018

One of my favorite subjects is anthropology, especially paleoanthropology and primatology. I love the idea of two societies of different epochs coexisting. Just imagine how cool it would be if high-tech cybernetic space-faring civilization coexisted with one that still lived in the hunting, gathering Stone Age?

Guess what: you and I, we all live in such a world.

The Stone Age People of North Sentinel Island

There are very few truly uncontacted peoples left in the world -- that is, people who have never been colonized or settled or had their mineral rights exploited, who know virtually nothing of the outside world, and about whom the outside world knows virtually nothing. One of these communities live on North Sentinel island, at the tip of the Andaman archipelago between India and Malaysia to the east. Protected by jagged reefs, rough seas and a reputation for shooting outsiders with arrows, there have been relatively few serious attempts to contact the Sentinalese. Those that have been made have failed; even gifts and peaceful offerings left onshore by anthropologists and Indian government officials have been answered with a hail of arrows. When one such landing party actually made it to shore, the islanders simply vanished, seeming to melt into the jungle.

Since the late 90s, the official policy of the Indian government has been to leave the Sentinalese alone. Still, that hasn't stopped accidental run-ins from occurring; back in 2006, a boat carrying two fisherman accidentally drifted into the shallows of North Sentinel, and the fishermen were killed. When a helicopter was dispatched to retrieve the bodies from the beach, the islanders chased it away with arrows.

Here's what we know:
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There are between 50 and 200 of them.

They don't have writing.

They don't know how to make fire; observations made by landing parties in deserted villages have concluded that the Sentinelese wait for lightning strikes, then keep the resulting embers burning as long as they can.

We know nothing of their language.

Videos exist of the Sentinelese, taken by anthropologists from distant vantages. This one consists mostly of footage from the 70s, and features a gift of coconuts being made to the islanders, and the islanders' response -- arrows fired at the anthropologists' boat, and a great deal of rude dancing and genital-waggling aimed in their direction.

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Their way of life has likely remained relatively unchanged for 60,000 years. Whenever we fly over their home, they don't see helicopters and planes— they see gods and demons.

Also, it's not really accurate to describe them as "Stone Age". But they are a perfect snapshot into human life as it was for the majority of our history.

From Wikipedia:

The Sentinelese are a hunter-gatherer society subsisting on hunting, fishing, and collecting wild plants. There is no evidence of agriculture or fire making. The Sentinelese language is an unclassified language and is not mutually intelligible with the Jarawa language of their nearest neighbors. The Sentinelese are designated as a Scheduled Tribe.

Advanced metalwork appears to be unknown. It has been observed, however, that they have made adroit use of metal objects which have washed up or been left behind on their shores, having some ability at cold smithing and sharpening iron and incorporating it into weapons and other items. For example, in the late 1980s two international container ships ran aground on the island's external coral reefs; the Sentinelese retrieved several items of iron from the vessels.

The 1880 British expedition to the island led by Maurice Vidal Portman reported that "their methods of cooking and preparing their food resemble those of the Öngés, not those of the aborigines of the Great Andaman.
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North Sentinelese: The Last Known Stone Age Tribe On Earth

Yuli Ban Level 18 (Magician) LitRPG Author Citizen Aspiring Writer

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