Featured Image Credit: Indian Coastguard/NASA
Topics: World News, Science
Emily Brown
A community of uncontacted people reside completely alone on an isolated island and are willing to attack anyone who comes near.
Located amid the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Indian Ocean, the small forested island of North Sentinel Island is home to the community known as The Sentinelese.
The island is approximately the size of Manhattan, but unlike the Big Apple, North Sentinel Island is not open to visitors.
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According to human rights organisation Survival International, The Sentinelese are the most isolated tribe in the world, and resist contact with outsiders so much that they have been known to attack anyone who comes near.
In 2018, young missionary John Allen Chau was killed after he attempted to make contact with the community in the hopes of converting them to Christianity.
As he first attempted to gain access to the island, the Sentinelese are said to have fired arrows at him as a warning.
Chau recalled the incident in his diary at the time, writing: "I regret I began to panic slightly as I saw them string arrows in their bows. I picked up the fish and threw it towards them. They kept coming.
"I paddled like I never have in my life back to the boat."
The group had 'a history going back tens of thousands of years of violently repelling anyone who steps on their island', but Chau didn't pay attention to the warnings, and on his third attempt to get on the island, he was killed by the community.
He was just 26 years old.
The reason the Sentinelese are so adverse to visitors may stem from the fate of neighboring tribes, which Survival International has said were wiped out after the British colonized their islands.
Another reason for their isolation may also stem from a visit from M.V. Portman, the British ‘Officer in Charge of the Andamanese’, with a large team in the 1880s.
The researchers came across an elderly couple and some children who were taken to the regional capital of Port Blair ‘in the interest of science’ - but the members of the community fell ill, and the adults died.
The children were taken back to the island, where the children are predicted to have passed on the diseases throughout the community.
Through their years of isolation, the group lacks immunity to common diseases that humans in more populous areas have developed treatments for, such as flu or measles.
If the community are exposed to the diseases, it could have disastrous consequences for their population.
Survival International has said that, from a distance, the community appear to be 'extremely healthy and thriving' - and all visits to North Sentinel Island are illegal, with area being patrolled by Indian Coast Guards.