Featured Image Credit: Survival International
Topics: News, World News
Callum Jones
For the vast majority of us in modern day society, we are well connected. Whether that be with our pals we meet down the pub every week or the busy commute into work.
In short, we see and interact with an whole range of people from different walks of life on a daily basis, but not everyone's world is like that.
In fact, one tribe lives in a world incredibly far from the one we all know so well.
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The isolated North Sentinel Island in the Bay of Bengal is home to the Sentinelese, an uncontacted hunter-gatherer tribe that’s been notoriously hostile to visitors in the past.
Some 18 years ago now, two fishermen were hacked apart with axes after getting too close to the island.
And reports of aggressive encounters with the Sentinelese indigenous people date back as far as 1867, when shipwrecked British explorers had to fend off attacks while awaiting rescue.
Perhaps one of the more notable stories comes from 1981, when a freighter ran aground in the Bay of Bengal with 28 people onboard. After a few days, a watchman said a group of people emerged from the island’s jungle, carrying bows, arrows and spears.
As per the Guardian, the freighter’s captain radioed his Hong Kong headquarters with a rather intriguing message.
"Wild men, estimate more than 50, carrying various homemade weapons, are making two or three wooden boats," the captain said. "Worrying they will board us at sunset. All crew members’ lives not guaranteed.”
Luckily for those on board, high winds and surf kept the tribespeople’s boats and arrows at bay.
However, not all those who ventured close to the island had the same experience.
In the 1970s, a National Geographic director attempting to make a documentary about the Andamans archipelago was wounded by a spear during the filming process.
And more recently, in 2018, the Sentinelese killed 26-year-old John Allen Chau, a US citizen who is thought to have paid fishermen to ferry him to the island.
Anthropologist TM Pandit urged visitors to leave the group alone that same year while reflecting on his own experience with the tribe.
"The tribespeople were on the beach, watching the boat come to the island," he told Down To Earth.
“There was a large number of them. But there was no reaction or resentment from them. We went about a kilometre inside the forest.”
Pandit added: “They did not come face to face with us, but rather hid in the forest, watching us."
Unfortunately, few photographs exist of the island though anthropologists have evidence it’s been home to human life for at least 2,000 years.