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Slash real life floor so this island here is North Sentinel island, and you're not allowed to visit it
There's a few reasons why but first it's important to know that North Sentinel island is part of the greater Andaman Islands which are in
The middle of the Bay of Bengal of roughly 1300 kilometers away from India and three hundred kilometers away from
Myanmar except for this tiny bit here the rest of the islands are governed by India
and if that includes North Sentinel island right here the people who inhabit the island are known as the
Sentinelese and even though their Island is technically a part of India
They've probably never even heard of India or anywhere else for that matter
you see the Sentinelese are one of the very last remaining groups of people on earth that have remained virtually untouched and
uncontacted from modern civilization
They live a hunter-gatherer lifestyle surviving from fishing hunting and gathering
Plants similar to how all of our
ancestors lived tens of thousands of years ago in the Paleolithic era if the real world was like a game of
Civilization 5 then the Sentinelese would not have even discovered agriculture yet
Which is the very first tech that you research in the game?
They also have still not discovered a way of producing fire
So they've been pretty isolated from the rest of human history and culture for untold
Thousands of years the strange thing about this society though is how close it exists to the modern world the island is only?
50 kilometres away from Port Blair a modern city home to over
100,000 people with an international airport a major naval base used by the Indian Navy and the seat of government for the Andaman and Nicobar
Islands territory the way this situation came to be is rather interesting
The first known contact between the Sentinelese and the outside world wasn't until the year
1867 in that year an Indian merchant ship crashed on a reef near the island the crew escaped to the beach and were attacked by
The locals who were seeing the first other humans in their entire civilizations history
They survived one another passing ship rescued them and periodic contacts were made by the British until
1887 from then on nobody from the outside world managed to make contact with them again until in
1970 when the Indian government sent a group of anthropologists who spotted them on the beach tragedy struck in
1974 when a National Geographic
team went to the
Island to shoot a documentary and got attacked by volleys of arrows as their boat got too near the beach the director was struck by
An arrow in his thigh and the crew retreated afterwards in
1981 a ship wrecked itself on the north side of the island which can still be seen there today on Google Maps they radioed for
Urgent help after they spotted the Sentinelese building boats on the beach armed with javelins and arrows
But help didn't come for two weeks
Eventually they were all rescued by helicopter and the first actual peaceful contact between them and the outside world finally occurred in
1991 with a group of Indian anthropologists
But the Indian government decided to stop any further expeditions to the island in
1997 out of fear of introducing diseases that the Sentinelese would have no immunities
against like what happened in a few other places around the world previously to this and
Just because the risk of getting attacked by them was considered too great
They survived the Indian Ocean tsunami in
2004 after Helle Kapur sent to check up on them was warned away by a warrior with a bow and
ultimate tragedy struck in the year
2006 when two fishermen who were illegally fishing in the waters near the island
Fell asleep and had their boat drifted just a little too close to the beach
Sentinelese archers killed the men and when a helicopter came to recover their bodies
It was also attacked by a volley of arrows and driven away in the aftermath of these incidents the Indian government has banned all
Travel to the island and declared a three mile
Exclusion zone around it which is enforced by their Navy that is the reason why you'll probably never get to set foot on this island
And even if you could you probably wouldn't even want to the latest Indian census of the island tried to estimate their
population and calculated it to be around 40, but other estimates place the true population somewhere between 50 and
400 people whatever the number the last people from the outside world that visited the island was in
2006 and neither lived to talk about it
But imagine what the perspective of these Islanders must be like when that ship crashed on the island back in 1981 it may have accidentally
kick-started the Iron Age for their
Civilization as they have been observed to be
Scavenging the wreckage for iron that they now use in their arrow tips to them their island is their universe and the outside world is
As far away as the Stars and space our to our
Civilization we are there aliens with incomprehensible
Technology and languages and we have much to learn from how they've reacted to us so far
We can't say for certain when or if contact with the Sentinelese will occur again
But what I can't say for certain is how to get a free audio book you head over to audible.com slash
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