Let me tell you the modern updated tale of North Sentinel Island, an isolated island
in the Andaman islands chain nominally administered and protected by the government of India.
North Sentinel Island is inhabited, there are humans there, but they are not just a
survivor of one of the world’s handful of uncontacted indigenous peoples that don’t
have regular interaction with our global civilization at large, but are even considered mostly uncontacted
locally by the inhabitants of the other islands in the chain.
One of the 5 other groups of indigenous peoples in the Andamans that are fully in contact
are the Onge people.
They’ve been interacting with others for two centuries, with an amicable start, though
they saw a significant population decline after contact that persists with a very high
infant mortality rate to this day and the problems that come with contact, including
poaching, environmental change and so on..
Interestingly, the Onge have a tradition of knowing that when the ground shakes, head
to the high ground as a great wall of water sometimes follows, and they survived the 2004
Indian Ocean Earthquake by heading to the hills using this knowledge.
The sentinelese appear to have done this as well, they knew what to do.
I’d love to know how old that knowledge is, as these people have been in the Andaman
islands since prehistory, at least 30-50,000 years, but split presumably thousands of years
ago.
The Onge were aware of North Sentinel island and even had a traditional name for it, so
they knew about it for a very long time but apparently without contact, potentially for
the same reasons that the sentinelese are mostly uncontacted today.
In the 19th Century the British brought members of the Onge to North Sentinel island to see
if communication was possible, and it was not, the Onge could not understand the Sentinelese
suggesting a very long time of isolation.
Yet there does seem to be evidence of cultural similarities between the two groups.
Body decoration and techniques on how they cook food are similar, along with similar
traditional canoe design.
There are also similarities with other Andaman groups such as the Jarawas in that their bows
bear similar markings, whereas the Onge do not.
This strongly suggests that contact in the past was there, but hasn’t been there for
a very, very long time, enough for significant language drift between the sentinelese and
all other groups in the Andamans.
This may simply be because the North Sentinelese are generally hostile, and very protective
of their island as they are today.
Perhaps local interactions amongst the islands was problematic and rare before the British
ever became involved in the area.
And to this day, a number of contacted groups in the Andamans seem to prefer some degree
of privacy and isolation as part of their culture.
The first known incidence of a western sighting of North Sentinel Island was in 1771.
The Surveyor John Ritchie observed lights on the shore of the island from the British
East India Company Hydrographic Survey Vessel the Diligent.
Ships of this nature may well have passed the island in the past, but it’s not recorded.
But what’s interesting here is to wonder what the people on North Sentinel Island thought
of this passing ship.
This was not a canoe they would be familiar with, but this giant floating platform or
vessel with white sails passing by of a type they might have been completely unfamiliar
with.
They might not have seen anyone on the deck in what seemed to be the dark.
Just lights and a silhouette.
To them, they might have thought of it as a UFO, but in this case an unidentified floating
object.
It’s fun to play with scenarios here.
Since the British ship saw the fires of the sentinelese, it’s a good bet the sentinelese
saw the ship’s lights in turn.
Maybe it spawned folk tales they tell to this day.
But what of … other scenarios, maybe no one noticed and they were on the other side
of the island at the time, with various security fires going to keep the embers going as they
seem to not be able to create fire, just keep it going.
Or maybe one single poor sentinelese person saw the lights of the mysterious ship, told
the others, and no one believed them.
Or they did tell the local government and the tribal elders swore them to secrecy, told
them to get back to cooking their shellfish, and that they saw nothing.
Any interaction in the subsequent decades either didn’t happen, or is unrecorded,
but in 1867 the Indian Merchant ship Nineveh crashed on a reef near the island.
The 106 survivors had no choice but to head to the beach.
Everything was quiet for the first two days, but on the third a group of red painted warriors
appeared and started firing arrows that were apparently iron tipped.
The survivors were able to repel the attackers with sticks and stones until a British Royal
Navy party rescued them.
Well shipwrecks do not go away immediately, and no doubt materials from the wreck started
washing up on shore, as probably happened in the past hence the availability of iron,
albeit to the sentinelese of uncertain, perhaps ghostly or sacred origin.
From that point on, shipwrecks have occasionally happened at North Sentinel Island and continue
to do so.
Right now, Anthropologists know that the sentinelese can cold work metal as a result of these wrecks.
They can make tools and arrow points from the metal they’re finding on their shores.
Though they probably didn’t find as much until recently.
It could be that a copper hull spike from a wooden vessel wrecked on the island in say
1650 might have been precious, even secret, this unknown material that did very strange
things like change shape when hammered on and show a shiny appearance when scratched.
But today, this is old hat to them, they have tons of shipwreck metal, with the odd potential
that the North Sentinelese have metallic aluminum working abilities despite being essentially
a stone age culture.
Working of a metal that wasn’t isolated as such in the technological world until 1824.
They would have no idea that they would be working with a highly advanced technologically
derived metal that for the vast majority of human history no one had, other than its ores.
You can play with other even later metals that might be found on modern shipwrecks,
titanium, which does not behave like Aluminum, or even gold or silver coins from decades
ago, or even really mundane but perhaps mystifying materials such as plastics.
What use can a hunter gatherer culture find for a discarded piece of glass.
Glass is sharp and useful, if not problematic if you’re walking barefoot on the beach.
I think it would be really interesting to put on a cloaking device and walk among the
sentinelese people and see what they do with our flotsam and trash, of which they may have
no conception of it’s actual intended use.
Or maybe they do.
They may understand the purpose boat that wrecked, it’s a big canoe, but not so much
the unopened 12 pack of pepsi that crashed with it.
But they may well understand that the bottles are good for holding water.
Maybe they use them for that, maybe they even tried the pepsi they contained.
But there’s also a good reason for isolation for the Sentinelese.
They actually have had limited contact with the world at large.
In 1880 a Royal Navy officer was sent to try to establish contact with the sentinelese,
which by that time the island was nominally part of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands British
colony.
They did so in apparent force, as the sentinelese scattered into the forest upon landing.
The party found nothing but abandoned villages for days until they eventually found an elderly
man and woman and four children.
They were promptly kidnapped and brought back to Port Blair, the administrative center of
the island groups.
This did not go well, the man and woman very rapidly became ill and died, and the children,
who were also falling ill were hurriedly returned to the island to unknown ends along with gifts.
What the sentinelese thought of this is unknown, but it’s hard to see how they wouldn’t
have found the whole thing hostile.
Abductions where four are returned ill and worse off than when they left, and two never
returned at all.
By 1896, things had become openly hostile.
An escaped convict landed on the island in a makeshift raft and was found dead on the
beach with arrow piercings and a cut throat.
Likewise, several years later, the chief commissioner of the Andaman and Nicobar islands landed
looking for other fugitives.
They saw no native islanders, but found that the fugitives had all been killed.
The commissioner also reported that a sentinelese individual apparently drifted off course and
ended up with the Onge and actually lived with them for at least two years.
So this purported sentinelese man returned with a British landing party to the island,
but the sentinelese didn’t recognize him and opened fire with the arrows.
The claimed sentinelese man refused to stay on the island, so may have never been from
there in the first place casting doubt on his story.
Subsequent visits by outsiders have either resulted in the sentinelese retreating into
the forest, or going on the attack, though in recent years there has been some limited
amicable contact between fishermen and the sentinelese, but only on the open ocean.
Meeting on the ocean seems acceptable.
Just do not set foot on their island.
This is bolstered by a 1974 affair when a national geographic film crew landed on the
island with a team of anthropologists.
They tried the gift giving angle to try to establish contact, but it went horribly wrong.
Being a film crew, they showed up with motorboats and cameras, and all that comes with that,
and it immediately provoked a violent response from the Sentinalese.
They left such gifts as a plastic toy car, cookware, a live pig, some coconuts and a
toy doll.
This resulted in the director getting shot in the leg with an arrow as the sentinelese
warrior that shot it withdrew laughing boisterously.
The sentinelese kept the cookware and the coconuts, shot and buried the pig and the
doll apparently finding no value there, with no information on what happened to the plastic
car.
National Geographic did manage to get the first photograph of some of the sentinelese
people, but with very little other success.
Since this, the sentinelese either wave at people nearby, retreat into the forest, moon,
yes I said moon interlopers, or attack anyone that lands on the island.
And it’s a good bet that the reason for this is, and this is backed up by recently
contacted tribes in the Amazon, that they know and learn more about us than we do about
them.
In the case of a recently contacted tribe in the Amazon, they knew full well that there
were different groups of us, such as violent poachers, normal villagers, and even the Peruvian
Army.
But the sad thing is, only by luck are the sentinelese still there.
Had their island been in the wrong location during World War II, an event they probably
had little indication of it going on and gripping the world as it did, they might have been
invaded.
By responding in a hostile manner, they may have easily been wiped out through shelling,
again something they may not be aware is possible and their island bulldozed and turned into
an airfield.
They don’t know any of this, and today are a protected people by the Indian government,
but human civilization could still wipe them out with little trouble in a bad situation,
after all there are only between 50 and 200 people living on the island.
Because of this, the question must be asked.
Is this a zoo hypothesis phenomenon?
Are the sentinelese surrounded by a vastly technologically superior, but changing civilization
that they only occasionally glimpse and have no in-depth understanding of?
Yes.
Are they subject to a foreign power without knowing it?
Yes, North Sentinel Island is claimed by India.
Are they in a zoo?
Yes, if they send a raiding party to a neighboring island then what happens.
They don’t do it, but they’d get shot, abducted or returned to their island by force.
Is their island under surveillance?
Yes, helicopters fly over with anthropologists trying to take a census of their numbers.
If the sentinelese knew why those flights happen and the reason, wouldn’t they ask
why?
If we restricted all access to the island and, at least to sentinelese eyes suddenly
disappeared, perhaps for centuries other than our flotsam washing up, would they wonder
if we were still here or had our world ended?
So I have to ask.
In their position, have the Sentinalese formed a zoo hypothesis of their own?
Thanks for Listening!
I am futurist and science fiction author John Michael Godier currently running through a
scenario.
So what of the Pepsi, so the sentinelese find the 12 pack, think it’s delicious and break
their silence asking us for the recipe.
So we give it to them, and they then promptly ask us to leave the island because they consider
our presence a national security risk and that the Island is classified.
Island 51, you understand, don’t call us, we’ll call you.
See you in a few centuries and be sure to check out my books at your favorite online
book retailer and subscribe to my channels for regular, in-depth explorations into the
interesting, weird and unknown aspects of this amazing universe in which we live.