![]() In 2006 the islanders killed two trespassers who were poaching fish from the island reef and these bodies have not been recovered. ![]() Despite these overtures, the Sentinelese maintained their skepticism towards visitors (“skepticism” in this context means “aggressively shooting arrows at”), and such attempts to communicate have since been curtailed. The Sentinelese took the red buckets but left the green ones behind. The pots and coconuts were eagerly accepted. They also build canoes–however they have not been known to venture beyond the reefs of their island.įor a time the outside world attempted to initiate contact with the Sentinelese by presenting gifts such as coconuts, buckets, dolls, pigs and metal pots before (quickly!) retreating to a distance out of arrowshot. The islanders manufacture baskets, pounding stones, nets, and adzes. The tips of their weapons are steel and iron which have been scavenged and shaped through cold-smithing (in the late 1980s two international container ships ran aground on the island’s external coral reefs). The language, religion, and customs of the Sentinelese are unknown (although they are presumed to speak a language in the Andamanese family). The inhabitants go naked except during hunting expeditions when they wear belts/loincloths. The Sentinelese are hunter-gatherers, subsisting on fruits, seeds, tubers, fish, shellfish, honey, feral pigs, and the eggs of turtles and seabirds. Here they are pointing their weapons at a helicopter.Īgriculture is completely unknown on North Sentinel Island. They’ll be with us when we blast off for the stars or fall down dead in the toxic dust. Our best friends have been with us since the remote depths of the ice age when we were nobodies. *I’m not counting dogs: wolves joined up with us many millennia before we domesticated anything else. There are wild goat populations dotted around the world in places such as Australia, New Zealand, the Caribbean Islands, Hawaii, Ireland, Great Britain, California, Indonesia, and the Galapagos (among others). Feral goats revert quickly to type and can thrive in most environments. Additionally domestic goats, like their wild forbears, are clever animals with a natural gift for climbing, jumping, and escaping. So goats are not raised in factory farms like cows, sheep, and poultry. To quote Wikipedia, “stall-fed goat rearing involves extensive upkeep and is seldom commercially viable”. Goat herding remains goat herding-the animals do much better when they have pastures to graze in. The worldwide fame/infamy which the North Sentinelese have gained in the last fortnight will quickly fade away, and we can go back to thinking of them as a peculiar alternate sect of humankind-when we think of them at all…Īlthough they were the first animals to fall under human agricultural sway, goats have not fallen so deeply under our thrall as most other farm animals. It strikes me that they have made their choices plain. ![]() Jesus can worry about his missionary’s final arrangements, thus saving the Indian police from savage battle and saving the islanders from measles, flu, smallpox, or goodness-only-knows what outside disease or influence which they are woefully unprepared for.ĭespite ample incontrovertible evidence that the North Sentinelese do not want to integrate into the modern world, there are always arguments about whether the Indian government is operating a “human zoo” (undoubtedly the Sentinelese have some choice descriptions of the interconnected pan-global hive organism that the rest of us are part of, insomuch as they can conceive of it). This strikes me as a grave error, since the islanders have demonstrated time and again that they do not desire visitors of any sort. North Sentinel island is part of India, although the islanders do not seem to recognize (or even know about) their citizenship, and the Indian authorities have been trying to recover Chau’s body. The natives, likewise, had no desire to hear John Allen Chau’s proselytizing, and they swiftly dispatched him with arrows and buried his body as quickly as possible (as is their known custom). The North Sentinelese are bellicose and territorial and they want nothing to do with our networked world of technology, trade, and toil. As previously set forth in one of our most popular posts, the island is inhabited by the mysterious North Sentinelese, a stone age hunter-gatherer tribe of unknown language and customs which has spurned all contact with the rest of humankind. ![]() On November 17 th, an American Christian missionary named John Allen Chau bribed corrupt fisherman to take him to the forbidden island in the Bay of Bengal. If you have been closely following the affairs of the Andaman Islands, you will know that the North Sentinelese are back in the news of the world. ![]()
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