Excerpt from nationalgeographic.com
In many ways, North Sentinel remains terra incognita. No visitor has mapped the jungle-shrouded interior of the island (roughly the size of Manhattan) or held a conversation with its residents. No one knows the size of the island’s population, which has been estimated at between 50 and 200. No one but the Sentinelese knows what language they speak, what laws might govern them, what god they might worship, or even what the tribe is called in its own language. From passing boats and aircraft, it’s possible to glimpse them spearing fish in the shallows, poling their dugout canoes across the lagoon, and aiming the bows that they use to hunt game.
According to Survival International, an organization that defends Indigenous peoples’ rights around the world, more than a hundred tribes live in seclusion in places from the Amazon rainforest to the Indian Ocean to Indonesia. The lone tribe on a small, remote island, the Sentinelese are perhaps the most isolated people in the world.
In 1975 National Geographic published dramatic photographs of Sentinelese shooting arrows at a seaborne “friendly contact” expedition of Indian anthropologists and filmmakers. Those images—which appeared under the headline “Arrows Speak Louder Than Words: The Last of the Andaman Islanders”—helped define the Sentinelese for a global audience as both hostile and anachronistic.
It is not really accurate to say that the islanders live apart from modernity: They inhabit the present day, as the rest of us do. Nor do they lack technology: A Sentinelese bow is a potent and beautifully crafted tool; they wield it with exquisite skill and craft its arrows’ heads with salvaged metal, perhaps from a nearby shipwreck. Still, much of the past 10,000 years of human history has slipped past North Sentinel, in the cargo holds of oared ships and the pressurized cabins of passenger jets. The island has almost wholly eluded all the devices and contrivances that have connected tribe to tribe, continent to continent: the written word, the steam engine, the smartphone. And no matter how much its inhabitants have gleaned about the outside world from their glancing contacts—probably quite a lot—there’s no way they can know that their home is among the last places of its kind on this planet.
