In the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal there lives a very intriguing tribe of people.
Known as the Sentinelese, they have lived apart from the rest of the world for 60,000 years. The few who have attempted to make contact with them have mainly ended up dead.
The Sentinelese hold up javelins as they see outsiders approaching:
The Sentinelese are quite possibly the most isolated tribe in the world and are believed to have descended from the first human beings when we made our way out of Africa 125,000 yeas ago. While they are often described as belonging to the “Stone Age,” they do in fact make weapons from metal recovered from shipwrecks, though researchers believe they live in a hunter-gatherer society.
They Sentinelese live on an island the size of Manhattan, surrounded by a three-mile exclusion zone that the Indian government established to prevent further violence:
The few incidents of contact with the Sentinelese have ended quite poorly for both sides. In 1880, a British expedition basically pulled a feat worthy of a Hollywood alien abduction movie. 20-year-old Maurice Vidal Portman, the local colonial administrator, led the expedition with the intentions of taking a few islanders, treating them well, giving them gifts to demonstrate friendliness, and sending them home for supper.
From the Sentinelese perspective it looked something like this:
Four children and an elderly couple were minding their own business one day, when a really big ship unlike anything they’d ever seen, took them captive. The six islanders were taken against their will to Port Bliar (which probably felt like the Death Star for these people that didn’t know what iron was) and were held captive there. The elderly couple had never experienced European diseases, so they didn’t have the immunity to fight them off, thus falling ill and dying. The children were soon sent home with European gifts (all of which were covered in foreign bacteria, which may have caused an epidemic). Relations have been pretty shotty since. To be fair, Portman and his crew probably didn’t mean to do this. They really thought they were being friendly, they just didn’t plan ahead (oops).
Since this first encounter, there have been a few exploratory missions, including expeditions where gifts have been left on the beach. The Sentinelese have made it pretty clear they want nothing to do with modern civilization, killing anybody who gets too close. Fishermen who drifted too close to the island in 2006 ended up dead. The Coast Guard couldn’t even retrieve the bodies because they were met with a deluge of arrows.
Perhaps the strangest encounter happened in 1970:
Indian anthropologist T. N. Pandit found his research party cornered on the reef flats between North Sentinel and Constance Island. An eye witness gave an account saying warriors came onto the beach with a hostile attitude. The research party attempted to show they wanted to be friends, but tensions only grew.
At this moment, a strange thing happened — a woman paired off with a warrior and sat on the sand in a passionate embrace. This act was being repeated by other women, each claiming a warrior for herself, a sort of community mating, as it were. Thus did the militant group diminish. This continued for quite some time and when the tempo of this frenzied dance of desire abated, the couples retired into the shade of the jungle. However, some warriors were still on guard.
Yup, you read that right. The women of the tribe alleviated the tension by having sex with the men. No researchers have ever gotten close enough to study this bizarre ritual, so nobody knows why it happened or if this is a frequent occurrence. I suppose, some in this world relieve tension with alcohol, while others simply have sex on the beach.
[Featured Image Credit: Exciting Earth]