But an anthropologist, Trinoknath Pandit, working under the backing of the Indian government, landed on North Sentinel Island in 1967. And over the last 200 years, outsiders have tried visiting the island several times, but it often ended badly for both sides. In historic times, other distant communities tried to mix up with the people of Sentinal island, and the experience definitely didn’t leave the Sentinelese with warm feelings toward foreign visitors. They also have three types of arrows, used for fishing, hunting, and unarmed ones for shooting warning shots, which they use to ward off helicopters flying over the island. They are equipped with javelins and flat bows, with incredible accuracy against human targets as far as 350 feet. The Sentinelese tend to live in families of 3 to 4 people within shelter type huts with no side walls although some appear to live in larger communal homes which are more elaborately constructed, with elevated floors and distinct family quarters. The Sentinelese people are related to other indigenous minorities in the Andaman Islands, but they’ve been isolated for long enough that other Andaman groups, like the Onge and the Jarawa, can’t understand their language. According to a 2011 census measure, and based on anthropologists’ estimations of how many people the island could support, there are probably somewhere between 80 and 150 people on North Sentinel Island, although it could be as many as 500 or as few as 15.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |