This Beautiful Beach Has A Deadly Secret For Anyone Who Tries To Go Ashore
By
Michael Avery in
Nature
On 8th November 2016
The world is becoming a smaller and smaller place. Thanks to satellites, WiFi and increasingly smaller and more powerful technology, scientists are constantly laying bare more and more mysteries of our world. As pervasive as modern living might seem, however, there are still some places in the world that exist devoid of civilization, its people existing almost as if stuck in time several thousand years ago.
While many of these tribal and indigenous populations do come into contact with outsiders from the modern world, not all of them choose to integrate. In fact, some of them oppose outside influence with violent and sometimes deadly determination.
This is North Sentinel Island, located in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Indian Ocean.
It's a gorgeous place to live...provided that you were born there.
If you weren't born on the island, however, you might not want to go there.
North Sentinel Island is home to the Sentinelese, an indigenous people who are extremely hostile to outsiders.
They descend from among the first people to leave Africa 60,000 years ago. Although they share ancestry with other tribes of the Andaman Islands, their language is so radically different that scholars theorize they must have lived in complete isolation on that island for several thousands of years.
The island is also surrounded by a reef that makes shipwrecks rather likely.
If your ship gets busted up, you might want to take your chances offshore.
The Sentinelese drive outsiders back with violent force. Anyone attempting to reach out to them is killed or at least given a hostile send-off back to wherever they came from. The island is considered so dangerous for outsiders that the Indian government (which administers to these islands) has set up a three-mile exclusion zone to prevent unwanted civilian casualties.
The Sentinelese gather when they see any newcomer offshore.
They usually have spears and bows in hand. The Sentinelese are characterized as a "stone-age" tribe, but the islanders are able to scavenge metals from shipwrecks and other debris that floats ashore and then fashion them into simple weapons and tools like arrowheads.
They've even been known to fire arrows at passing aircraft.
They're all about the whole "shoot first, ask questions later" thing. This photo was taken by an Indian Coast Guard plane sent to see if the islanders were alright after the 2004 tsunami. The Sentinelese found higher ground prior to the tsunami and survived, and sent out a warrior to fire a warning shot as if to say "We don't need your help!"
In the 1990s, India sent several parties to encourage friendly relations with the inhabitants of the island.
However, those missions stopped in '97. Although the Indian government led a number of contact expeditions here and successfully contacted many of the other tribes, the resulting decline in those populations due to exposure to previously unknown diseases led them to the decision to leave the Sentinelese alone.
Since then, several visitors have lost their lives.
The Sentinelese seem to have become more malicious after the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake.
Two fishermen were killed in 2006 when they washed ashore at North Sentinel Island.
That was the most recent encounter. In 2006, two fishermen who were fishing illegally inside the exclusion zone were killed by the Sentinelese and buried in shallow graves. When a helicopter attempted to retrieve the bodies, it was shot at with arrows until it was forced to retreat.
Most estimates place the number of Sentinelese between 40 and 500.
However, nobody's actually going there for a head count. Since most of the islanders tend to hide whenever outsiders are nearby, it's hard to say how many Sentinelese there are. The estimates range anywhere from 40-500.
There are plenty of other islands in the world.
This seems like one to leave alone.
