The Sentinelese, thought to number between 50 and 200, have rebuffed all contact with the modern world, firing a shower of arrows at anyone who comes within range. 
 
 They are believed to be the last pre-Neolithic tribe in the world to remain isolated and appear to have survived the 2004 Asian tsunami. 
 
 The two men killed, Sunder Raj, 48, and Pandit Tiwari, 52, were fishing illegally for mud crabs off North Sentinel Island, a speck of land in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands archipelago. 
 
 Fellow fishermen said they dropped anchor for the night on Jan 25 but fell into a deep sleep, probably helped by large amounts of alcohol. 
 
 During the night their anchor, a rock tied to a rope, failed to hold their open-topped boat against the currents and they drifted towards the island. 
 
 "As day broke, fellow fishermen say they tried to shout at the men and warn them they were in danger," said Samir Acharya, the head of the Society for Andaman and Nicobar Ecology, an environmental organisation. 
 
 "However they did not respond - they were probably drunk - and the boat drifted into the shallows where they were attacked and killed." 
 
 After the fishermen's families raised the alarm, the Indian coastguard tried to recover the bodies using a helicopter but was met by the customary hail of arrows. 
 
 Photographs shot from the helicopter show the near-naked tribesmen rushing to fire. But the downdraught from its rotors exposed the two fisherman buried in shallow graves and not roasted and eaten, as local rumour suggested. 
 
 Mr Acharya said the erroneous belief in the tribe's cannibalism grew from the practice of another tribe, the Onge, who would cut up and burn their dead to avoid them returning as evil spirits. 
 
 "People saw the flesh cooking on the fire and thought they must be cannibals but this incident clearly contradicts that belief," he said. 
 
 Attempts to recover the bodies of the two men have been suspended, although the Andaman Islands police chief, Dharmendra Kumar, said an operation might be mounted later. 
 
 "Right now, there will be casualties on both sides," he said from Port Blair. "The tribesmen are out in large numbers. We shall let things cool down and once these tribals move to the island's other end we will sneak in and bring back the bodies." 
 
 Environmental groups urged the authorities to leave the bodies and respect the three-mile exclusion zone thrown around the island. 
 
 In the 1980s and early 1990s many Sentinelese were killed in skirmishes with armed salvage operators who visited the island after a shipwreck. Since then the tribesmen have remained virtually undisturbed. 
 
 DNA analysis of another tribe, the Jarawa, whose members made first contact with the outside world in 1997, suggest that the tribesmen migrated from Africa around 60,000 years ago. 
 
 However, the experience of the Jarawa since their emergence - sexual exploitation, alcoholism and a measles epidemic - has encouraged efforts to protect the Sentinelese from a similar fate. ||||| New Delhi (CNN) Authorities in India have decided to hold off retrieving the body of the American national feared killed on North Sentinel Island amid concerns about a possible confrontation with the tribe that lives there. 
 
 John Allen Chau is believed to have been killed by Sentinelese tribespeople after he visited their island home in the Andaman and Nicobar archipelago in November, breaching local laws strictly prohibiting contact with the isolated people. 
 
 Indian police say Chau found local fishermen who agreed to take him near the island, before using a canoe the rest of the way. Days later, the fishermen -- who have since been arrested for facilitating his trip -- say they saw the tribespeople dragging his body around the island. 
 
 "We want to avoid direct confrontation with the tribespeople," Dependra Pathak, director general of police of the Andaman and Nicobar islands, told CNN when asked about the latest efforts to retrieve Chau's body. "We do not want to go there and create an unhappy situation." 
 
 The decision to avoid a direct confrontation with the isolated tribe came after a series of meetings and reconnaissance trips made by the officials. Anthropologists and tribal experts were also consulted. 
 
 By Sunday, authorities had mapped out the area with the help of the fishermen and observed several members of the tribe walking around the area where eyewitnesses claim to have seen Chau's body dragged and buried. 
 
 However, despite ruling out any immediate attempts to land on the island, local police would not categorically rule out retrieving the body at a future date. "We are working on it. We'll firm up a plan very soon," said Pathak. 
 
 The Sentinelese: World's most isolated tribe 
 
 The Sentinelese have lived in complete isolation on the remote North Sentinel Island for tens of thousands of years. The island, which is part of India's Andaman and Nicobar Islands territory, is roughly as large as Manhattan. 
 
 India has protected the island for decades to prevent the Sentinelese from contracting modern illnesses and to keep outsiders safe. 
 
 People are not allowed to go within five nautical miles of the island by Indian law and the Indian Navy patrols it day and night. 
 
 And while its residents have no contact with the outside world, they aren't too far from other civilizations. 
 
 The island is only about 50 kilometers (31 miles) west of Port Blair, the territory's capital known to tourists for its stunning emerald beaches, history and water sports. 
 
 At least 15 Sentinelese could be living on the island, according to India's census estimates from 2011. 
 
 John Allen Chau was an avid aventure traveler. 
 
 He returned to his boat twice before vanishing 
 
 Traveling on a tourist visa, Chau arrived at the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in October with one mission: preach to the Sentinelese. 
 
 Indian authorities say Chau was 27, but Mat Staver, founder of a Christian ministry that Chau was involved with as a college student, gave Chau's age as 26. 
 
 He had traveled to the remote island years ago and returned knowing that his mission was illegal and risky. Still, he wanted to get to know the islanders' way of life. He hoped to eventually share the gospel and perhaps translate the Bible, said a friend, John Middleton Ramsey. 
 
 He asked a local friend, an electronic engineer, to get a boat and also recruit others -- several fishermen and a water sports expert -- who could help him. 
 
 He carefully planned his expedition and used a 13-page long journal to write his strategy, the steps he would take to reach the island and, later, some of his memories. 
 
 After he paid the fishermen around $350, police said, the group boarded "a wooded boat fitted with motors" and headed to the island on the night of November 15. 
 
 They stopped a little less than half a mile away and waited in the dark. At some point in the morning, Chau "used a canoe to reach the shore of the island," Pathak said. 
 
 He returned later that day with arrow injuries, police said. 
 
 But that did not discourage him. 
 
 He returned to the island the following day. It's unclear what happened but "the (tribespeople) broke his canoe" and he had no other option than to swim back to the boat. 
 
 On the third attempt of his mission, he didn't come back. 
 
 The fishermen said they later saw the tribespeople dragging his body around but police haven't been able to independently verify Chau's death. Authorities believe he was killed. 
 
 All seven locals who facilitated the trip have been arrested. ||||| 'I'm privileged to have this contact with the tribesmen,' said Mr Pandit, a director of the Anthropological Survey of India. 'Before, it was worse. They shot arrows when we tried to land.' 
 
 The Sentinelese, as the islanders are known, live on North Sentinel, one of a chain of islands in the Bay of Bengal. Their skin is ash-black and their faces moon- shaped with negroid features. 
 
 They can husk coconuts with their teeth, and use fire, which they hide and guard jealously because they do not know how to make it. With long bows and arrows tipped with iron salvaged from shipwrecks, they are superb marksmen. Farming is unknown to them. They survive on fish and turtles, and hunt wild pig and the huge monitor lizards that abound on their island, an area of a mere 30 square miles. 
 
 Sentinelese songs contain just two notes, and they can only count up to two, above which they call everything else many. Their only form of art is body painting, which consists of wavy smears of white or ochre. 
 
 More than 100 of the Sentinelese live in palm-built lean-tos around the island, yet they have no community structure, no chiefs and no witchdoctors. Their way of life is comparable to that of humans 15,000 years ago; it is possible that they have not evolved any further because they simply have not been required to do so. 
 
 It took Indian anthropologists 24 years to befriend the islanders with gifts of coconut and iron chunks. But now that they have succeeded, Mr Pandit and his team are hesitant about how - or whether - these tribesmen should be 'civilised'. 
 
 'Permanent isolation isn't practical,' he said. 'They're surrounded by 200,000 people living in these islands. But the government has to make sure they're not harmed, and that they don't die from imported diseases.' 
 
 The Sentinelese are not the only aboriginals left in Andaman, a chain of 361 islands stretching between India and Burma. Other aboriginals are hidden in the jungles, such as the Andamanese, the Onge and the Jarawa. But the Sentinelese have resisted contact the longest. 
 
 When the British set up penal colonies in the Andaman Islands in the 1850s, the tribal population was estimated at about 5,000. The aboriginals resented the foreign intruders and fought back with their puny weapons. The British responded by slaughtering many of them, and today, fewer than 400 aboriginals are left. 
 
 For many centuries, sailors viewed the Andaman Islands with dread: tales drifted back of shipwrecked survivors being eaten by cannibals. Mr Pandit claims, however, that the Andaman islanders never dined on their victims. They do, however, like to hang the jawbone of a favourite relative around their necks. 
 
 Despite the many arrows shot at him, Mr Pandit insists the reputation of the Sentinelese for hostility is unfair. 'They're cautious, that's all. They want to defend themselves against outsiders.' 
 
 The islanders cannot be oblivious to the forms of civilisation that surround them; freighters pass by on the horizon and planes across their skies. They make occasional forays in dugout canoes to hunt turtles or fish, but they don't seem to sail far out of sight of North Sentinel. 
 
 Their aggressive isolation seems self-imposed. 'I'd give my right arm to know what they're thinking,' said Mr Pandit, 'but we just haven't learned enough about them yet.' 
 
 When the first anthropological expedition reached the island in 1967, the Sentinelese hid in the jungle. When teams returned in 1970 and again in 1973, the scientists were greeted with a hail of arrows. Then in 1974, the anthropologists tried a different tack: they brought gifts of coconuts, pots and pans, and a live pig, and left them on the beach. 
 
 But the Sentinelese were not so easily bought. Warriors with bows, arrows and spears lined the shore, posturing in defiance, and Mr Pandit recounted in a report: 'Sometimes they would turn their backs to us and sit on their haunches as if to defecate. This was meant to insult us and to say we were not welcome.' 
 
 Unruffled, the anthropologists kept dropping gifts on the island, and the Sentinelese progressively grew less hostile and more playful. They love coconuts, which do not grow on North Sentinel. 
 
 Finally, on 4 January 1991, Mr Pandit and his colleagues were met on the beach by a party of 28 men, women and children, for once unarmed. 'They may not have chiefs, but a decision had obviously been taken by the Sentinelese to be friendly towards us,' Mr Pandit said. 'We still don't know how or why.' 
 
 Now, the anthropologists have learned to remove most of their clothes, watches and spectacles before visiting the Sentinelese and the Jarawa, another isolated tribe. 'I've lost half a dozen pairs of glasses,' lamented Mr Pandit, who has been stripped naked by the islanders on several occasions. 'Clothing doesn't make much sense to them,' he said. 'They're curious about what we're trying to hide underneath.' 
 
 The anthropologists now practise the traditional Sentinelese greeting, which is to sit in a friend's lap and slap your right buttock vigorously. 
 
 A debate is raging among scientists and Indian officials about how the Sentinelese should be treated. Some want them drawn into civilisation as rapidly as possible. But other Andaman tribes have been cruelly exploited: their women have been inveigled into brothels as exotica, the men coaxed away by opium and alcohol to trade in the edible birds' nests that the Chinese consider to be a delicacy. 
 
 So far, the Indian government has banned all visitors to the island and forest areas where the aboriginals live. 'We can't leave them forever,' said Mr Pandit. 
 
 'But the government must ensure that, when they do come into contact with the outside world, the Sentinelese won't be uprooted or hurt. The question is: how?' 
 
 (Photograph omitted)
– Sometimes paradise is better off lost: Off the coast of India in the Bay of Bengal, a Manhattan-size island called North Sentinel Island boasts a deep green canopy of trees, stretches of sandy beaches, coral reef barriers—and a population that's decidedly hostile to outsiders, who aren't likely to live long. As Wackulus explains, the isolated indigenous tribe, one of the last of its kind on Earth, almost always attacks visitors. A little digging uncovered this story: After a night of drinking in 2006, two fishermen drifted too close to the island and were killed by the Sentinelese, who've lived there for 60,000 years. A helicopter sent to recover their bodies was halted by tribesmen's arrows, the Telegraph reported at the time; the air generated by the copter's rotors revealed their bodies in shallow graves. One of the earliest known encounters a century earlier ended when a convict who'd escaped from the neighboring Andaman Islands ended up on the island with his throat slit, the New York Times reported in 2012. In 1967, the Sentinelese—a Stone Age people but for the metal-tipped arrows carved from wrecked ships—hid from an Indian government expedition, during which a marker was placed on the island, declaring it part of India. Indian anthropologist TN Pandit's visits in the late 1980s and early 1990s proved more exciting. He left gifts of coconuts, knives, cloth, mirrors, and once a live pig. The native hunter-gatherers—believed to number between 50 and 400—killed the pig and buried it in the sand, but only insulted Pandit's group. "They would turn their backs to us and sit on their haunches as if to defecate," he told the Independent. India has since established a 3-mile exclusion zone around the island to protect both outsiders and the natives from disease. Survival International argues it's all for the best as the natives are "extremely healthy, alert, and thriving." They have fire and are believed to dine on fish, fruits, tubers, wild pigs, lizards, and honey. (This video reportedly shows the first contact with an isolated tribe.)