text: The most isolated tribe in the world? 
   
   In the days after the cataclysmic tsunami of 2004, as the full scale of the destruction and horror wreaked upon the islands of the Indian Ocean became apparent, the fate of the tribal peoples of the Andaman Islands remained a mystery. 
   
   It seemed inconceivable, above all, that the Sentinelese islanders could have survived, living as they did on a remote island directly in the tsunami’s path. 
   
   Yet when a helicopter flew low over the island, a Sentinelese man rushed out on to the beach, aiming his arrow at the pilot in a gesture that clearly said, ‘We don’t want you here’. Alone of the tens of millions of people affected by the disaster, the Sentinelese needed no help from anyone. 
   
   Perhaps no people on Earth remain more genuinely isolated than the Sentinelese. They are thought to be directly descended from the first human populations to emerge from Africa, and have probably lived in the Andaman Islands for up to 60,000 years. The fact that their language is so different even from other Andaman islanders suggests that they have had little contact with other people for thousands of years. 
   
   This does not mean, however, that they live just as they did 60,000 years ago. Commonly described, for instance, as belonging to the ‘Stone Age’, they do in fact make tools and weapons from metal, which they recover from ships wrecked on the island’s reefs. 
   
   Like so many isolated tribal people with a fearsome reputation, the Sentinelese are often inaccurately described as ‘savage’ or ‘backward’. Their hostility to outsiders, though, is easily understandable, for the outside world has brought them little but violence and contempt. 
   
   In 1879, for example, an elderly couple and some children were taken by force and brought to the islands’ main town, Port Blair. The colonial officer in charge of the kidnapping wrote that the entire group, ‘sickened rapidly, and the old man and his wife died, so the four children were sent back to their home with quantities of presents.’ Despite being responsible for the deaths of at least two people, and quite possibly starting an epidemic amongst the islanders, the same officer expressed no remorse, but merely remarked on the Sentinelese’s ‘peculiarly idiotic expression of countenance, and manner of behaving.’ 
   
   How far this is from the truth can be easily judged from a video of the Sentinelese on the island’s beach taken during an Indian government ‘contact’ expedition in the 1990s. 
   
   The islanders are clearly extremely healthy, alert and thriving, in marked contrast to the two Andaman tribes who have ‘benefited’ from Western civilization, the Onge and the Great Andamanese, whose numbers have crashed and who are now largely dependent on state handouts just to survive. 
   
   Pressure from Survival and other organisations has led the Indian government to alter its policy towards the Sentinelese, from attempting to make contact, to recognising that similar policies have proved disastrous for other Andaman tribes, and accepting that they have the right to decide for themselves how they wish to live. Underpinning this shift is the simple acknowledgment that the people themselves are best placed to decide what is in their own interests. ||||| 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. ||||| '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)
target: – 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.)