Posted on 02/07/2006 5:58:05 PM PST by blam
Stone Age tribe kills fishermen who strayed on to island
By Peter Foster in New Delhi
(Filed: 08/02/2006)
One of the world's last Stone Age tribes has murdered two fishermen whose boat drifted on to a desert island in the Indian Ocean.
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.
Sentinelese tribesmen prepare to fire arrows at the coastguard helicopter after the fishermen's murder
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.
Tribesmen clamber over the fishermen's beached boat
"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.
And if he's a fat guy, 2 weeks!! :-)
The two men were foolish. But they should not have been murdered. While I think these people certainly ought to be allowed to continue to live on their island without outside interference, no one on this earth has a right to murder. Their island or no. Breaking and entering into a home is NOT the same thing as landing on a beach. No one has a right to murder. No one.
That is where we disagree and that is my specific point. It is their home and being an island, they decided they don't need doors.
I DO understand it. But in the world today, it's simply unacceptable. There are limits. If you murder (and I do think these men were unwise at best), you lose your sovereignty. You DON'T murder other people, I don't care what your ethics or lack of them are. Or how old and uneducated a culture you are. I can understand why they are this way. But it can't stand. The families have a right to have those bodies back.
Only if they have the particular bad genes.
By intermarrying with neighboring tribes.
But from the article it seems that neighboring tribes have been decimated by interaction with modern peoples.
The tribes numbers probably have been cut by last years tsunami as well.
bump.
Everybody has a genetic weakness of some kind only they are not expressed.
Most genetic weakness goes unexpressed because a person has only received that bad gene from one parent.
When a person receives the bad gene from both parents the genetic disease is expressed.
Diseases such as hemophilia (Europe’s Royalty) and sickle cell anemia (African Americans) are such genetically transmitted disease.
These diseases become prominent when isolated populations of small numbers interbreed.
Europe’s royalty and African Americans haven’t died out because there numbers are in the thousands and millions respectively, but this tribe’s numbers are far too small to be sustained with out an influx of outside genes. A number I seem to recall reading is about 50,000 for a minimum sustainable breeding population.
Post# 29, third photo from the top, guy on the right.
Proves Squantos has worked undercover!
Make that third from the last.
Long day.
...Or do not matter in the circumstances. Really harsh conditions have a way of filtering out genes that tend to leave one of ill health or debilitated. Having large families also leaves a lot of room for continued family lines with recessive issues. That said, the effects of inbreeding genetically, are quite overstated in the common understanding. Most of what genetic diversity gives a population is the ability to adapt to varying conditions.
I agree individual cases of inbreeding do not pose any real danger (if you marry you cousin you do not have any real danger of birth defects unless the parents on both sides were also cousins).
That being said, inbreeding over many generations does pose a real danger, especially in small populations (think the banjo player in the movie Deliverance).
I was thinking of that too. I have seen photos of those tribes in Andaman and Nicobar Island and they do look like Capoids, which are San Bushmen and Hottentots.
I wonder how they would feel about 21st century weapons?
I think your thinking is right here. These people are essentially a sovereign nation, and their immigration policy seems quite strict. It seems best to let them be. It would be a different story if this was a random act of violence with no precedent, but those fishermen should have known better.
While HG is under the bed making grunting noises and waving the spoon made from boar tusk...
I'll bet they would love to own some.
I see you have been suitably brainwashed by the PC university perfessor brigade. Don't be discouraged. Welcome to FR. The realities of the world are now available to you through the benificence of benign, normal, intelligent human beings who will be patient with you.
Cannibalism has been a widely documented ritual in many cultures, and undoubtedly could be shown to exist today if we could get an honest read out of the ivory tower anthropology departments.
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