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.
Boar tusk is powerful talisman, aye...
Nonsense. They're not insects, they're humans, and they've done just fine without any "courtesy" from the modern world. Such "courtesy" has klled off most tribes like them.
They want to be left alone - we should oblige.
ROFLMAO!
Just because you are American and arrogant, doesn't give you the right to tell these people they must be overrun by other cultures. They don't want it, I think they've made this perfectly clear.
If Iran decided to send their people here and make us follow their culture, we shouldn't kill them? I do not understand your point of view. If your point of view prevails, we will soon be Muslims. Heaven forbid we should fight back as they are doing.
That's exactly what I mean. They exist courtesy of our discretion. They exist today because charitable government authorities think they should be enabled to continue to exist, which is fine by me BTW. Otherwise they would be extinct. In the natural order of things, like predatory tribes, foreign military powers looking for forward bases, and wandering brigands, they already have declined, probably past the point of no return.
I know they are human beings, and they are being treated like an endangered species--eg of some rare moth in a terrarium. It's an analogy. Figure it out.
What?
No penis gourds?
Talking about judgmental! Yes, I'm American, but no, I'm not arrogant. I do, however, value life. If you had read what I had written about these people, I said that I think they ought to be allowed to continue their way of life without outside interference. But I draw the line at murder. NO ONE has the right to murder others. NO ONE, I don't care how primitive and protected. The families of their murdered victims have the right to retrieve their bodies from the island. I didn't say that they then had the right to move in.
My point was not for the hell of it that we should go gang-banging onto a island of a max of 200 people with stone age weapons. I would just say that some half-trained, sober, small-armed poachers could keep the natives at bay fairly easily unless there are some difficult reefs (see Burmuda).
Jeez just take a few well placed sniper shots and splatter 100-300 rounds at the heros (while you still have suprise), and the tide IMHO would change pretty quickly. Until the frond-covered wing planes come over the horizon.
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Just updating the GGG info, not sending a general distribution. |
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You must do the needful.
IT’S A SMALL WORLD AFTER ALL.
Not.
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