Imagine an island in the middle of the crystal clear waters of the Indian Ocean, with white beaches and coconuts growing on the trees. Sounds like a perfect get-away, right? Wrong. If you venture too close, there's a more-than-likely chance you'll be impaled with spears and arrows.
Living in isolation through vicious seclusion, with no agricultural farming, no satellites or contact with the world, the Sentinelese (as we have named them) have inhabited an island off the coast of India in the Bay of Bengal.
They survive off of island plants, animals, and fish, and make tools from animal bones and recovered rubble that washes up on the island's reefs. They don't have clothes; they use leaves. Based on our distant observations, considering contact with their people is forbidden, we assume they live as hunter-gatherers, and do not fully understand agriculture.
Thought to be descendants of the first humans to emerge from Africa, a group of anywhere between 30 and 500 people have turned the island into a sequestered home for their people, and their people only. For your own sake, steer clear of the island, and its surrounding waters.
Photo via North Sentinel Island
In 2006, two fishermen got a little too close to shore. Although they were fishing in illegal waters, I wouldn't have deemed murder a proper punishment. Apparently the Sentinelese disagreed. When an Indian Navy helicopter attempted to retrieve the fishermen's bodies, they were confronted from below with tribesmen with arrows, preventing the craft to land.
Indian anthropologist Trilokinath Pandit made visits to the island, trying to study the inhabitants, and left a live pig as an offering. The Sentinelese slaughtered it, rejecting Pandit’s gift and his visit to their secluded land. The Indian government installed a three-mile exclusion zone around the island to protect both the natives and outsiders.
The Sentinelese are not friendly, and although they don't have shotguns or grenades, they have spears and arrows, and aren't afraid to attack outsiders. So, if you're ever venturing through the waters of the Bay of Bengal, keep a look out for the island made up of the most isolated tribe on earth.
