First Friendly Contact with the Sentinelese
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If we wanted to learn anything about the Sentinelese, then perhaps we could use well-camouflaged camera traps, and other electronic eavesdropping devices. The moral considerations are difficult - it's a privacy breach, but the information would also be valuable not only to their descendants (should contact be made), but also to science generally.
Would you accept NSA surveillance if they said it was so that your descendants could understand you, and "For Science"?
What would they do if their camera recorded a violent act between tribe members, or against a child? They might feel obligated to act, or not act, either of which could have dangerous consequences.
It has often occurred to me that my own children could be reading through my comments years from now. Probably not. There's a lot of them. Of course if they can search, well, who knows.
All the same, I think you make a good point.
If I trusted the NSA to actually do that, I'd have no problem with it.
The problem is, I don't have the choice of being surveilled by the NSA, and I don't trust them. Just as the Senigalese would have no choice in redsummer's proposal, and many reasons not to trust outsiders.
If an unintrusive privacy breach of that small group was likely to allow us to learn something that would improve the lives of 7 billion others, it ought to be made. Just do the math.
I don't think there's likely to be that much we can learn which would actually be useful, but that ought to be the test.
My understanding is that the only thing we'd learn is more about how early tribal systems might have been, which is of academic interest to Anthropologists, not of general value to every day people.
I am known to misunderstand though, which is why I'm asking if there is something we think we can learn from studying them that would apply to all people.
Well, I guess I answer my own question here, but we don't know that they survived because of their observation of the nature. We don't know enough about them to say that. They survived, how or why, we don't know. Knowing how or why may be of interest to Anthropologists, but there's nothing indicating that it would be generally useful for all humans.
Based on my understanding of "reality", I would assume this would tend to be the case. From what I understand, rapid technological advancement tends to wreak havoc on social structures.
These people are wise to attack outsiders, especially given their early contact with westerners in 1880. There are all kinds of ways outside contact is likely to bring despair to their community.
It also sounds like they have a matriarchal society which is (of course debatably) a more stable, more advanced social structure.
Once we start thinking about the diversity of human experience I think we can see such statements as examples of the Noble Savage sentiment (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_savage)
I think considering all primitive societies to be "noble" is probably not accurate. Probably most of them had serious issues.
My impression (which is just from reading various material over the years) of these small tribe-size communities is that some of them evolve very advanced social structures - where there is low violence and high compassion. The emotional side of me "likes" this. But also my intellect suggests that more harmonious/supportive communities are probably stronger and more productive.
Other communities diverge into states that I consider to be "sick" perversions of what communities "should" be like. Things like honor killings and it being ok to sell your nieces and nephews into the slave trade are things I would personally consider sick and I hope they are sub optimal from a survival perspective.
If I had to guess, I'd say a big reason she considered them socially advanced was the matriarchal component. I speculate that its hard to develop a matriarchal society because men tend to be more aggressive and physically stronger. However, my impression is that matriarchal societies tend to be less violent and more harmonious. It could be argued that less violence and more harmony are components of a more optimal social structure.
For instance, the concept of private property promotes the invention of productivity-enhancing capital, at the expense of tribal cooperation. Computerized automation drives the proliferation of unnecessary jobs.
I don't think this is contact with the Sentinelese, but with the Jarawa, another tribe on the same chain of islands.
The photos here appear to show contact with a Jawara tribe, and are incorrectly labeled as Sentinelese.
If the Indian government just sent people over to throw coconuts onto an island and didn't have any official documentation of the trip, or research that the trip resulted in, a story about it more than 20 years later doesn't hold a lot of weight for me.
As you can see, this is just me being a bit pedantic, so if others want to take this as a source of truth, they are welcome to do so, I'd just like to know why they think this is authoritative.
1. The author's meeting with the Sentinelese.
2. The author's meeting with the Jarawa.
You are correct that most of the photos are from the meeting with the Jarawa and that much of the article describes the author's time with the Jarawa but there is a segment which explicitly describes the meeting with the Sentinelese, separate from the Jarawa meetings.
The only reference I can find for such contact is a blog post and a 1993 news article that appears anecdotal. I'd like to see the journal article written about this contact by the Anthropological Survey of India which funded the contact with the Andaman Islanders, but I can't find a source, leading me to believe it didn't happen as described.
The best I can find is this book: https://books.google.com/books?id=-4PDCQAAQBAJ&pg=PA140&lpg=...
This text claims to have made friendly contact in 1986, and says 1994 had contact on the eastern coast.
These dates don't line up with the story, and I can't find any official source information about the contact, so the inconsistency is a red flag.
I don't know how one would go about researching Indian anthropological expeditions to find the officially-documented connection to reality, but presumably that's where you'd start, if you wanted to verify the story.
While in theory a similar looking beach could be anywhere, and the native people could be of any tribe, in the first photo the visitors are standing in water, offering coconuts. The other tribes live in the mainland of Andaman island, so when meeting them you would more probably arrive on foot on land.
This is some, perhaps indirect, indication that the visitors arrived on a boat, and the photo really is from where the caption says it is.
Scott suggests that we might tend to think that isolated people have been there for millennia and have no idea that there are other human beings, but that very often they just wanted to be alone, or not part of a particular society. (And for those who deliberately left, they may have left behind things like governments, agriculture, and metalworking technology.)
It does seem like we have a tendency to say "ooh! unchanging primordial antiquity!" and not remember that human migration is one of the greatest constants of human history, and everyone has a story about how they got where they are.
Reason ? They haven't yet invented oars.
But this tribe might have friendliness and hostility reversed :)
Given that humans only evolved around then, it's reasonable to ask about tribes that split off.
"modern humans evolved in Africa possibly from Homo heidelbergensis, Homo rhodesiensis or Homo antecessor and migrated out of the continent some 50,000 to 100,000 years ago"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_evolution
I suppose this could be mostly answered with a DNA test, on further thought.
I took this to mean they've been isolated at least in terms of not having genes cross over.