An Indian Ocean island with a community that has been there for 60K years (2015) | Hacker News Reader

An Indian Ocean island with a community that has been there for 60K years (2015)

dailymail.co.uk

109 pointsempressplay101 comments

The "avoid contact for 60,000 years" bit is quite the embellishment. We only have detailed history being recorded about the island going back for, what, a couple centuries, maybe? For the rest of that time, we've got nothing.

Other sources tell a very different story from this site, which seems to be cherry-picking the historical record. The Wikipedia article documents several probable periods of contact in relatively recent history. That time in the 19th century where a large group of people shipwrecked on the island and lived there for a while before being rescued certainly counts. It wasn't peaceful contact at all, but it was prolonged, and a couple decades later British explorers were able to land on the island and explore - finding a largely depopulated landscape, presumably as a result of disease.

See also this account of peaceful contact a couple decades ago: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/islanders-running-ou...

(edit: Looks like the title and link have both been updated. The "avoid contact for 60,000 years" was a direct quote from the original title, and the original link went to http://themindunleashed.com/2015/07/the-people-of-this-isola...)

There are couple of tribes on those Islands (Andaman and Nicobar). Some of the tribes have been contacted, some have never been reached (and are off-limits) while some tribals have moved mainland in search of jobs and have mingled with the mainlanders.

One of the tribal language went extinct because most of their tribe moved mainland and learnt Hindi/English/Tamil http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1964610,00...

This article should talk about specifically the Sentinelese tribe (but they are mixing up Bo and Andamanese tribes with Sentinelese). As far as we know there has been no contact with them ever. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese

The rare sighting of them was during the boxing day tsunami and they had enough knowledge to predict it few hours before and move to higher ground.

The Independent article I linked specifies that it's talking about the Sentinelese of North Sentinel Island. The account it gives is from a researcher who was involved in the contact efforts the Wikipedia article you link briefly mentions in the paragraph that begins, "In the early 1990s. . . "

Also, look at the Wikipedia page for North Sentinel Island. The two articles give different lists of encounters with the Sentinelese that are only partially overlapping.

I originally heard about North Sentinel Island right here on Hacker News via this story [1]. One thing I found really interesting is how people credit their proximity to more desirable islands as one of the reason they have survived in (relative) isolation so long, since the other Andaman Islands were first to be exploited.

Also interesting is how the Sentelese didn't sail great distances like many Polynesian groups, they used small boats with long sticks which could only be operated in shallow waters. This kept them relatively tethered to the island.

I can't help but wonder what it's like there, what's the day to day like? I understand the ethical concerns, nevertheless I can't help but wonder what we could learn from a youtube live feed of the main camp site.

[1] http://www.neatorama.com/2013/07/08/The-Forbidden-Island/

Maria sighed at the TV. The Suitor had gotten boring this season - same old petty drama, same self-absorbed contestants using the facade of competition to build their personal "brands" for acting careers.

So after making sure that the kids were asleep, Maria logged into her VPN, activated Torta, and navigated to a tomato that was rumored to be hosted out of Kyrgyzstan. It was called "Dark Island".

For three years now, the series had surveilled the lives of an isolated tribe, the Etcamanese, to whom fire and agriculture were unknown. It was apparently filmed from an array of a dozen or so high-end video cameras embedded in biomimetic robotic vultures, so the coverage was spotty.

But despite the alien language and the majority of Etcamanese life happening outside of the video feeds, bits and pieces of the usual human drama were obvious: domestic squabbles over leaking huts, rivalries in love, medical emergencies due to snakebite.

And because there were only 272 people on the island, a regular cast of characters had emerged. Old man Onge, leader of the largest village, seemingly blind to the abusive behavior of his two sons. Gentle-voiced Senga, clubfooted, but the most skilled weaver of fishing nets - would she ever find love?

The number of people on the island, mysteriously enough, never seemed to change. Births always occurred the same day as deaths, with women apparently ingesting herbs to induce premature delivery if necessary. There suggestions of infanticide as well. It was a favorite topic on the discussion forums.

And although the language was still untranslated, some clever NLP algorithms by a group Pakistani Island-heads had begun to yield tantalizing clues. Led by UxBhutto07, they had determined that Etc1, the everyday dialect, had a strangely consistent grammar, with a system of tenses and declensions that seemed to contain no irregular forms. Their system of numbers seemed unusually complex as well, in base 8, with a suffix indicating prime numbers. (There were related, heated threads about the strange taboos concerning thumbs.) Etc2, a sung language, seemed to be used only at night, and in a ritual context. It was completely different from Etc1, and had eluded all attempts at decryption.

The site's main page loaded more slowly than usual, and Maria saw that the number of forum threads had tripled from the day before. The top thread was: "Where did 27 new people come from? And why is everyone singing?"

I wonder sometimes if North Sentinel Island is Earth, the Sentinelese are us and the rest of the world is the rest of the galaxy.

Do we have a history of killing alien visitors?

Maybe? NASA have been hiding a second sun from us for all these years who knows what they are up to! ;)

I know you're joking but what is this in reference to?

The hypothesized Planet Nine? It's predicted to be way smaller than a star, though.

That's nothing. The real outrage is the cover up of anti-earth.

I'm just waiting for the day some hapless clerk clicks the wrong checkbox and accidentally reveals the Savage Land to the world.

Yup, tis just a joke :) http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/paul-cox-nasa-second-s...

I, uh… have the distinction of being one of three men to have exterminated such a creature. I was with the C.I.A. in Vietnam. A UFO was sighted for five nights over Hanoi. The marines shot it down and brought it to us. Maybe… it didn't know what a gun was or perhaps they don't show emotion but that… innocent and blank expression as I pulled the trigger has haunted me… until I found you. That's why I come to you, Mr. Mulder, and will continue to come to you to atone for what I've done.

Related, probably from an old HN story:

http://www.probashionline.com/madhumala-chattopadhyay-first-...

Wikipedia on the Sentinelese: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese

On North Sentinel Island: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sentinel_Island

Whilst there is a concern of them being exposed to the common or garden pathogens, I imagine they don't have the population to sustain much genetic diversity.

The survivors of the Bounty Mutiny suffered heavily from inbreeding after several generations.

http://www.livescience.com/289-north-america-settled-70-peop...

Not even observations with a disinfected drone?

Drones (in the quadcopter-sense) are too noisy to make observations on Human groups without getting their attention. And then they would still throw stuff at the drones.

If at all, you'd need something alike a military surveillance drone, and even then the tree cover would make it difficult.

Not entirely true. At 200 meters in altitude, many quad-copters under 5 kilograms are pretty much inaudible.

With a telephoto lens, and 40 minuets of flight time inbound, 15 minutes of loitering, and 40 minutes of return flight, you could probably begin to catalog substantial data, without being invasive.

You wouldn't be able to ingress beyond tree canopy, but quad-copter drones aren't the greatest at negotiating tree cover to begin with. You'd only be able to capture the beaches. Sticking to the beaches, and remaining above a certain altitude, the sound of the ocean would probably cover up much of the actual propeller and motor noise that reaches the ground.

This would be a very expensive operation, given the remote destination. Nothing an individual could accomplish. But it's a concept within reach, using off-the-shelve consumer technology, if you've got the budget, and the logistical support to pull it off.

At 200 meters of altitude they still see the drone.

With telephoto lenses, it doesn't make sense to use multicopters any more, in my opinion. Not even a quadcopter can track objects on the ground precisely enough, just by positioning its body, so the camera needs a gimbal, with some kind of automatic tracking. At that point, a bigger, fixed wing drone would be better, I think.

[0], from [1].

I can almost see the next scene in the village being the start of new religion, à la the opening to Star Trek: Into Darkness [3] :)

[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7b/Índios_I...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncontacted_peoples

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldxE2DLZ-tA

It's a shame that any significant contact would wipe the Sentinelese out. Even a common cold infection would be the end of them.

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. I think I would be happy if my Viking ancestors had been filmed 1000 years ago.

The trick is to install the devices. It's their island and they probably know every inch of it. How to land on the beach, sneak around and plant surveillance devices (that ideally are solar powered and broadcast their data to some offshore station), and get off undetected? And hope the devices aren't discovered and tossed into the ocean? Also, the equipment would need to be totally sterile.

Mighty though our civilization is, we lack the technology to spy on an isolated Stone Age tribe like this. Rather humbling.

Personally I don't think we lack the technology at all, just the motivation.

> To protect the Sentinelese people - and visitors - the Indian government has established a three-mile exclusion zone

I was curious if I could find any other notable features visible from the satellite images, and noticed a boat well within the "exlclusion zone":

https://www.google.com/maps/@11.5271578,92.2834124,478a,35y,...

It's a shipwreck from the 1970's.

The crew was attacked by natives, and had to be rescued by helicopters.

Natives and invaders have been reclaiming the wreck's iron ever since.

When I read about them long time ago, they reminded me of those tribes in the movies "The Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest" and "The Gods must be crazy."

Those tribes always consider outsiders to be a threat.

I wonder what theories might Sentinelese have formulated about the world. When they see and hear loud voices of planes. Or distant light on the night sea. What do they conclude?

The tribe in "Gods" was quite friendly with other people.

reading this incidence of contact by British (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese#Incidents_of_conta...) - might have had a very bad perception of modern humans - they kidnapped an elderly couple and four children, the elderly couple died and those four children might have gone through some horrors that might have influenced them to be aggressive towards the modern humans

Minor nit: you have to be careful with the term "modern humans"; the islanders in question are also modern humans.

One reason of why the Sentinelese remain uncontacted is because they might not be immune to diseases and contact could kill them.

They don't know that. But it is one of the reasons why contact has been prohibited by law.

In the middle ages they didn't knew about infectious diseases, but they did blame foreigners for plagues or simply "bad luck".

"In January 1880, an armed British expedition to the island led by 20-year-old Maurice Vidal Portman, the local colonial administrator, arrived to conduct a survey of the island, and to take a prisoner, in accordance with British policy regarding unwelcoming tribes at the time, which was to kidnap a member of the tribe, treat them well and give them gifts, and release them back to the tribe, hoping to demonstrate friendliness. Portman's expedition of the island is believed to be the first by outsiders. While the Sentinelese tended to disappear into the jungle whenever outsiders were spotted approaching, Portman's expedition found an elderly couple and four children after several days. They were taken prisoner and brought to Port Blair. The elderly couple became ill and died, probably from contracting diseases to which they did not have immunity. The four children were returned to the island, given gifts, and released. The children then disappeared into the jungle. After this incident, the British did not try to contact the Sentinelese again and instead focused on other tribes."

I imagine that what those children spread amongst the islanders could be what makes them so aggressive to outside contact now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese

The ways of the people at Andaman Islands were popularized by Arthur Conan Doyle in the Sherlock Holmes novel "The Sign Of The Four".

With such a small population, wouldn't inbreeding be a problem?

Not according to some studies. During a period of the last ice age, only around 1,000 reproductive homo sapiens were around, possibly as low as 40 breeding pairs (after the Tuba eruption)

Looks like click-bait.

Careful with that source though, they post some pretty questionable stuff on their facebook.

There has been contact with the Sentinelese a few times.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sentinel_Island

That's a very interesting read, thanks for sharing.

This one is also quite nice I found: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncontacted_peoples

> Uncontacted peoples, also referred to as isolated peoples or lost tribes, are communities who live, or have lived, either by choice (peoples living in voluntary isolation) or by circumstance, without significant contact with global civilization.

The 60,000 year figure is pretty dubious. Also saying they've avoided contact or still live in the stone age probably isn't true. Obviously they are ignorant of the workings of helicopters and modern fishing vessels, but they likely understand what the purpose of them is. So they've been contacted, they just prefer not to interact.

Given that they live on an island, I'll bet they make use of all sorts of materials that wash ashore. Even a torn plastic tarp is very useful compared to having to make one by hand from some plant material.

So culturally they are likely completely isolated, but likely very aware of the changes going on in the world outside their island.

Considering the origin of the term "cargo cult" I sincerely doubt they understand what technology they've seen.

Their ethnic makeup and technology, combined with the location leads to the 60000 year figure. They are closely related to the first emergents from Africa.

I agree, seeing this is a major red flag.

Thank you, we've updated the link from http://themindunleashed.com/2015/07/the-people-of-this-isola... to this.

To be honest this isn't much better. The Daily Fail is fairly near the bottom of the UK tabloid gutter press pile. Would be better to link to the Wikipedia article instead:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese

Agreed. And it seems even worse with the outfit they took the story (and the title) from.

> While privileged people are eating £15 burgers and splashing £100 on new trainers, the near-naked Sentinelese are surviving off the land and hunting for sea creatures.

Ah, The daily mail. Let's open a McDonald's and ship in some Adidas. That'll make them happy.

I'm surprised they didn't use the word savages.

I read that sentence as mocking Westerners' consumerism, not glorifying their burger-and-trainer spending habits.

Not familiar with the "The Daily Hate" them? I rather think they did mean it as the OP said.

If there is an advanced civilization with better shoes than Aasics and better food than Shiv Sagar restaurant, I'd love it if they made contact and let me buy some of their stuff. Doubly so if they also have cures for heart disease, cancer, old age and other things that are likely to kill me.

How would you justify depriving the sentinelese of these wonders, as the Indian government is currently doing?

You'd have to buy their stuff using their currency, which you could only get by engaging in unfamiliar activities they called 'work', which you probabably wouldn't understand and wouldn't be very good at. In fact the only work you would be able to get would be making said 'aasics', the pay for which wouldn't be enough for you to buy a pair. How ironic! Etc. Etc...

Yeah, the idea of living in an advanced civilization and learning new things sounds horrible! I hope I never need to leave the place I was born or be exposed to new cultures. That would be so awful!

(Oh wait, I'm writing this from a city about 10,000 miles from where I was born. I haven't spoken to anyone from my own country in over a month. Should I also be suffering in some way?)

Right now, somewhere in that island is a child that wished she could live to be older than 30, while we culturally sensitive outsiders do not dare disturb her way of life.

Is life expectancy that low in such communities? I know it was around 30 in medieval Europe, but it had worse climate, epidemics carried over across the continent, overpopulation, constant wars and kings/lords/church robbing people of a big part of their food.

There's a myth (perpetuated by Paleo diet people and others) that hunter gatherers were in ideal health and agriculture ruined it.

The opposite is in fact true, hunter gatherers were short lived and agriculture is what gave humans the first great advance in longevity.

That is incorrect. Once you account for infant mortality, life expectancy at birth dropped with the advent of agriculture.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy

That said, diet probably isn't as crucial to longevity as we'd like to think. Hunter/gatherer populations got (and get) a lot of exercise and lead relatively low-stress lives. For example, the Tsimane of Bolivia eat animals and starch and have practically no heart disease. They walk around a lot and are generally a happy bunch. Probably the only thing that would increase life expectancies more would be actual medical care, particularly regarding parasites.

Drop of infant mortality (particularly, through having enough food) is what the advent of agriculture achieved, so this is like saying "people died younger, except those who didn't".

No, it's like saying that people who survived past infancy lived long lives.

What does modern agriculture have to do with infant mortality? It makes sense to exclude infants, because the reduction of those deaths are likely due to improvements in modern medicine and personal hygiene.

The thread above was not about modern agriculture; it was about the pre-historic time when agriculture was adopted and the availability of more food enabled more children to survive.

I dont but that at all. Infants dont eat anything that comes from a farm unless we're arguing that formula is somehow part of all this.

Infants eat breast milk, and if the mother does not have enough to eat, there is not enough milk. Sufficient and stable nutrition for mother is important to avoid child mortality.

In context of ancient world, nutrition of the family also had other mechanisms that impact the survival of children (strength to build housing, or strength to defend against hostile people, etc).

And your hypothesis is that insufficient breast milk production affects the mortality rates more so than modern medicine?

I still did not write about modern medicine; I don't know why you bring that up. This was about the transition from hunter-gatherers to farming, first in Mesopotamia and a few other places, about 10 000 years ago or so.

That was the "advent of agriculture", also known as "Neolithic revolution".

However, overall I'd say that starvation vs. having sufficient food impacts mortality rates more than modern medicine. You can't eat the best of hygiene and medication doesn't nourish you.

And that is also incorrect in assuming a strict hunter-gatherer mode of production. Husbandry and some agriculture were part of the late hunter-gatherer people's life, as seen in Scandinavia for example, and this does not necessarily mean that this was a mere transition to full-fledged farming either. The debate is still wide open.

Keep in mind that the average lifespans were so low only because of high childhood mortality. If someone made it past the age of six or so, they had a good chance of making it in to their 60's, even millennia ago.

So should we force our way of life on them because we think we know better? This is the same argument used in so many failed regime change operations/invasions.

If they're as isolated as we assume, that child wouldn't know what she's 'missing'.

Yes, we should. We think we know better. We have senses and can measure ways in which the quality of life of man and animals can be ascertained, and we can conclude that these people will live much shorter, worse, unfulfilling lives, than those of people born elsewhere on average. If not the first generation, at least the following.

It is because we are culturally timid and racist that we still hold to the idea of the noble savage [1], and condemn their children to their wretched lives. A child not knowing what it's missing is no excuse to let her suffer, when we are in position to help.

Regime change operations and invasions have little to do with this unless they come from the sincere effort to improve their people's lives. And when the intention is sincere and the execution well planned, it works, and you can tell by the quality of life of countries like Japan and South Korea.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_savage

This completely leaves out the element of choice on their behalf. Based on what is known it's entirely possible they choose not to have any part in "our world".

Previous contact had some of their people kidnapped and some died so I'm sure that and similar events are the reason for hostility towards visitors.

The fact that you even talk about them living an unfulfilling life is entirely ethnocentric, what is a fulfilled life anyways? I'd love to learn more about them, and ideally we could learn from each other.

1) They currently do not have an element of choice. And it would actually be very difficult or impossible to proportionate them a full choice since they would have to know what their lives would be like if outside the island, or with a modernized island.

2) Human beings fear the unknown (quite rightly so, often).

3) You can make the relativity argument all day. I personally believe that a person that is confined to an island in pre-agricultural civilization does not live a life as fulfilling as one that can access vast amounts of information on the internet, can read thousands of texts written over a span of 3 millenia on every topic imagined, can hear Antonio Vivaldi [1], almost void of unnecessary or unusual suffering and privation, for over twice the lifetime.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z39KxbbtCC0

As I said, I'm all for offering them greater information to make choices, but your conclusion that their life is worse by all measures is an ethnocentric opinion. Certainly thats the conclusion most people would reach, but that can only be based on what we believe to be best.

Willing to live is not a cultural trait.

Can you explain what you mean by that?

What do you want us to do? These guys keep throwing spears and shooting arrows at anyone that approaches their island. Should we... should we ask the Indian government to send in an armed infantry unit to force the Sentinelese to sit down and watch a video explaining the benefits of 21st century civilization?

Meanwhile, way more people actually living in 21st century civilization in India are currently experiencing extreme poverty and suffering,[1] despite having instant access to Vivaldi.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dharavi

Funny you mention my country.

You know, back in the early 20th century, Japan had exactly the same attitude. It saw itself as the beacon of progress tasked with leading the rest of Asia out of traditional misery and into the modern civilization. White men's burden, Asian edition.

It went on to colonize Korea, to teach us what modern civilization is like, and of course went on to occupy other parts of Asia as well. Somewhere along the way they got overenthusiastic and declared themselves the protector of Asian people against roaring tides of Western colonialism.

Well, we all know how that went. And yes, for all the supposedly good things Japan did for us (there are some), the colonial time was shitty days to live in.

* And then America took up the mantle, decided to cut Korea in halves, and then propped up a pro-western dictator who went on to murder more than a hundred thousand people... (Well, to be fair, it's not like America picked him because he was murderous: America probably didn't think he would be that bad. But still, it was more shitty days to live in.)

Sounds like you are arguing to take up the Whiteman's Burden:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Man%27s_Burden

Take up the White Man's burden, The savage wars of peace— Fill full the mouth of Famine And bid the sickness cease; And when your goal is nearest The end for others sought, Watch sloth and heathen Folly Bring all your hopes to nought.

The Canadian government tried something like this with the Residential School System:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Indian_residential_sc...

The residential school system had a lasting and adverse effect on the transmission of Aboriginal culture from one generation to the next. Over 150,000 students attended residential schools, constituting approximately 30% of the population of native children in Canada.[1] The legacy of the schools on Aboriginal communities has been referred to as a "collective soul wound." A sample of 127 survivors revealed that half of these survivors have criminal records; 65% have been diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder; 21% have been diagnosed with major depression; 7% have been diagnosed with anxiety disorder; and 7% have been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder.

Right now, millions of Americans are suffering, because Communism has not been brought to them.

I wonder how you'd take to being liberated of your current lifestyle.

Unbelievable. I hope they can be studied with compassion and care. Not with violence and hate. And I hope they can be gently introduced to modernity without reducing them to janitors in Mumbai.

Also, the article claims it's located between Myanmar and Indonesia. That's just wrong. It's apparently located in the Andaman Islands, which are claimed by India.

Why introduce to modern society at all? Keep them around as a fresh start, should singularity or environmental collapse make that necessary?

It's not about "introducing them to modern society", but rather to establish contact and communication. Maybe learn something about them, and being able to help when a disaster strikes the island.

A population of 50-500 individuals must be extremely fragile, even if they survived on that island for so long. They could become infected through anything, even bird excrement or something, also tsunamis or other bad weather. It would be helpful to respond to a crisis.

What makes you think they'll be treated with violence and hate?

I would avoid introducing them to modernity at all. They've been there for thousands of years without issue, why interrupt now? Let them be.

We don't really know what issues they are facing. We do know that they've been able to survive, that's about it.

What is concerning to me is the shrinking genetic variability involved in long-term in-breeding. That is, logically, a rather important issue.

without issue

Infant and maternal mortality? Childhood disease? Loss of teeth? Local diseases/parasites?

Just because they're surviving doesn't mean their lives are without issue. Would you want to revert 60000 years to their level of technology? Would they want to go back to the village if they were given this same choice?

Too early to say, but ask me again in 5 years. If humanity fails to overcome the debilitating psychosis induced by Facebook in that time period, the island might become that much more tempting.

I'm among the majority of humans who don't use Facebook. I'm not too worried about it!

The main argument in favor (which I'm presenting but not necessarily defending) seems to be that the surrounding area is increasingly densely populated, so avoiding contact in the long run is impossible. Therefore it's better to take the initiative and make sure that contact is made in a controlled and gentle manner.

> What makes you think they'll be treated with violence and hate?

"Upper caste" Indians (Brahmins / Kshatriyas) have a history of treating marginalized tribal groups with violence and hatred. Forcibly removing them to exploit natural resources.

Source: I'm Indian. I've seen quite a bit of this happen during my life. Here's an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narmada_Bachao_Andolan

You are trying too hard, even if I subscribe to the evils of brahmin priests you are talking about Sentalese who are far far away from Indian mainland.

India claims Andamans on technicality, those islands were at best a way point for Indian sailors in the past.

Please give better points of and sources of exploitation, to call Narmada Bachao Andolan which was a protest against building a dam, as something only Brahmins and Kshatriyas only benefited is a stretch.

Lol, there's human safaris in India. They're not particularly benevolent to tribal peoples...

Just to be clear, Andaman is not claimed by India, it is a part of India as much as Hawaii (or even Alaska) is part of the United States of America.

> as much as Hawaii (or even Alaska) is part of the United States of America.

Hawaii is a terrible analogy to use. Hawaii was annexed by military force on behalf of the American pineapple and sugar mafia (Dole, etc). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Hawaii , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaiian_sovereignty_movement

As far as I can tell, Andaman and Nicobar islands are part of the fascinating historical migration route between India and South East Asia, and no military force was used by India to have ownership of those islands.

I admire the way Indians have dealt with those islands ( leaving them un-interfered with ) versus how my own culture dealt (and deals) with less technologically advanced populations.

Thanks for sharing..

I agree, however as soon as the island is discovered to be the world's greatest and/or only source of unobtanium, then they're quickly going to find themselves deported, with little in the way of compensation.

They are very hostile and violent against outsiders, so it's best for all if they are left alone.

They don't know it themselves but they serve the rest of the humanity by preserving one island as it was.

Andaman islands geographically indeed are located between Myanmar and Indonesia. It's not wrong.

And the islands are an integral part of India without any major disputes on its staus with a neighbouring nation. Not just claimed by India.

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