Learning this makes North Sentinel island seem like a wild success story. It’s been continuously supporting a population with no outside help for at least a millennium.
Humans would only go extinct if they lived in an environment which required a certain minimum of cultural ability, e.g. making clothes in areas with a colder climate, as humans don't have sufficient fur.
IIRC, the closely-related Andamanese lost technology. Years ago I read something that said they did not use boats, but still occasionally constructed something like them (I'm thinking something like a dugout canoe) for purely ritual purposes.
> Submerged in the crystal-clear waters off North Sentinel Island is a mysterious shipwreck with a truly hair-raising backstory.
> It belongs to The Primrose, a 16,000 ton freighter which ran aground in a storm while transporting a cargo of chicken feed from Bangladesh to Australia on August 2, 1981.
> [...]
> Footage of the tribespeople taken during "friendly" contact with a group of visiting Indian anthropologists in 1991 shows some members carrying metal tools for the first time.
> It is believed the tools were forged from metal scavenged from The Primrose, which remains in its resting place atop a coral reef near the island.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/hair-raising-story-behind-m...
> Gonschor argues that, rather than being isolated, the Sentinelese visited other Andamanese peoples. Their isolation wasn’t ancient, he thinks, but the product of British and Japanese colonialism, and in particular, the British invasion of the island in 1880.
> We can use Lana Lopesi’s new book False Divides to understand what the North Sentinelese have suffered. Lopesi laments the way that, in the Pacific as well as the Indian Oceans, colonisation interrupted histories of inter-island voyaging, trade and marriage.
https://thespinoff.co.nz/society/04-12-2018/three-myths-abou...
Googled and found a few versions. Here is one:
https://thestorytellers.com/the-businessman-and-the-fisherma...
Also see who thestorytellers are a part of (at the top).
These people have survived for 50,000 years (!) on a resource limited island and have managed to continue to have a martial arm and frivolous beach orgies. I would have to assume they’re pretty happy on a day to day basis.
They'll tell you it's all good apart from colonists, blackbirders, and atomic tests.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXkwDeaQS08
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vEntK3fwp8
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackbirding
https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/location/marshall-islands/
Is there a reason you'd make such a banal generic point specific to the Torres Strait Island or Tiwi Islands?
Right, as usual, the evil Europeans were the cause of the collapse, and the fact that there were no trees left on the island for hundreds of years prior, and therefore no wood for building things, had absolutely nothing to do with the collapse. This modern rewriting of history according to modern sensitivities is incredible in a society that preaches to value reason and science rather than wishful thinking.
These papers are a attempt to reconquer lost funding by the very same academics who happily ignore other cultures atrocities, be they in the past:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sultanate_of_Zanzibar
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-african-h...
Or in the present: https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/09/23/russia-partial-military...
Its extraordinary that such a blatantly racist (west centric diabolism) and ideological charged movement is still recognized as academia.
"...the researchers determined that the island experienced steady population growth from its initial settlement until European contact in 1722. After that date, two models show a possible population plateau, while another two models show possible decline."
and
"Current research shows that deforestation was prolonged and didn’t result in catastrophic erosion; the trees were ultimately replaced by gardens mulched with stone that increased agricultural productivity. During times of drought, the people may have relied on freshwater coastal seeps." [1]
"Evil Europeans" is your term in an attempt to make it seem as if the European culture is being attacked. There is no "modern rewriting of history according to modern sensitivities", it's rewriting of history taking into account new knowledge that Pacific peoples weren't stupid, had spread across the Pacific using navigation methods unknown to Europeans for thousands of years and recognising the effects of the introduction of outside cultures - disease, slavery and theft.
https://www.binghamton.edu/news/story/3155/resilience-not-co...
> It’s no joke.
So is high infant mortality, low life expectancy due to a very high likelihood of dying from a trivially treatable diseases, living in abject poverty etc etc.
In the highlands of India, remaining time is often spent brewing and drinking alcohol, with the biggest problem being elephants finding and raiding the brew pots.