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Slash real life floor so this island here is North Sentinel island, and you're not allowed to visit it
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There's a few reasons why but first it's important to know that North Sentinel island is part of the greater Andaman Islands which are in
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The middle of the Bay of Bengal of roughly 1300 kilometers away from India and three hundred kilometers away from
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Myanmar except for this tiny bit here the rest of the islands are governed by India
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and if that includes North Sentinel island right here the people who inhabit the island are known as the
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Sentinelese and even though their Island is technically a part of India
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They've probably never even heard of India or anywhere else for that matter
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you see the Sentinelese are one of the very last remaining groups of people on earth that have remained virtually untouched and
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uncontacted from modern civilization
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They live a hunter-gatherer lifestyle surviving from fishing hunting and gathering
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Plants similar to how all of our
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ancestors lived tens of thousands of years ago in the Paleolithic era if the real world was like a game of
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Civilization 5 then the Sentinelese would not have even discovered agriculture yet
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Which is the very first tech that you research in the game?
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They also have still not discovered a way of producing fire
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So they've been pretty isolated from the rest of human history and culture for untold
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Thousands of years the strange thing about this society though is how close it exists to the modern world the island is only?
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50 kilometres away from Port Blair a modern city home to over
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100,000 people with an international airport a major naval base used by the Indian Navy and the seat of government for the Andaman and Nicobar
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Islands territory the way this situation came to be is rather interesting
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The first known contact between the Sentinelese and the outside world wasn't until the year
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1867 in that year an Indian merchant ship crashed on a reef near the island the crew escaped to the beach and were attacked by
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The locals who were seeing the first other humans in their entire civilizations history
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They survived one another passing ship rescued them and periodic contacts were made by the British until
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1887 from then on nobody from the outside world managed to make contact with them again until in
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1970 when the Indian government sent a group of anthropologists who spotted them on the beach tragedy struck in
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1974 when a National Geographic
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team went to the
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Island to shoot a documentary and got attacked by volleys of arrows as their boat got too near the beach the director was struck by
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An arrow in his thigh and the crew retreated afterwards in
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1981 a ship wrecked itself on the north side of the island which can still be seen there today on Google Maps they radioed for
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Urgent help after they spotted the Sentinelese building boats on the beach armed with javelins and arrows
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But help didn't come for two weeks
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Eventually they were all rescued by helicopter and the first actual peaceful contact between them and the outside world finally occurred in
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1991 with a group of Indian anthropologists
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But the Indian government decided to stop any further expeditions to the island in
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1997 out of fear of introducing diseases that the Sentinelese would have no immunities
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against like what happened in a few other places around the world previously to this and
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Just because the risk of getting attacked by them was considered too great
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They survived the Indian Ocean tsunami in
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2004 after Helle Kapur sent to check up on them was warned away by a warrior with a bow and
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ultimate tragedy struck in the year
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2006 when two fishermen who were illegally fishing in the waters near the island
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Fell asleep and had their boat drifted just a little too close to the beach
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Sentinelese archers killed the men and when a helicopter came to recover their bodies
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It was also attacked by a volley of arrows and driven away in the aftermath of these incidents the Indian government has banned all
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Travel to the island and declared a three mile
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Exclusion zone around it which is enforced by their Navy that is the reason why you'll probably never get to set foot on this island
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And even if you could you probably wouldn't even want to the latest Indian census of the island tried to estimate their
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population and calculated it to be around 40, but other estimates place the true population somewhere between 50 and
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400 people whatever the number the last people from the outside world that visited the island was in
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2006 and neither lived to talk about it
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But imagine what the perspective of these Islanders must be like when that ship crashed on the island back in 1981 it may have accidentally
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kick-started the Iron Age for their
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Civilization as they have been observed to be
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Scavenging the wreckage for iron that they now use in their arrow tips to them their island is their universe and the outside world is
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As far away as the Stars and space our to our
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Civilization we are there aliens with incomprehensible
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Technology and languages and we have much to learn from how they've reacted to us so far
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We can't say for certain when or if contact with the Sentinelese will occur again
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But what I can't say for certain is how to get a free audio book you head over to audible.com slash
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