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  • Slash real life floor so this island here is North Sentinel island, and you're not allowed to visit it

  • 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

  • The middle of the Bay of Bengal of roughly 1300 kilometers away from India and three hundred kilometers away from

  • Myanmar except for this tiny bit here the rest of the islands are governed by India

  • and if that includes North Sentinel island right here the people who inhabit the island are known as the

  • Sentinelese and even though their Island is technically a part of India

  • They've probably never even heard of India or anywhere else for that matter

  • you see the Sentinelese are one of the very last remaining groups of people on earth that have remained virtually untouched and

  • uncontacted from modern civilization

  • They live a hunter-gatherer lifestyle surviving from fishing hunting and gathering

  • Plants similar to how all of our

  • ancestors lived tens of thousands of years ago in the Paleolithic era if the real world was like a game of

  • Civilization 5 then the Sentinelese would not have even discovered agriculture yet

  • Which is the very first tech that you research in the game?

  • They also have still not discovered a way of producing fire

  • So they've been pretty isolated from the rest of human history and culture for untold

  • Thousands of years the strange thing about this society though is how close it exists to the modern world the island is only?

  • 50 kilometres away from Port Blair a modern city home to over

  • 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

  • Islands territory the way this situation came to be is rather interesting

  • The first known contact between the Sentinelese and the outside world wasn't until the year

  • 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

  • The locals who were seeing the first other humans in their entire civilizations history

  • They survived one another passing ship rescued them and periodic contacts were made by the British until

  • 1887 from then on nobody from the outside world managed to make contact with them again until in

  • 1970 when the Indian government sent a group of anthropologists who spotted them on the beach tragedy struck in

  • 1974 when a National Geographic

  • team went to the

  • 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

  • An arrow in his thigh and the crew retreated afterwards in

  • 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

  • Urgent help after they spotted the Sentinelese building boats on the beach armed with javelins and arrows

  • But help didn't come for two weeks

  • Eventually they were all rescued by helicopter and the first actual peaceful contact between them and the outside world finally occurred in

  • 1991 with a group of Indian anthropologists

  • But the Indian government decided to stop any further expeditions to the island in

  • 1997 out of fear of introducing diseases that the Sentinelese would have no immunities

  • against like what happened in a few other places around the world previously to this and

  • Just because the risk of getting attacked by them was considered too great

  • They survived the Indian Ocean tsunami in

  • 2004 after Helle Kapur sent to check up on them was warned away by a warrior with a bow and

  • ultimate tragedy struck in the year

  • 2006 when two fishermen who were illegally fishing in the waters near the island

  • Fell asleep and had their boat drifted just a little too close to the beach

  • Sentinelese archers killed the men and when a helicopter came to recover their bodies

  • It was also attacked by a volley of arrows and driven away in the aftermath of these incidents the Indian government has banned all

  • Travel to the island and declared a three mile

  • 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

  • And even if you could you probably wouldn't even want to the latest Indian census of the island tried to estimate their

  • population and calculated it to be around 40, but other estimates place the true population somewhere between 50 and

  • 400 people whatever the number the last people from the outside world that visited the island was in

  • 2006 and neither lived to talk about it

  • 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

  • kick-started the Iron Age for their

  • Civilization as they have been observed to be

  • 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

  • As far away as the Stars and space our to our

  • Civilization we are there aliens with incomprehensible

  • Technology and languages and we have much to learn from how they've reacted to us so far

  • We can't say for certain when or if contact with the Sentinelese will occur again

  • 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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