What Happened To The Rare Tribes (Tsunami)

Times Of India ^ | 12-28-2004 | Sanjay Dutta/Chandrika Mago

[blam]

What happened to the rare tribes?

SANJAY DUTTA & CHANDRIKA MAGO

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 28, 2004 11:19:06 PM

NEW DELHI: An enormous anthropological disaster is in the making. The killer tsunami is feared to have wiped out entire tribes — already threatened by their precariously small numbers — perhaps rendering them extinct and snapping the slender tie with a lost generation.

Officials involved in rescue operations are pessimistic, but still keeping their fingers crossed for the Sentinelese and Nicobarese, the two tribes seen as bearing the brunt of the killer wave.

The bigger fear is for the Sentinelese, anthropologically the most important tribe, living on the flat North Sentinel Island. Putting their population at about 100, officials say no body count is possible as the tribe had remained isolated. The Nicobarese, numbering about 25,000, are also feared to have suffered major losses, if not near -extinction. Clustered in 12 villages along the coast of Car Nicobar, the worst affected, it is feared nearly half of them could have been engulfed by the giant wave.

Then there are the Chowra and Teresa islands, mostly inhabited by the Nicobarese. Chowra has reported 38 deaths from a total population of 1,500. Here, too, the picture is hazy. The Onges, living on the Little Andaman island, are expected to fare a little better. So far, 14 deaths have been reported from the island. Some of these would be Onges. To begin with, they just number a 100.

The Shompens, Great Andamanese and Jarawas are expected to have fared better as they live on comparatively higher grounds. But their small number could be working against them.

[Kitten Festival]

Asians in general are very cool people - all of them, in all the glory of their differences, whether sino asians, malay asians or indian asians. I love them all.

They're never supercilious, always interested, wonderfully exotic and couldn't be less like annoying eurotrash.

[NautiNurse]

Thank you for the post. Half a world away, it is tough to absorb all of the implications from this catastrophe.

Once again, we are a very changed world.

[jungleboy]

German Tourism Companies have been very agressive over the last 20 years in setting up/building destinations in CHEAP, yet beautiful places.

[RightWhale]

I still don't know a tenth of it.

Thanks to Web browsers and the eagerness of FReepers to help, we can view an amazingly detailed topical map of anyplace where something is happening, and not just on earth. Our world already includes Mars and the moon will be coming on line soon. Not to mention Hubble views and maps of the entire visible universe all the way out. We know the geography of Kashmir and the wild back country of Pakistan or anywhere OBL is sighted next better than most know the geography of their next county, except for those who actually live in Kashmir or Pakistan.

[diverteach]

This most certainly falls perfectly inline with the prophecy of the end times to have "Earthquakes in DIVERSE places"

[Strategerist]

This most certainly falls perfectly inline with the prophecy of the end times to have "Earthquakes in DIVERSE places"

Problem is the evidence is that there have been earthquakes in "Divers places" for the entire 4 billion year history of the planet.

[Jhensy]

I'm a geography buff; these lands have always been my "fantasy" islands: the Andamans and Nicobars, the Maldives, Seychelles, etc. Much of their charm is their unfamiliarity to westerners. Not anymore.

Sadly, I've never been to any of them. It was just nice knowing that exotic, mysterious places like these still existed.

Lay off the cannibals.

[derheimwill]

The last cannibals were converted to Christianity in the 70's. There's a saying: the whore is closer to God than the theologian.

[muawiyah]

True story ~ found this one in a comprehensive history of postal services of the world.

Back in the old days there was a regular mail service between the King of England and his "interests" in Nederland.

A small sailboat was used since there really wasn't all that much mail involved. The fellows on the Nederland shore at Middelburg, which was then an island, set up a watch every day to catch sight of the mailboat. It was very important that they do this before the folks in the surrounding swamps did so because they would not only kill and rob the crew of the mail boat, they had been known to eat them!

To assist them they had a small 3 power telescope.

Galileo mentioned that he'd gotten the idea from someone in Middelburg.

It is presumed the telescope had been invented there for a very practical purpose. Watching for the mail from the King of England may well have been that reason, and the cannibalism rampant in the fens!

Remember, the Euros are only a few hundred years "ahead" of the primitive fuzzy-wuzzies out on those islands, and sometimes not even that.

[GladesGuru]

"I doubt it; there's no sex trade in small boys there..."

Haven't been in Hati lately, eh?

[Eric in the Ozarks]

Some years ago, I sold some specialty petroleum via tanker to a company doing business in Balikpapan, Indonesia. The government wanted a 100 percent of value bribe before they allowed the product to be transferred.

[muawiyah]

These places aren't particularly "divers" either ~ earthquakes and volcanic explosions along the Strait of Sunda have served to bring civilization to the brink of destruction several times.

Be happy this big quake happened at the Western end of Sumatra, and not the Eastern end. That's where Krakatoa is located! One explosion possibly brought about the Dark Ages in 538 AD.

[dufekin]

Cannibalism continues to this day in some parts of the Congo. Perpetually famished North Koreans sometimes eat their own dead for sustenance. And I believe that there remain some cannibals in very remote highlands on the island of New Guinea, but they may have converted in the past decade or so. Most cannibals today, insofar as I can tell, only eat the corpses of the deceased as an alternative to burial; they do not kill people for the purpose of eating them.

But the people mentioned in this article are almost certainly NOT cannibals. Cannibalism is fairly rare in part because consumption of infected flesh presents and easy conduit for the transfer of disease. A cannibalistic tribe in Indonesia was dying rapidly in the past century because of a rogue prion (Crutzefelt-Jacob disease?) transferred by consumption of infected flesh.

[ApplegateRanch]

No one ever seems to question the ethics of these anthropologists for working with governments to keep these "pet" humans for their private study, watching them die of easily preventable diseases, while refusing to offer help for fear of "contaminating" the population.

Can't violate The Prime Directive, you know.

Just because that star is going to go nova is no excuse to do any more than watch the non-warp capable autochthons be wiped out, rather than contaminate their "primitive" culture.

[visualops]

Head Hunting Cannibals: The Facts
Alongside the perfectly accurate image of swimming elephants, another rather less correct assumption about the Andaman Islands has become part of popular folklore: don’t set foot on any of the more remote islands or your crew will be massacred and eaten by headhunting natives.

Or, as a collection of Arab notes dating from 851 puts it, "The inhabitants of these islands eat men alive. They go naked and have no boats. If they had, they would devour all who passed near them. Sometimes ships that are windbound and have exhausted their provision of water, touch here and apply to the natives for it; in such cases the crews sometimes fall into the hands of the latter and most of them are massacred."

This view was to persist amongst mariners for the next 1,000 years or so until very recently, despite the fact that the Andamanese have always insisted that they have never been cannibals. In fact, as is often the case with most indigenous tribal communities around the world, the natives have much more to fear from interlopers than vice versa. Despite the best efforts of the Indian government to help preserve their culture, the Onge, Sentinelese and Jarawa, who are of Negroid descent and live on the Andamans; and the Shompen and Nicobarese, who are of Mongoloid descent and live on the Nicobar Islands, are on the verge of extinction and are vastly outnumber by the immigrant Indian population. Visiting the tribal areas on Little Andaman Island, Strait Island, and the western coast of South and Middle Andaman is strictly prohibited to tourists.

The modern myth of the headhunters can be attributed to one tiny island in the chain: North Sentinal, which lies 29 kilometres off the west coast of South Andaman. The Sentinalese are one of the last remaining Stone Age tribes on earth and virtually nothing is known about them. The Indian government has attempted to make contact on several occasions before being driven from the beach by primitive spears and arrows. Needless to say, North Sentinal is to be avoided at all costs and boats should not attempt to approach it – apart from being completely illegal, it could be a potentially fatal experience. However, sailors can be confident of a friendlier welcome elsewhere in the archipelago.

Other info points to the likelyhood in centuries past, of Malay pirates perpetuating the cannibal stories to keep people away.

[Ichneumon]

I'd no idea so many westerners visited that part of the world...

That has surprised me as well.

[derheimwill]

Cannibalism continues to this day in some parts of the Congo.

Thank you for the correction. I was only thinking of the south seas.

[Ichneumon]

Most of these tribes have more contact than the naive anthropologist think

I don't recall the exact details now, but a few decades ago I read a hilarious article about how anthropologists visited a primitive remote tribe somewhere, and were studying their culture, when the tribe leader asked them if they'd like to hear one of their traditional songs passed down through generations. The anthropologists said, "sure", and turned on their tape recorders as the tribe gathered for the performance. The anthropologists about fell over in surprise when the tribe launched into a four-part harmony version of some old classical music piece from the West. It was something like the "Hallelujah Chorus" from Handel's "Messiah", if I recall correctly.

Apparently a century or so ago, some traveling missionary had passed through and taught it to them.

[ApplegateRanch]

the Andamanese have always insisted that they have never been cannibals.

There are Amerindian tribes that swear the same thing...but studies of their ancestor's cooking pots put the lie to that. Of course, it is VERY un-PC to point that out.

[WestTexasWend]

Very sad. Hadn't thought of rare tribes being wiped out.
Did wonder about the monitor lizards in Sumatra/Borneo.