But even one of the earliest visitors, Marco Polo, called the atolls "the land of the head hunters." Roman geographer Claudius Ptolemaeus called the Andamans the "islands of the cannibals." Samir Acharya, head of the independent Society for Andaman and Nicobar Ecology, said the Jarawas were peaceful until the British, and later the Indians, began encroaching on their territory. The two paragraphs do not appear to agree.
A classic example of the odd liberal obsession with the mythically peaceful, usually matriarchal, period in the past of tribal life.
Actual studies of actual tribes, past and present, have shown that almost all of them were wildly more violent than the most violent sections of modern cities.