UN American instagrammer killed by uncontacted tribe in Andaman Islands - becomes pincushion for Stone Age arrows

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-46286215

An American man has been killed by an endangered tribe in India's Andaman and Nicobar islands.

Fishermen who took the man to North Sentinel island say tribespeople shot him with arrows and left his body on the beach.

He has been identified as John Allen Chau, a 27 year old from Alabama.

Contact with the endangered Andaman tribes living in isolation from the world is illegal because of the risks to them from outside disease.

Estimates say the Sentinelese, who are totally cut off from civilisation, number only between 50 and 150.

Local media have reported that Chau may have wanted to meet the tribe to preach Christianity to them.

But on social media the young man presented himself as a keen traveller and adventurer.

"Police said Chau had previously visited North Sentinel island about four or five times with the help of local fishermen," journalist Subir Bhaumik, who has been covering the islands for years, told BBC Hindi.

"The number of people belonging to the Sentinelese tribe is so low, they don't even understand how to use money. It's in fact illegal to have any sort of contact with them."

In 2017, the Indian government also said taking photographs or making videos of the aboriginal Andaman tribes would be punishable with imprisonment of up to three years.

The AFP news agency quoted a source as saying that Chau had tried and failed to reach the island on 14 November. But then he tried again two days later.

"He was attacked by arrows but he continued walking.

"The fishermen saw the tribals tying a rope around his neck and dragging his body. They were scared and fled," the report added.

Chau's body was spotted on 20 November. According to the Hindustan Times, his remains have yet to be recovered.

"It's a difficult case for the police," says Mr Bhaumik. "You can't even arrest the Sentinelese."

getting BTFO by Pajeet an-prims is pretty embarrassing way to go

 

[millais]

Haven't read the whole thread so sorry for my ignorance if this has been asked, but has anyone tried parachuting a robot with a camera on there or something?

they would just bash it pieces with a rock or if it was a flying drone, they would knock it out of the sky with thrown rocks.

 

[Dracula's Spirit Animal]

Heh, we should like drop shit from planes just to fuck with them. Nothing harmful, just like random shit, like a ton of feathers or yugioh cards or pictures of Donald Trump.

Or if we really wanted to be perverse, we could drop a million Cabbage Patch Kids on them, really fuck with their heads.

[Edited for Autism in an earlier reply...]

 

[polonium]

Imagine the freaky sex-moves they could teach us after living so long without access to the internet and nothing to do all day.

 

[Johnny Bravo]

No, apparently not. We should parachute some nukes in there too.

Seeing them be so primitive does make me wonder about the validity of some sort of race realism logic though. I know they're on a island and semi isolated, but the fact they haven't gone beyond that is interesting.
Are some strains of human just predisposed to certain behaviour? I know it's not something that will get researched now we live in a shut-it-down PC world, but anthropology was cool before dangerhairs fucked it up.

You can't really get too far down the tech tree without cows, horses, or crops. I'm guessing these people are hunter gatherers because that's really all there is to do on their little island. Then you get into a situation where all your men are hunters and all your women are mothers and gatherers and nobody has any free time to think up new ideas because you're all busy just trying to survive from day to day.

 

[Fleshy Sanik]

No you can't. It's just a matter of time. It's inherently a tiny population bottleneck.

I think you are thinking of genetic drift.
I agree that it is not a healthy breeding population and there are most likely issues already but it is not like actual inbreeding should be an issue unless they go out of their way to get it on with uncle rayray

 

[repentance]

You can't really get too far down the tech tree without cows, horses, or crops. I'm guessing these people are hunter gatherers because that's really all there is to do on their little island.

We know almost nothing about them so all we can do is guess. Even if they are hunter gatherers, they've obviously been able to maintain their food supply over a prolonged period of time regardless of natural disasters - which is quite an accomplishment given the tiny space they inhabit.

We don't really know what animals are on the island or even what plants grow there, let alone whether the inhabitants undertake any crude forms of agriculture or animal husbandry. Clearly, they have access to fresh water. They're presumed to have no knowledge of how to make fire, but that's based on questionable observations from the 1800s.

It's kind of interesting how attitudes about what's ethical have changed. If these people were exotic animals, we'd be looking at captive breeding programmes to try to save them from extinction but there seems to be common agreement that leaving them to their fate is the only ethical option. Not all that long ago, such a policy would have been viewed as genocidal.

 

[Johnny Bravo]

We know almost nothing about them so all we can do is guess. Even if they are hunter gatherers, they've obviously been able to maintain their food supply over a prolonged period of time regardless of natural disasters - which is quite an accomplishment given the tiny space they inhabit.

We don't really know what animals are on the island or even what plants grow there, let alone whether the inhabitants undertake any crude forms of agriculture or animal husbandry. Clearly, they have access to fresh water. They're presumed to have no knowledge of how to make fire, but that's based on questionable observations from the 1800s.

It's kind of interesting how attitudes about what's ethical have changed. If these people were exotic animals, we'd be looking at captive breeding programmes to try to save them from extinction but there seems to be common agreement that leaving them to their fate is the only ethical option. Not all that long ago, such a policy would have been viewed as genocidal.

I'm highly skeptical that they haven't mastered fire. Modern humans have difficulty digesting raw meat, which makes fire a necessity.

I don't think there's any need to intervene. They're capable of rational thought and can decide their own fate. Other primitive tribes with limited contact with the outside world would form cargo cults, calling for aid from the modern world they believed to be gods. This tribe hasn't done anything like that. For all we know they're doing just fine (by paleolithic standards).

 

[Dogs can't look up]

Play stupid games, get eaten by cannibals.

 

[Haramburger]

The last time they did they got sick and died nearly immediately.

Diversity is our... strength???

 

[Marvin]

I think you are thinking of genetic drift.
I agree that it is not a healthy breeding population and there are most likely issues already but it is not like actual inbreeding should be an issue unless they go out of their way to get it on with uncle rayray

How would that work?

If we've got six initial parents at generation 0, A B C D E F.

Generation 1 might have AB and CD.

Generation 2 would have them breed to make ABCD.

ABCD has four grandparents. In order to find someone to mate with without inbreeding, for the next generation, the best they can do is mate with a generation 1 pairing of EF.

If they did that, you'd have ABCDEF, which would be a genetic dead end unless they inbred.

Eventually the purer members would die off and you'd only be left with gen 1 pairs. And then they'd die off, and you'd be left with gen 2 quads (or maybe trips if a pair bred with gen 0).

I don't see how this could be avoided.

 

[repentance]

I'm highly skeptical that they haven't mastered fire. Modern humans have difficulty digesting raw meat, which makes fire a necessity.

I don't think there's any need to intervene. They're capable of rational thought and can decide their own fate. Other primitive tribes with limited contact with the outside world would form cargo cults, calling for aid from the modern world they believed to be gods. This tribe hasn't done anything like that. For all we know they're doing just fine (by paleolithic standards).

Oh, they're obviously doing fine. They've somehow managed to avoid being wiped out by tropical diseases in an area where they're endemic.

We won't really know much about how they lived until after they die out. The area is too heavily forested to be able to observe them from afar, and no previous expeditions have lasted long enough to investigate the island in detail. A lot of our assumptions about them are probably wrong.

 

[Maxliam]

Why don't people leave uncontacted tribes alone? There are plenty of other cultures you can interact with all over the world. He was a dumbass for bothering these people. They live in an entirely different era.

They need to be wiped out for their savage and pagan ways. They probably are a bunch of child molesters or soemthing. I really hate native populations in case anyone hasn't caught on. Stupid savages and their dumb beliefs just bug me. Just wait until they attack us when they get the numbers.

They are a society with the most expert archers per capita in the world if you're into that kind of thing. It takes a long time to make a good longbowman.

The more I read about the Sentinelese, the more they sound like real jerks.

They're just filthy savages who need to be wiped out.

BraziL and the amazon area may have several tribes that we don't know of. the issue there is they are in constant contact with various logging operations both legal and illegal, and since primitive natives tend to cut into the profit margins logging companies tend to react.... violently to any they encounter. Illegal operations especially have no qualms about wrecking villages and shooting people, and since its in the middle of no where its hard to get a good idea of just how bad it it. really, the Sentinelese probably have the right idea considering how India treats various minority populations.

I need a new deck, fuck those backwards savages and fuck the rain forest. I hope we cut it all down. Tree hugging hippies with bows and arrows.

 

[Jub-Jub]

The Wikipedia article points out that an British exploration party in the 19th century actually explored the island and found a network of pathways and abandoned villages. They abducted two elders and four children, the elders basically died immediately. They then brought the children back with presents. Apparently that contact didn't wipe out the tribe either. Funnily enough in the 70s a National Geographic Team brought them presents too, via motorboat on the beach. Amongst them a live pig and a doll. It ended up with the director of the documentary being shot in the thigh and the pig being killed with spears and buried on the beach together with the doll while the guy who shot the director laughing at the film crew from afar.

There were tons of such attempts to make peaceful contact with the tribe, especially through gift-giving, but apparently the gifts besides one event in '91 always have been refused. For a while around that time the islanders even responded more peaceful by showing up unarmed, but would always revert to threatening gestures and firing arrows without arrowheads if foreigners hung around for too long or got too close. It's pretty clear that they're very aware of an outside world but just don't want any contact.

Here's footage of the '91 meeting if anybody wants to see it, it also has the footage of the earlier 70s attempt already linked in the thread. No robot narration, but it is annotated.

Attenborough made a documentary on a PNG tribe.

If this refers to the the birds of paradise B&W documentary then Attenborough was lucky he was with a known PNG tribe when another cannibalistic tribe showed up, otherwise he probably would have been ganked as well.

 

[repentance]

If this refers to the the birds of paradise B&W documentary then Attenborough was lucky he was with a known PNG tribe when another cannibalistic tribe showed up, otherwise he probably would have been ganked as well.

It's this one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Blank_on_the_Map

 

[Zaryiu]

I'm disappointed since i thought the tribe managed somehow to kill him without him going anywhere close to there

 

[Secret Asshole]

If there's only a hundred or two hundred of them, and they kill anyone who washes up on the island ... Well, I'm sorry to say it, but Darwin is going to solve the problem much faster than Jesus will. Another few generations, and they'll be too inbred to function. Sooner or later they'll stop shooting arrows at helicopters (or hoverships or giant eagles or whatever we have by that time), and when a couple of scientists with body armor and Navy SEAL escorts land to investigate what's going on, they'll find a load of modern-day Habsburgs too sick to even kill anyone anymore.

No you can't. It's just a matter of time. It's inherently a tiny population bottleneck.

You don't really need a lot of people to avoid this actually. Its been estimated you only need around 160 people to avoid any sort of inbreeding or genetic drift. Its been estimated that their population is as low as 50 (which wouldn't be enough) to as high as 400 (which would be). There's no accurate count and they've lasted as long as 60k years, so we can assume their population is at least at or over 160. Nobody really knows though.

The guy also probably needed to die because if he brought the flu with him, he'd probably wipe out the whole fucking island. They have no genetic immunity to modern diseases and its been luck that they haven't contracted anything with the minimal contact they've had. Probably because they murder and toss the bodies out into the sea of anyone who stays too long.

 

[break these cuffs]

Pandit reported that several of them squatted on their haunches as though they were defecating. He read this as a kind of insult.

That's a rather odd take for someone who regularly shits in streets, fields, and on beaches himself.

 

[Maxliam]

That's a rather odd take for someone who regularly shits in streets, fields, and on beaches himself.

Maybe they were doing it in an actual toilet and that pissed him off. Why didn't the British wipe out the Indians from Old India the way they did it to so many of them here in New India, I mean America?

 

[Marvin]

You don't really need a lot of people to avoid this actually. Its been estimated you only need around 160 people to avoid any sort of inbreeding or genetic drift.

On a long enough time scale, with a fixed number of people, it's factually impossible to avoid inbreeding.

You can do the math. The parameter is the oldest age someone might be able to breed. One person has two parents, four grandparents, eight great grandparents, etc. Each generation you go back doubles the number of people that need to be unrelated to prove there hasn't been any inbreeding. On a long enough timeline, you can then prove that there are more ancestors than the fixed number of people, therefore there must've been inbreeding at that point.

 

[AnOminous]

On a long enough time scale, with a fixed number of people, it's factually impossible to avoid inbreeding.

The issue is how much population you need to avoid adverse effects from it, and what practices could mitigate that. I'd assume they have some kind of elaborate system on who can marry who if they're still around at all.