For many of us, not having signal on the tube between Queen’s Park and Paddington feels as though we’ve been thrust back into the dark ages, so it’ll probably make you break out in a sweat to hear that there’s one island on planet earth that remains untouched by modern society to this day.
The isolated North Sentinel Island in the Bay of Bengal is home to the Sentinelese, an uncontacted hunter-gatherer tribe that’s been notoriously hostile to visitors in the past.
In 2006, two fishermen were hacked apart with axes after getting too close to the island, and reports of aggressive encounters with the Sentinelese date back as far as 1867, when shipwrecked British explorers had to fend off attacks while awaiting rescue.
In 1981, a freighter ran aground in the Bay of Bengal with 28 people onboard. After a few days, a watchman said a group of people emerged from the island’s jungle, carrying bows, arrows and spears.
According to The Guardian, the freighter’s captain radioed his Hong Kong headquarters with the following message: “Wild men, estimate more than 50, carrying various homemade weapons, are making two or three wooden boats.
“Worrying they will board us at sunset. All crew members’ lives not guaranteed.”
Luckily for those on board, high winds and surf kept the tribespeople’s boats and arrows at bay.
In the 70s, a National Geographic director attempting to make a documentary about the Andamans archipelago was wounded by a spear during filming.
Then, in 2018, the Sentinelese killed 26-year-old John Allen Chau, an American who is thought to have paid fishermen to ferry him to the island.
The same year that Chau was killed, veteran anthropologist TM Pandit urged visitors to leave the Sentinelese alone and also opened up about his own experience with the tribe.
He told Down To Earth: “The tribespeople were on the beach, watching the boat come to the island.
“There was a large number of them. But there was no reaction or resentment from them. We went about a kilometre inside the forest.”
Pandit added: “They did not come face to face with us, but rather hid in the forest, watching us.
“After some time, we came upon a large area of forest cleared for a camp. There were 18 small huts, with little fires burning in front of each, fenced off with sticks.”
Few photographs exist of the island and anthropologists have evidence it’s been home to human life for at least 2,000 years.
Other studies suggest some of the island’s tribes – of which there are four, with the Sentinelese being the most isolated – are 30,000 years old.
Today, the island belongs to India and is around half the size of London. The Sentinelese are estimated to number 100 people.