How would you feel if they shook your hand and infected you with Ebola?
Can’t be worse than listening to them.
I could do without that. Still, while this hypothetical missionary would be practicing negligent homicide, at least it wouldn’t be genocidal negligent homicide. So props for that, relatively speaking.
I am. The only time I remember the Trinity coming up was when the middle schoolers were doing comparative religion stuff and had to learn about the Trinity, virgin birth, transubstantiation, etc., and my daughter came home with “Christianity is way weirder than Greek mythology.”
I know nothing about the area, and am just curious - is it not equally parsimonious to assume that language is an ‘emergent phenomenon’ of the human brain and could thus be anticipated to have arisen, ‘spontaneously’, more than once?
I think the parsimony argument is valid with regard to any genetic mutations that were necessary in evolving the capacity for language, since genes are obviously inherited.
It’s far less clear that the parsimony argument is valid with regard to the specifics of language, since we don’t know to what extent language is dependent upon inheritance in the form of cultural transmission. There’s the well known example of Nicaraguan Sign Language that suggests that an entirely new language can arise spontaneously in a social group that lacks one.
They only annoy me a bit. But, then again, I have no problem with these folks ending this pest because it annoyed them a LOT.
I knew you had potential . . . even before your Habilitation lecture.
Visually, we do pattern recognition nearly to the point of obsession.
It would be surprising if this search for pattern/meaning did not leak over into our auditory systems as well.
All Andamanese are of mitochondrial haplogroup M, which predominates all over Asia, and Y-chromosome haplogroup D-M174, which links them most closely with Ainu of Japan and Tibetans.
Someone invoked the name of Joseph Greenberg, so here’s this: Greenberg classified the Andamanese languages (presumably including Sentinelese) into the Indo-Pacific macrofamily, which also includes the Papuan languages and Tasmanian.
No matter how you look at it, they’re a long, long way from Africa. Yet over on Facebook one of my Black friends is arguing that they must be African, 'cause just look at them (phenotype). She argues, “I’ve watched several documentaries on this tribe and no one says they aren’t African except you.” :dubious:
Is her research supported by tweets from anyone with more than 100,000 followers?
Earlier today, I saw something about an “anthropologist” named Maurice Portman who, in the late 1800s, went there to “study” them but instead did indeed exposed them to diseases they couldn’t fight off, and quite likely molested some of their children.
The following is a Twitter feed, that’s true, but it has some very interesting links and information in it. It’s going to be spoilered due to NSFW images.
This quite likely explains why they don’t want to be bothered by outsiders in any way, and there is a story about a boat that ran aground and a last-minute rescue of the sailors.
Please tell me that you pointed out that we’re all African when you go back that far, thus rendering the distinction pretty useless.
I see nothing about him molesting children in anything you linked there?
I’m not sure that’s actually true, a lot of indigenous tribes met colonizers with varying degrees of open hostility. I’m not sure there’s very many indigenous tribes in areas colonized by Europeans that didn’t have at least some level of conflict with the colonizers. From what I can tell both the ones that were aggressive and the ones who tried to be less aggressive both suffered similar fates–mass die offs from diseases, pushed out of traditional tribal lands, and marginalized and killed in violent conflicts with the colonizers. A great many of the tribes did survive, albeit only small percentages of their total. What’s mostly kept the uncontacted/minimally contacted peoples of the Andaman Islands and the deep Amazon “safe” is that in the era when we had no moral qualms about eradicating these types of people their land was basically worthless to the white man since we lacked easy ability to exploit it and there was no obvious benefit to do so.
The Amazon’s uncontacted/minimally contacted people and the Andaman peoples are now benefitting form more modern views about the moral way to deal with indigenous peoples. But it’s also true that more modern technology means that exploiting resources in say, the deep Amazon, is now more viable, and despite government efforts a lot of illegal logging now intrudes on legally protected peoples in the Amazon.
(I use the term uncontacted/minimally contacted since we think most of these tribes have in fact been contacted by the modern world and/or have tribal knowledge of it, the Sentinelese are known as being some of the “least contacted” and we even know they were visited by anthropologists in the 70s, and British imperialists a few generations before that who kidnapped several members of their tribe, which likely has left a very negative oral history in the tribe. The Jarawa are often described as being “uncontacted”, but the truth is they were fairly extensively contacted for a time and basically withdrew from that contact due to the negatives, a decision the Indian government supports because it recognized the same negatives, likewise a number of the Amazon “uncontacted” tribes are suspected of almost certainly having had contact, and negative contact, with modern Brazilians.)
Yeah, we have no real knowledge of it but I strongly suspect at one time in history this tribe had more regular contact with other Andamans. The Andaman Islands went through what would have been to the native population, massive societal changes in the last 300 years, it wouldn’t be at all surprising to me that as the Sentinelese observed these changes in their near neighbors second hand, and linked those changes to contact with the “outsiders” it lead them to make a conscious decision to withdraw from contact with other Andamans.
There’s some similar behaviors among the Amazon tribes that are “uncontacted/minimally contacted”, it’s believed most used to have stronger ties to other Amazon tribes that themselves had ties to Europeans, and it’s suspected part of why they became so reclusive even with other Amazon tribes is out of fear of what they were seeing happen (note that some of the so called uncontacted tribes actually probably still trade with contacted Amazon tribes, lightly.)
Morally speaking our only real option with the Sentinelese is just to leave them alone. Part of me is sad for the lost opportunity to advance our knowledge of pre-Neolithic man, because the Sentinelese do appear to be unique in several areas. For example we don’t believe they know how to make fire. What’s also tragic is their population is at all time lows, as best we can tell, India tries to maintain a census of them using overhead surveillance, and after the Indian Ocean tsunami it’s thought they number as few as 15, in previous times they had counted upward of 50 individuals and before that their number were estimated at 400+. No one knows if the tsunami killed a large chunk or not (they were specifically surveyed after the tsunami out of fear of what it may have done to them, but there’s no way of knowing if their reduced number was just a coincidence or not.) Considering they’ve had biological interactions with the rest of the world through the anthropologists who visited there in the 70s (and tried to give them a pig–the Sentinelese slaughtered the pig but didn’t eat it and just buried it, but just that contact with a domesticated animal could’ve spread modern disease to the island) and the people they’ve buried who have come from the rest of the world, it’s entirely possible they’ve already basically been killed off by modern disease, and all that’s left for the few who remain is a slow dying off since they’ve fallen below the reasonable threshold for sustaining themselves.
When they die off we lose any chance to understand this sort of time-capsule of human technological/cultural development. Again though, our only “moral move” is to just leave them alone.
“Molesting” can be used ambiguously, as it would appear to be here, because I think the criticism is more directed towards his obsession with their genitals and their sexuality, clearly shown in his writings and numerous homoerotically-posed photographs.
We can hope that the lack of tangible evidence that he was actually physically molesting them means that he wasn’t, but I wouldn’t have much confidence in that hope.
FYI, that same twitter feed was linked to upthread. Also, the New York Times reported that the Indian police were trying to figure out if it would be possible to retrieve his body, although it appears that the people are guarding it. I’d be in favor of leaving it there (and so would the missionary, based on what he wrote in his last letter) except I wonder if the decomposing body would be a danger to them.
Yeah, leave him there on the beach, face down, in the missionary position.
[quote=“Czarcasm, post:86, topic:824892”]
cite?