I’ve been following news of the terrible tsunami disaster very closely, and it has prompted me to learn more about some remote places in the Indian Ocean that I did not know much about before. One of those places is the Andaman and Nicobar island chain, a group of tiny islands owned by India which suffered some of the worst damage from the tsunami. Apparently these islands are home to several small tribes that have continued to live the same way for thousands of years and have relatively little contact with the outside world.
Fortunately, according to another article I read, most of the tribes seem to have survived the tsunami.
Anyway, this made me think of a few questions:
Exactly how many similar tribes are still left around the globe?
Where are they?
Are there any tribes left in the world that outsiders have yet to communicate with? I was absolutely amazed to read the above quote that some of the tribes in Andaman and Nicobar were only contacted in 1997.
There was first contact made with a tribe in Papua New Guinea only about ten years ago. They were there happily worshipping a rock in the centre of their village until news of their discovery reached the West and the missionaries damn near fell over themselves getting to the airport. :mad:
The villagers were curious about aircraft apparently. They had seen them passing over high overhead, and wondered what they were.
I’ve also seen footage of Australian Aborigines in the 1950s who lived in a remote area and had not seen Westerners before. The footage of one of the earliest meetings was interesting. They were fascinated by the car headlights more than the car itself, because it was light without heat. One of the young men was shown a Playboy centrefold, and he was taken by the two dimensional nature of it - first photograph he’d seen.
The Tagaeri and Taromenane clans, a branch of the Huaorani people of Ecuador’s Amazonian forest, still remain essentially uncontacted. They certainly know about outsiders, but remain unremittingly hostile, having speared to death trespassers on their land in 1987, 2000 and 2001. However, they are very few in number.
I have long heard that the Andaman islanders were quite hostile and xenophobic until very recently. No cite, but I recall reading stories of them killing and eating sailors unfortunate enough to be shipwrecked there (into the early 20th Century at least).
New Guinea has long been a haven for these types of people. The island is largely made up of valleys separated by very difficult to traverse mountain ridges, so each valley gradually developed its own tribe, with its own language (I believe New Guinea holds some sort of record for the number of native languages spoken), that had almost no contact with its neighboring tribes, let alone the outside world.