North Sentinel Island is an island de-jure owned by India but is de-facto self-governing. It is illegal to visit the island due to how dangerous it is, along with the risk of spreading diseases that the inhabitants do not have any resistance to.
The island is inhabitated by around 50-500 (true number unknown) indigenous people who have inhabited the island for over 60,000 years. The Sentinelese people are well-known to attack most outsiders who dare to come visit the island. Apparently, one major catalyst was when a British man kidnapped an elderly couple and four children. The couple died and the children were returned but had serious diseases which may have spread to the rest of the islanders.
In 2018, an American tourist illegally visited the island in order to attempt to convert them to Christianity. He was later killed by the Sentinelese.
I don’t why, but for some reason, this island is quite fascinating. There is so little known about it. The very concept of an isolated society that wants to be left alone is something that I find interesting.
Have any two cents to give?
I find it endlessly fascinating too. Uncontacted peoples in general can inspire a lot of wonder and curiosity in me. It’s like trying to wonder how people felt throughout history, except that with history you have all these records and accounts and evidence left behind to give you an idea. You’ll never know for sure, you can get an idea.
How these people feel and comprehend the world? Total mystery. They are disconnected from the vast majority of humanity in experiences and knowledge.
We know so little about them, and their day to day life would be entirely disconnected from the day to day life of you and me. They know the same about us - basically nothing, except that whenever we visit we tend to bring disaster to their homes. They don’t want anything to do with it and will shoot arrows at visiting helicopters.
And how wild is that? I have to imagine seeing a helicopter when you skipped several tool ages would overwhelm the mind, but it doesn’t. They’re not interested in our planes, helicopters, hulking cargo ships - they just want to be left alone. It’s not like they don’t know we’re cooking some wild shit out here, either. They’ve looted the wreckage of a cargo ship that ran ashore and since then they’ve been observed using new tools in new ways.
I sometimes wonder if we’ll blow ourselves up one day and leave these guys to inherit the Earth.