Stone Age tribe kills fishermen

[Anonymous]

Stone Age tribe kills fishermen
By Peter Foster in New Delhi
February 9, 2006

ONE of the world's last Stone Age tribes has murdered two fishermen whose boat drifted on to a desert island in the Indian Ocean.

The Sentinelese, thought to number between 50 and 200, have rebuffed all contact with the modern world, firing a shower of arrows at anyone who comes within range.

They are believed to be the last pre-Neolithic tribe in the world to remain isolated and appear to have survived the 2004 Asian tsunami.

The men killed, Sunder Raj, 48, and Pandit Tiwari, 52, were fishing illegally for mud crabs off North Sentinel Island, a speck of land in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands archipelago.

Fellow fishermen said they dropped anchor for the night on January 25 but fell into a deep sleep, probably helped by large amounts of alcohol. During the night their anchor, a rock tied to a rope, failed to hold their open-topped boat against the currents and they drifted towards the island.

"As day broke, fellow fishermen say they tried to shout at the men and warn them they were in danger," said Samir Acharya, the head of the Society for Andaman and Nicobar Ecology, an environmental organisation. "However they did not respond - they were probably drunk - and the boat drifted into the shallows where they were attacked and killed."

The Indian coast guard tried to recover the bodies using a helicopter but was met by a hail of arrows.

Photographs shot from the helicopter show the near-naked tribesmen rushing to fire. But the downdraught from its rotors exposed the two fishermen buried in shallow graves and not roasted and eaten, as local rumour suggested.

Attempts to recover the bodies have been suspended, although the Andaman Islands police chief, Dharmendra Kumar, said an operation might be mounted later.

Environmental groups urged the authorities to leave the bodies and respect the five-kilometre exclusion zone thrown around the island. In the 1980s and early 1990s many Sentinelese were killed in skirmishes with armed salvage operators who visited the island after a shipwreck. Since then the tribesmen have remained virtually undisturbed.

source article

[Anonymous]

Wow, I didn't know any natives had held off modern society.

I often wonder when I hear Native Americans complaining
they "we" took their land. I don't really know who "we" are?

I have as much to do with the settlers as the Native Americans
alive today.

Anyway, I wonder if "they" which is many, many tribes in the continental US, really think they could have held off the rest
of the world when they where on a colonization kick at that time.

The US has quite a bit of land.

The indians in this story have a postage stamp of land, that
outsiders have decided are not valuable, or they would be gone.

I don't believe that those of us born today have "original sin" for what happened hundreds of years ago, just as I don't believe that Native Americans born today have "soverign rights" to their way of life.

The indians that I know that got on with their lives are doing fine, and it has become apparent that getting of the reservation is a good idea. The reservations have become essentially a bad neighborhood.

Not much different than before the settlers got here all these tribes where attacking each other. That is why they celebrate their warrior's today.

If they where spiritual as they claim they would not have been so brutal towards their fellow natives!

Not that "we" don't have contradictions, but hey, so didn't they!

Thanks for posting the article!

[Anonymous]

taken from a helicopter after the tsunami, I believe. aparently.. they survived!

 :grin:

[Withdraw]

That's a nice looking loooongbow  :wink:

[try another castle]

Wow, I think those fishermen qualify for a darwin, what do you think?

_________________

"Learn from your mistakes so that one day you can repeat them precisely."
-Trevor Goodchild

[ This Message was edited by: sorry... try another castle on 2006-02-14 03:17 ]

[Antigen]

On 2006-02-08 15:24:00, Anonymous wrote:

If they where spiritual as they claim they would not have been so brutal towards their fellow natives!

That's a myth. The people in these lands were relatively peaceful and comfortable. There was ongoing animosity between the east and west tribes, but rarely what Europeans would call all out war. Scalping was not a known practice till some asshole British officer put a bounty on the "pelts" of native ppl who lived on lands he had been instructed to clear.  You can read all about it in Conspiracy of Pontiac by Francis Parkman.

They never did celebrate warriors so much as the celebrated leaders, who were only warriors part time when the situation called for it. It was the Europeans who characterized the shamen and medicine men as "warriors". Our own Constitution borrows liberally from the Iroquois Alliance. Too bad we've abandoned it. It was a good plan. Worked well for the alliance for some hundreds of years before we came along and whipped a little "civilization" on em.

The will to learn is an intrinsic motive...The will to learn becomes a 'problem' only under specialized circumstances like those of a school where the curriculum is set, students confined, and a path fixed.
--Jerome S. Bruner, Harvard.