North Sentinel Island: Some Places refuse to be Subjugated

Deep in the Bay of Bengal, somewhere between Indonesia and India, is a heavily-jungled island roughly 20% larger than Manhattan, New York.  Canopy forests circled by large sandy beaches, this mysterious place has no natural harbors, is completely surrounded by ship-disintegrating coral reefs, and has been almost completely untouched by human civilization sinec the dawn of mankind.  To this day, it is illegal for anyone to set foot on this ultra-remote would-be paradise – the Coast Guard of India maintains a 3-mile cordon around the island.

This cordon is there for your protection.  Because while this miniscule speck of land in the Indian Ocean may appear to be completely uninhabited, it is in fact home to one of the last civilizations on earth about which we know absolutely fucking nothing.

“A most brutish and savage race… they are very cruel, and kill and eat every foreigner whom they can lay their hands upon.” – Marco Polo, 13th century 

This is North Sentinel Island.  And the tribal people that live there have a long-standing policy – if you set foot on our island, we will kill the shit out of you, slit your throat, dump your corpse on the beach, and then disappear into the jungle.  We don’t negotiate.  We don’t make friends.  We don’t make treaties.  We defend our fucking island to the death.

To this day, in the Golden Age of Google Maps and Other Crazy Satellite Robot Drone Shit, the only photographs you will ever see of the North Sentinelese people were taken either from an aircraft or a boat.  There is no living person on the planet right now who has set foot in those jungles and lived to tell the tale.    Not only can we not decipher their spoken language, but it bears no resemblance to any spoken language of any civilization in existence.  These loinclothed tribesmen have very dark skin, leading some anthropologists to believe that they are of African descent, but how the fuck they got to the Bay of Bengal is a complete mystery.  We have never taken a DNA sample of a tribesperson, so we have no clue what their genetic lineage might be.

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