Chapter 1: What defines the Stone Age and its significance in human history?
Around 3.4 million years ago, before the pyramids, Great Wall of China, and everything in between, hominins first entered what we now call the Stone Age, a prehistoric period during which stone, surprise, surprise, was heavily used to create a variety of tools with an edge, percussion, or pointed surface.
It's expanded across the entire world, moved between entire species and genera, and lasted for a mind-boggling amount of time, only officially ending in modern humans about 4,000 years ago, around 2000 BC, with the advent of metalworking.
And while the Stone Age can seem very distant from the present, given how much we have progressed, it has nearly been our entire story, so to speak, as a species, as it is by far the longest technological era we've been in. And as a whole, it encompasses over 99% of our history.
Yet, alas, we have as a world moved on from those simpler times, and depending on who you ask, we have progressed up about eight different ages so far.
Yet, with that said, there is one group, or rather tribe, that despite all the advancements in the world, have remained in the past for the most part, and are perhaps the most removed group of people on the entire planet, contained to their very own island with a very distinct culture, with some researchers referring to them as the last humans living in the Stone Age.
and for a few rather interesting reasons of that. And these are the Sentinelese people. Within the center of the Bay of Bengal, which lies in the Indian Ocean, you will find the Ataman Islands, a cluster of about 200 islands that greatly vary in size.
In all, these islands are home to over 300,000 people, who for the most part live lives that somewhat resemble the lives that you might find anywhere else on the planet. But on one of the smaller islands, known as North Sentinel, you will find a completely different story.
Now, this piece of land is about the same size as Manhattan, yet instead of skyscrapers, you will instead find an extensive beach, and then a sprawling tropical and subtropical broadleaf forest that's home to at the minimum, Indian boar, coconut crabs, and then on the beaches, sea turtles, as the island is also surrounded by a large coral reef.
Of course, another resident on this island are the most isolated humans on the planet, who would be the Sentinelese, which number between 35 and 400 individuals. Overall, they belong to the broader Andamanese peoples, being one of the six indigenous groups known to the area.
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Chapter 2: Who are the Sentinelese and where do they live?
And this is because in 1981, the cargo ship MV Primrose, which was carrying chicken feed, ended up marooned just off the coast of the island. After a long standoff with the tribe, the crew was ultimately helicoptered to safety, but the large, mostly metal ship?
That remained there, and the Sentinelese ended up salvaging iron where they could, obviously recognizing that it could be used for weapons and tools, with the thought likely being that they could cold-forge the metal into their desired shapes.
Scrap dealers assigned to scrap the ship also observed the group frantically searching for small pieces of metal during their work, and were oddly quite friendly to the metal scrappers, who said that they would also give the Sentinelese bananas in order to appease them.
Additionally, there is even talk that this metal acquisition from shipwrecks might have happened in the past too, which means that, despite the best efforts of many, we have significantly changed the course of this group's history for good.
now this said as far as their own capabilities go when it comes to mining smelting and crafting metal ores that's pretty much non-existent and thus many don't consider them to have actually entered a full-fledged metal age plus others still refer to them as stone age in the sense that at least one hypothesis has stated their extreme isolation might have started a whopping 60 000 years ago which for reference is before the last glacial maximum which also means that genetically there is a direct line between all of them and their pre-neolithic ancestors who first arrived on the island or at least that's the gist
And funny enough, it seems that post-shipwreck and scrapping, the group actually began to soften up just a smidge, maybe hoping for more of that sweet, sweet metal. And not the music, that is, as it was only after the shipwreck that the outside world made the first peaceful and physical contact with this extremely isolated group.
To be exact, in 1991, a new expedition, spearheaded by Madhumala Chattopadhyay, noted that for the first time, the sentinels approached with no weapons on them when they came to collect the gifted coconuts.
Then later in the same day, a second visit found the Sentinelese had now armed themselves, but disarmed themselves after one of the women amongst them forcibly pushed a man's loaded arrow downward, which prompted him to bury his weapons in the sand, and along with the rest of the present tribe, approached the research team unarmed.
And it was then that this gift exchange led to physical peaceful contact for the first time. Now, due to a yearning for their own spotlight, we don't actually know who the first person was to touch this reclusive population, but someone did. Multiple, in fact. And the gift-giving event ended without incident.
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