Origins of Sentinelese?

Isaac Beach

Banned
It's more likely that they have forgotten how to make it (we saw a similar thing with the Tasmanians). Which would indicate a relative early colonisation of the island.

Heyo, Tasmanian here. I'm not sure that anecdote about the indigenous Tasmanians is true, though I've heard it a lot and I don't know where it comes from. (I'm guessing that people extrapolate the fact that the Tasmanians didn't have more advanced tools like boomerangs to other technologies like fire use, but this would this would strike me as injudicious)
it's pretty well recorded that the Palawa routinely performed controlled burn offs and did so to different degrees depending on what they intended the land to be used for, which would require them to be able to produce fire independently, such as encouraging wallaby grazing or creating 'highways'. And in reconstructions of their campsites (there's a permanent exhibit at my local museum) they have fire pits.

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On the other hand in 1867 the merchant ship Nineveh reported that the Sentinelese were armed with iron tipped arrows so they can't have been that isolated. Clearly they were getting metal from somewhere.

Even recent reports from this century and a few decades prior have confirmed the islanders have some iron arrowheads.

They get their metal by scavenging shipwrecks. Given the Andamans are on a well-traveled route, this could have been going on for a while.

Exactly what I thought when I first learned they have at least some iron arrowheads.

They could have also made them from the few iron pots they've gained over the last two centuries. Once the pots puncture or are otherwise damaged and unusable, maybe at least one was taken apart gradually, cut up into metal shards and the shards sharpened into arrowheads. Though metals washed up on the shore or in the form of shipwrecks made a lot of sense too, and would be a more common source of metallic materials.

interested if they have metal where do they get it? can't imagine that island would have a source, what sort of wildlife food sources are there besides fish? snakes, lizards?

I'm not sure snakes would live on that fairly small, fairly isolated island. Perhaps sea snakes that swam there, but they wouldn't be seen much outside of the coastal areas. Depends on whether the Andamans have any snake species, really. If not, I think it wouldn't be surprising if North Sentinel Island also lacked snakes. From what I know about island evolution, lizards tend to arrive later than plants, insects, turtles (or seals) and birds. And snakes even later. When humans discovered New Zealand, it had no snakes whatsoever, and that's effectivelly a mini-continent. (Compare Ireland in Europe, which also doesn't have a natural snake population of its own, though that's down to the ice age rather than oceanic isolation.) Snakes are generally late animal colonisers, if they make it at all (colder climates being naturally more prohibitive to this).
 
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