eli5: How did the people on islands like sentinel island get there? And how have they survived for so long?
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They took boats. People have been sailing around on boats for thousands of years, and when they get to an island, they sometimes set up a permanent settlement there.
Islands can generally support some small amount of people through the locally-renewable resource of fish and other protein from the sea. Many islands are viable for farming and may have other natural resources that can be exploited by a gatherer society.
By boat, they make canoes to fish in the coastal waters that could definitely make the trip to the next island if they wanted. The next large island is only like 25 miles away.
Why have they stayed there and fought everyone who tried to come near for so long? We don’t know for sure. There’s theories out there. But no one really knows.
There are two ways that populations spread out — either by land bridges that have since gone back underwater with changing geology, or simply by boat.
It wasn’t necessarily boats the size of Europeans coming to the Americas, but all it takes is a few people in canoes to get to an island to start living there to have large populations a thousand years later.
There is a misconception that North Sentinel Island is some remote island.
It’s not.
It’s only 20 miles off the coast of South Andaman Island which is a big tourist island and home to the islands’ main town, Port Blair.
The amazing thing is how the islanders have stayed so uncontacted despite being with sight of an Indian Ocean tourist island. The answer is that during the colonial times, the islanders survived contact with the British and their guns and germs. Many of the other islands suffered greatly due to the European diseases they had no immunity too and were colonised.
North Sentinel Island had no strategic value to the British. Its entire coastline was shallow reefs unsuitable as a harbour and the islanders were aggressive enough (but not too aggressive) for the British to ignore them for the majority of the 19th and early 20th Century.
The islands transferred to India after independence and since 1947, the Indian navy patrols the waters around the island to ensure the island remains uncontacted for anthropological reasons.
Have you not heard of boats?
All of the Pacific islands were populated by ancient peoples using boats. Madagascar was reached by people from Indonesia by boat before people from Africa by boat.
Homosapiens have been on the 6 populated continents for at least 10k years. Homosapiens have been on Earth for about 200,000 years. Hominids have been on Earth for 2 million years.
The Americas were full of uncontacted tribes just 500 years ago, and many of them were still uncontacted well after that point. If there were tribal people surviving on Earth 500 years ago, why would they have suddenly disappeared in the last few centuries?
We believe North Sentinal Island was first populated around 60k years ago. The bronze age started around 5k years ago, the agricultural revolution was around 12k years ago. There’s no reason to believe the last 10k years would have gone any worse for them than the first 50k unless they were contacted by the civilized world, but their remoteness, isolationism, and hostility has prevented that.
The archipelago use to be more connected to the mainland during the last ice age when sea levels were lower, you could walk or float a short distance to get there. The same with Britain and Japan.
Earth’s appearance during the last ice age
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i’m interested in their source of fresh water, could there be natural springs or is the geology not suited for that?
Others have already said that it can be by boat so I’ll just add an interesting anecdote I heard about boating without much technology (idk if it’s true, but it fits with the culture and it’s a cool story)
When British explorers first came to Australia (or maybe New Zealand), one guy tried talking to a native guy and to his surprise he answered in English. Turns out he went to Indonesia by boat, learned English while there, and came back before the British arrived
Most, if not all of the Pacific Islands were populated by people in small boats. They would start at an island, get swept out to sea, follow the current and then land at another island.
the book *Kon Tiki* is the story of an expedition that attempted to recreate how people spread along the pacific this way.
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