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Learning this makes North Sentinel island seem like a wild success story. It’s been continuously supporting a population with no outside help for at least a mil
by facialwipe 3y ago
Learning this makes North Sentinel island seem like a wild success story. It’s been continuously supporting a population with no outside help for at least a millennium.
- tareqak 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sentinel_Island https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sentinel_Island for anyone interested.
- anon-sre-srm 3y ago[flagged]
- Vecr 3y agoWell, I mean, technically, but it would absolutely be better if the NSI people could warn them off using similar mathematical and diagram-based signaling techniques as would be used for space aliens.
- huytersd 3y agoIt’s because they aren’t cutting down all the trees there. They’ve found a way to just actually live off the land without destroying. Way more than a millennium, they’ve been doing it for 50,000 years. It’s no joke.
- DiscourseFan 3y agoYeah no wonder they kill anyone who tries to come
- huytersd 3y agoGood for them. Honestly.
- Hucklederry 3y ago[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jojobas 3y agoThat's not a life you would want to live though.
- huytersd 3y agoNo, but it’s probably a pretty good life if that’s the only thing you know. They have a lot of sex on the beach (actually) and don’t look malnourished.
- mixmastamyk 3y agoReminds me of the parable chiding the fisherman relaxing at the beach to work hard, so he can later retire relaxing at the beach.
- fuzztester 3y agoYes, that is a good one. Googled and found a few versions. Here is one: https://thestorytellers.com/the-businessman-and-the-fisherman/ https://thestorytellers.com/the-businessman-and-the-fisherma... Also see who thestorytellers are a part of (at the top).
- cubefox 3y agoThis doesn't mean it is a "success" in the context above. The population living there might have lost most of its previous technological abilities and stabilized in a permanent "collapsed" state. There is no reason that humans have to go extinct when they lose their cultural achievements, after all, other animals survive without having those in the first place. Humans would only go extinct if they lived in an environment which required a certain minimum of cultural ability, e.g. making clothes in areas with a colder climate, as humans don't have sufficient fur.
- timeagain 3y agoThis is a central theme in Vernor Vinge’s Deepness books. Space travel is slow (100s-1000s of years), so travellers are forced to calculate the likelihood that their destination will have experienced societal collapse by the time they arrive. The idea of a perpetually-sustained civilization is a failed dream. Technology helps societies bet larger and last longer, but also more dependent on the technology to sustain their growth.
- heavenlyblue 3y agoIn real life you could take a ship between two different distant lands and when you arrive it is ravaged by war started a couple of days ago
- cubefox 3y agoBut the population size theory says this is increasingly unlikely the larger the population gets. Even Gran Canaria was large enough to avoid the loss of crops for a thousand years, unlike the populations on the smaller islands.
- tivert 3y ago> Learning this makes North Sentinel island seem like a wild success story. It’s been continuously supporting a population with no outside help for at least a millennium. IIRC, the closely-related Andamanese lost technology. Years ago I read something that said they did not use boats, but still occasionally constructed something like them (I'm thinking something like a dugout canoe) for purely ritual purposes.
- AlbertoGP 3y agoWell, they did get a big supply of metal in 1981, and there might have been trading with other islands up to 150 years ago: > Submerged in the crystal-clear waters off North Sentinel Island is a mysterious shipwreck with a truly hair-raising backstory. > It belongs to The Primrose, a 16,000 ton freighter which ran aground in a storm while transporting a cargo of chicken feed from Bangladesh to Australia on August 2, 1981. > [...] > Footage of the tribespeople taken during "friendly" contact with a group of visiting Indian anthropologists in 1991 shows some members carrying metal tools for the first time. > It is believed the tools were forged from metal scavenged from The Primrose, which remains in its resting place atop a coral reef near the island. https://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/hair-raising-story-behind-mysterious-shipwreck-off-north-sentinel-island/7UWWHDCA35XKJ2Q3PGRXMBXYNQ/ https://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/hair-raising-story-behind-m... > Gonschor argues that, rather than being isolated, the Sentinelese visited other Andamanese peoples. Their isolation wasn’t ancient, he thinks, but the product of British and Japanese colonialism, and in particular, the British invasion of the island in 1880. > We can use Lana Lopesi’s new book False Divides to understand what the North Sentinelese have suffered. Lopesi laments the way that, in the Pacific as well as the Indian Oceans, colonisation interrupted histories of inter-island voyaging, trade and marriage. https://thespinoff.co.nz/society/04-12-2018/three-myths-about-north-sentinel-island https://thespinoff.co.nz/society/04-12-2018/three-myths-abou...