Well, 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 wa

Well, 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...