The Forbidden Island

The clip is absolutely fascinating. It's sad that the person who uploaded it also threw up a bunch of BS about garden of eden and Abrahamic religions. Come on, this contact with people unlike us. One of the downsides of greater contact and communication is the homogenization (somewhat) of civilizations around the world. These are people who have escaped much of that except a few contacts.

We really do need to fight the urge to put nike's on them, although I must admit to being interested the number of things we might learn about ourselves from studying these people. But then again, I understand the Schrodinger's "People" analogy.

except a lot of the tribes were further reduced to paltry sizes after the tsunami. If I remember correctly from my last visit in 1996/97, the census numbers for some of the tribes were already around ~100. Since Port Blair is on the middle island of the Andaman land mass, it has affected all the other tribes on that island. Especially the Jarwa.

North andaman (Jarwa) tribes at the time were hostile, which I believe since the construction of the Andaman grand trunk road have become more subdued.

Compared to Jarwa, the sentilese have it better, they dont share their island.

Tribal warfare was usually a matter of establishing boundaries. If I remember my history correctly, this was pretty clearly demonstrated in battles between Native Americans and European colonists in the 16 and 1700s. Tribal attacks were closer to raids - warriors would fight, some people would die, but damage on a lasting scale was minimal. Colonist attacks, on the other hand, were going to war in the civilized measure of the term; burning down villages/towns, significantly more death, etc.

And as technology has advanced and civilizations have grown in size and strength, our conception of war has grown ever more brutal. Its been shown, for example, that troops at the time of the revolutionary war that fired on each other by and large missed - troops would load gunpowder but not the bullet; they would aim over the heads of the opposing troop at the last second; and so on. Something like 20 or 30 percent of the troops would actually be shooting at their opponents.

When this was discovered (I think in the early 1900s, but I don't really remember - could be as late as the 40s?) armies changed training methods; they would use targets closer to the shape of humans and so on, and there was a massive increase in the accuracy of soldiers using guns. There was also the advent of "total war" during the American Civil War, with the previously unheard-of scale of destruction that brought (which we now consider typical).

In short, "war" is a wildly different thing for two tribes of a few hundred people that have several hundred sq. miles of territory each (and no strong reason to invade the other), and two civilizations deploying thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of troops, with vastly more lethal weapons, to fight each other.

Famine is also less of an issue for a hunter/gatherer tribe; the large expanse of territory means that if one area is temporarily exhausted, you move somewhere else, or you follow the herds, etc.

Lastly, inequality doesn't seem to exist as a problem for most tribal societies. I mean, imagine living with a few hundred other people that are all you know - and are all you will ever know? People will go to great lengths to help their friends and family in our society; is it so strange to think that in a group where everyone knows each other and everyone works, lives and plays together, that the group will naturally enforce some sort of equilibrium between its members? That people will share and help each other based more on their capabilities and the expectations of others?

Further, we can see that stratification and inequality are endless problems for civilized societies - war, rebellion and revolts are constant themes throughout civilized history, often between the "haves" and the "have nots". These problems exist because civilization is an attempt to create human societies at scale - except humans aren't built for social structures beyond a few hundred people, and we have yet to find a way to replace that default social construct with something that works for tens of thousands or millions or billions of people.

> A. it is clearly what they want.

We all encounter at times fellow humans who want something that clearly is based on lacking information. Of course we respect such things, but only up to a certain point. We often do try to help people see the bigger picture - sometimes we do say "I hear you say that that is what you want, but have you considered the fact that...".

> B. contact with us is likely to be deadly to them.

This can be remedied with technology. A crude solution would be to land in hazmat suits and have a chat. I don't know how we should deal with the bows and arrows though.

We cant get our own cultures right, why screw up more?