Heard Of The Missionary Killed By The Uncontacted Tribe? Turns Out They're Not So Uncontacted After All

Several adventurous parties have visited these people before...

Jack

• Published in Interesting
• December 15, 2018

Humanity, despite all of our flaws, have created a lot of pretty incredible things. Communication, just to name one of them, is truly an incredible feat at the point that we have gotten it to. We are able to communicate with most of the population of Earth at any time, and if not straight away, with then space of a day we would be able to be having a conversation with any human being on Earth alive right now.

Take a moment to think about that. The technology we have created has become quite the norm for us, so we tend to not think about how amazing it all is. But imagine if you were living the life of someone from 100 years ago... or maybe 1000 years ago. That is the case for the uncontacted tribes of the Sentinelese in the Indian Ocean. 

There has been a lot of news lately about the Christian man who attempted to contact these ancient people and was immediately murdered. News outlets have been referring to them as 'uncontacted tribes' however it turns out that there has been a Western person there before.

Meet Madhumala Chattopadhyay.

27 years ago she led an expedition to meet these ancient people

She had grown to love them since she first learned of them at a young age.

In order to work towards eventually being able to go to the islands, she had studied anthropology at university - the study of humanity - work which paid off as she led an expedition to make first contact.

The team found that perhaps it was the presence of a woman aboard their ship that led to the Sentinelese people being less aggressive, some sort of peace offering perhaps.

They also brought coconuts as gifts which they threw into the water. The locals came to the waters edge to grab the coconuts and, over time, started to interacted with those on the expedition.

It must have been a truly incredible experience interacting with people who had been living in the same place with the same form of life for the last 2000+ years.

Chattopadhyay went on to spend over 6 years visiting the island. She was basically accepted as one of the tribe and was trusted with holding babies and helping the local woman with cooking and other chores, a sign of a deep seated trust between her and the tribes people.

Jack