About 10,000 people on Earth still live as members of what some anthropologists call “uncontacted tribes”: groups of hunter-gatherers in almost total seclusion from the outside world, many of them deep in the Amazon Basin. But no human community is more isolated than the inhabitants of tiny North Sentinel Island in the Andaman archipelago, far off the coast of India in the Bay of Bengal.
The archipelago had already been home to at least a dozen Indigenous tribes scattered across multiple islands—including North Sentinel. Geneticists believe that these small, dark-skinned people, who bear little physical or cultural resemblance to other Asians, may have separated from the rest of the human species as early as 60,000 years ago.
Why Uncontacted Tribes Want to Stay Uncontacted
A new National Geographic documentary, The Mission, which premieres in theaters today and will be streaming online later this year, promises to draw new attention to Chau’s obsessive life and the tribe that lethally rejected his evangelism. (I was a consultant to the filmmakers.) Meanwhile, the Hollywood director Justin Lin, best known for the Fast & Furious franchise, is set to start shooting a dramatization of the story.
Unable to capture their own footage of the Sentinelese, the filmmakers had hired animators to depict Chau’s fatal encounter. As I watched the sequence, I marveled that 10,000 miles away, the islanders were going about their daily lives, blessedly unaware that simulacra of them, several times larger than life, were flickering on a wall high above Sunset Boulevard—revealing them once more as unwilling participants in a global culture that, since Portman’s day, has wanted to know them far more than they want to know it.