A History Teacher Reacts | "History of North Sentinel Island - Why it's Illegal to Visit" by Hilbert

[Music] hey youtube welcome back to another history teacher reacts video of mr. Terry's I continued my search for historical knowledge found here on YouTube alright today's video comes from our awesome patreon pleasures because they voted on this and this past weeks patrons pick poll so once a week I put up a poll and for our patreon pleasures they can pick which one they would like to get on the channel this is what they chose it's the history of the North Sentinel island and why it's illegal to visit by history with Hilbert so I'm excited to check out this Hilbert's channel is great it's another one of I don't know if I've hit as much but should because there's so much good content on there so thanks to you guys for getting another channel I haven't done a lot of work on with this here so there's gonna be awesome now I'm trying to remember I believe I want to say is it North Sentinel that Island I want to say up south of India or something that basically does not allow visitors and has a history of actually being like hostile towards people and like the footage and stuff that you've seen of the island from far it looks like they're they live in a guy like a hunter-gatherer state and yet like people have been like injured or killed potentially for gone that on that island hopefully I'm right if I'm not you'll probably see me edit out this part of the video so if you're watching this I I must be sort of right at least because I kept it in anyways all right down below will be a link to the original video make sure if you like it you go over there and give over to a like and subscribe okay there and if you haven't stuff to my channel love to have you around as well want to plug one other thing another reason you might want to sub and especially enable those notifications just recently I started doing some live quiz show nights on our Channel and we had our first one a few days ago and had hundreds of people showed up it was a whole lot of fun and if that's something that sounds like a lot of fun to you especially in kind of this downtime where so many you are staying home trying to stay safe and healthy might be a fun thing to be a part of so you have my opening to do that all right talking too much let's go ahead and get started with the history of the North Sentinel island and why it's illegal to visit that's an important thing too why is it illegal to visit why would any be a little place be illegal to visit North Sentinel island is one of the Andaman Islands found in the middle of the Indian Ocean and it's come to prominence recently because of the death at the hands of a Stone Age tribe who have used all contact with the outside world of an American missionary called John Allen Chow who was killed there in November 2018 okay so that's fascinating you know what's interesting about this the location let me go back here okay North Sentinel island because I'm immediately just getting thoughts of the Indian Ocean trade that has been such a big deal for India I mean sorry the Indian Ocean for centuries going back to basically what would be the Middle Ages of the dominance of the Islamic Indian Ocean trade routes and it's not like this place you can see with its location there's no way this place would have been bypassed by people throughout its history how could it not I mean even just like as a strategic point of view this would be so big for the trade that comes the ocean faring trade has done for centuries from India to Southeast Asia and then around to China this would be a huge thing to control so I can't imagine these people have never never had interaction they probably even been colonized before but what happened to get it to where it is today being so isolated okay but yeah this is their story there's a missionaries that try to go in probably try to get him to convert Christianity looks like it didn't go well for unfortunately this guy let's see what else we got of an American missionary called John Allen Chow who was killed that in November 2018 now it's amazing that this island exists just fifty kilometers away from a fully developed modern city at Port Blair yet the natives of this island known as the Sentinelese have no idea it's there and have hardly any grasp of what the modern world around them is at all how do they know it's not there have they been communicated with having lived on this island for tens of thousands of years now in this video I want to look at how is this possible in the twenty a century that we have a tribe of people who are so far behind essentially living in the Stone Age as well as making some interesting differences along the way so I mean if you ever wondered you know what parts of the world was such a globalized world today what parts of the world still have that isolation how many parts are there left I don't have any connection maybe don't even know a lot of what exists in the world or even very close by you'd think in 2020 that that would pretty much not exist but it does I guess it's thought that 60,000 years ago around about that time people from Africa migrated out into various parts of the world and that those who came to be known as the Sentinelese we're one of the first groups to do this having migrated from little Andaman Island to the south now an interesting point about this is because obviously we have hardly any idea about the people on this island as hardly anyone's ever landed on the island and much fewer have survived to tell the tale so once it not just fascinating to survive to tell the tale we're saying we know of people that went there and just didn't come back the way we think we can work this out is that interestingly enough the turtles around North Sentinel island are afraid of the Sentinelese and turtles take a long time tens of thousands of years to adapt and to learn to become afraid of humans it's something that gets passed down so it's thought that turtles don't care they must have been there for a considerable amount of time now another way that they think that these people have been left for so long is that when the British in the 19th century came to the island they brought various natives of the Jarawa and unka tribes with them as the Indian government would do in the 1980s and when they try to make them communicate with the Sentinelese they found that their languages although they were probably a related people because they are very similar they live in a similar region and they're painting styles are so similar they actually weren't able to communicate with each other the languages weren't mutually intelligible anymore that's amazing that you have something that close but language is that intelligible if you have that kind of intelligible disconnection between your neighbors that has to be indicate indicative of being isolationist and for a long time because languages are something that evolved very quickly quickly in the sense that that they they can change quickly right but we'll have those routes that still connect each other by having totally unintelligible that's pretty fascinating now if we look at Europe for instance where you have languages like it's hollien french-inspired all coming from vocal Athens in 2000 years ago these are almost pretty much all mutually intelligible and that was 2,000 years ago I mean yeah you get I mean that could be hard I mean for if you guys know multiple these languages I mean yeah you might have roots but you're not gonna they're different I mean they are different but but you can see the roots of all of them like from a Latin language you know if you know one language you can see roots and so it easier if you can if you can learn one of these languages first the first one is gonna be the hardest one to learn but after that the other ones become a little bit easier because you are gonna get a lot of similarities in the roots of words sure but you can't it me could be easier to communicate you're not you're not gonna hot it like if you just know French doesn't mean you're gonna know Spanish though right so if these languages no longer are mutually intelligible it suggests that they were much further removed back in time much more time has gone past for these languages to develop differently to the point where they could no longer communicate with someone they are different languages at that stage now an interesting reference the first one is by 13th century explorer Marco Polo who references the natives of the Isles saying they were very cruel kill and eat every foreigner whom they can lay their hands upon although they seemed to be contradicted by some more modern evidence because we're not sure if he's simply making these dog skin foreigners seemed to be barbarous and scary to his readers in Europe I wonder how much we know of Marco Polo is that actually sense an island so he spent obviously deck he spent decades in mainland Asia specifically because he pretty much worked for Kublai Khan the Mongol Emperor and spent many years with them and then on his way home rather than just doing an about-face he went south to Southeast Asia I went in to like be about India and then then to those islands but you have we know much about his specifically what islands he went to but that if that is true that's fascinating you have something clear back to like the 1300s about how this island is acting if there's a violent tendency it's interesting especially if you you see that or if you're saying there's a connection to that today but it was found that in 2006 two fishermen went too close to the island they were killed by the natives there although they were buried and the Indian police in a helicopter tried to get back to these bodies and found that they had been unmolested so to speak so that calls into question whether they actually are cannibalistic because they obviously hadn't consumed the bodies of these people but they may yeah yeah you're I mean you're you're really really getting into speculation yeah if you're just doing it by these aerial footage and stuff like that but um so I'm interesting to me I just thought of is if if this is true about the the violence that's that's been on this island for a long time when but one reason why people have left it alone and basically given up on it but you wonder from their cultural perspective why they act like that what what is going on in their culture that they are talking about and are teaching is a part of a religious foundation about this isolation isn't that the world is evil are out to get them or is there some kind of prophetic prophecy about this that would honestly is that that's like the biggest question not like you know just that they're doing this but like what is the source of this potential hostility or is it simply just survival I don't know but I'd love to know if there's something something else something philosophical going on here oh this is another interesting case of conflicting sources of evidence which we'll talk a little bit more about and which will be useful later on because I'm soon going to be making videos about the North in America so this is a very interesting anthropological study because we essentially have a Stone Age people as the Native Americans were and a much more modern people interacting in live time so we can sort of make some assumptions and draw some conclusions and look if this would be a similar situation to various contexts with native peoples in the Americas for the Viking agent sure so another interesting one is that in 1771 the first modern reference to the island was by a British ship which surveyed and the captain of the ship said that he could see many lights on the island the British had had colonized India so therefore that whole region is something they would had a big presence in India was the most valuable most important colony to all of Britain as it was our most valuable one in the age of the British Empire so that indicates that there were obviously fires which indicates that there were people then however its this has sort of been questioned in modern times various articles published suggest that they don't actually have the ability to make fire whereas that would call that into question that earliest source if it is to believe to them that's hard to believe just because of how we found how important the use of fire has been and we say it's not that it's impossible that they didn't have it but how important fire has been to the development of humanity for so many different things cooking food which helps our body digests they say that once we started cooking our food our stomachs became smaller and kind of allowed other organs specifically like the brain to to increase in its function in size as well as using fire for you know obviously heats and traps for animals and all that kind of stuff and be interesting too if that's really true that they did not have fire I mean that's that's that's one of the things you'd think such a basic thing that would exist right I mean you can you can live in such a sedentary era it's our nomadic type away but even nomadic peoples had that fire we have two contradicting points of you know possible reason for some of the antagonism between the outside world obviously in the north Sentinelese who are they basically attack anyone who comes onto the island and apart from of one occasion is that when a British expedition in 1880 led by Morris without Portman came to the island they brought native Jarawa tribesmen width and it's possible that actually the Jarawa were all enemies of the Sentinelese the Jarawa in their language and the anger both have names for North Sentinel island which suggests obviously they know that it was there and that they had contact with the people as they had canoes that weren't able to sail that far truck this obviously didn't work in the favor of the British if there were enemies because then the north these would imagine that they were in league with them and the so see those other people coming to the island from afar as enemies now this is interesting because this similar cases happen in North America so a lot of the time by gangs outside didn't grasp the full complexity of native tribes and their enemy towards each other so for example the Norseman in Greenland with the different groups of native Inuit there so the Dorset culture and it originally being subsumed by the fuelie culture and the difference between them also hypothetically in North America where they landed on the mainland of North America between the different tribes there and also of course much later on with the second European colonization of the Americas there was a lot of oversimplification of these regions as well as throughout the world as well now the the biggest impact that happened between the the cross an Atlantic interaction was the spread of disease and I'm guessing with with that the native population of the North sentiments in Sinhalese or Sentinel island that those people have not dealt with that cuz one thing you get out of isolation is either a some kind of immunity or a lack of immunity to disease was a bit I guess a lack of immunity or or develop out of immunity for something native to you but I wonder if that has ever been a big deal on that island because that a biological isolationism is what is what creates immunity to to diseases and can cause catastrophe by not having that kind of immunity Oh probably didn't help is that Morris Vidal Portland found six of the natives they have fled further inland into the jungles but he found six two elderly people and four children and brought them back to Port Blair whereupon the two elderly people became very sick and died and then he quickly returned the four children which really didn't leave a good impression in the minds the natives blame them interestingly as well okay so maybe that has ties to their isolationism and hostility towards foreigners is based off of historical events of being exploited okay or taken advantage of or yeah 67 a merchant ship the new debate was actually shipwrecked off the coast of North Island and the crew had to fight back with sort of stones and with furniture and things that the natives tried to attack them that they were then rescued by a British naval patrol now as well what's interesting is that this also happened in 1977 and in 1980 when what's interesting is that this also happened in 1977 and in 1981 ago if the MV Rusli Primrose both cargo ships and ships that you can still see the shipwrecks on North Sentinel island because there are a lot of Reeves around both Sentinel island making it very treacherous waters for these boats to go in what's interesting here is as a Stone Age peoples they used stone and wood for their tools and weapons but after the 1970s when these shipwrecks I've seen a couple of these photos now of them are they are they like trying to shoot like where these cameras are be taken out like are taken from like with a probably helicopters maybe or something like that to be able to get something or I guess slower lower level planes but it looked like in some of these pictures that they're like they're like raising up like almost like they're gonna try to shoot it or maybe it's just a warning but they're fascinating to think about that and the whole bow and arrow thing they're pretty long plumes their long bows like English long bows almost but having that difference of like warfare of the bow and arrow versus you know what you could obviously bring today on an island like that the government sent missions to the island they were fired upon with the usual aggression from Sentinelese but that arrows that they retrieved that was shot at them they found had iron tips to them so it's possible metallurgist shipwrecks I've actually potentially set off the Iron Age on the island because now there is a source of iron for them to scavenge and we now have evidence that they used it ok so having iron that's amazing that they would do that but yeah not necessarily saying though that they have developed iron metallurgy on the island there's no way that would be possible but using metal they got from a shipwreck I wonder if they if there was evidence of them using them before these shipwrecks but I mean it's a finite source I guess that you know they would run out but that's fascinating to see them to see them use that and again most likely there's no way they'd go to have my urn mining on an ion like that I mean maybe but I would highly doubt it which is a very interesting prospect just as with the Native Americans in the adoption of the horse entirely now as North Sentinel island went from a British possession to an Indian possession the Indian government decided that they needed to communicate with the native peoples and to bring them into the fold essentially so from 1967 they started sending in these expeditions with anthropologists and researchers and scientists etc to try and make friendly contact with the Sentinelese people interesting didn't go well about five the ex-king of Belgium King Leopold the third also attempted but he was chased down by a single warrior with a bow and arrow and his expedition was forced to at retreat again well it was Leopold part of it well the third also attempted but he was chased bound by a single warrior with a bow one personally on his expedition was forced to retreat again under a hail of arrows this wasn't a Belgian invasion by the way this was just him wanting to see this island they're still living in the Stone Age I mean it would make sense the Belgians were were imperialists at this time they set off the Scramble for Africa as the first Europeans to really get to the heart of Africa with the the Congo and famously Leopold the story about the brutality of belt occupation of the Congo and the millions of deaths of people that were there but wow I had no idea that you know he was visiting other parts of Asia holy crap how interesting li mochou no there was actually one successful friendly mission which was in 1991 where they brought along members of the younger tribe who were shouting the word for coconuts in their language and they were throwing coconuts onto the shore and there's a video or link in the description below we can see the Sentinelese picking up the coconuts and then one of the Warriors makes quite a clear gesture that he thinks they've got enough coconuts and he wants the others to bugger off haha but that was the one friendly encounter then afterwards into everyone likes coconuts except on pizza you would never have it on pizza or pineapple or anything like that right inside jail huge Boxing Day tsunami the ravaged the Indian Ocean region and killed hundreds of thousands of people and obviously this was hugely devastating the Andaman Islands as well and it was feared that perhaps the Sentinelese and also Maya have been wiped out that's pretty amazing how resilient they've been with the natural disasters that can happen there in that region with tsunamis and stuff like that that they can they can still thrive maybe living as simply as they could is is the easiest way to overcome those natural disasters because not a lot changes as much changes as a sedentary lifestyle when natural disasters happen they sent a helicopter to check up on them but once again a warrior that shot arrows OH early was mops you can imagine the balls in these guys just shooting arrows at helicopters dude reminds me a bit of a senior from Avatar which is then in the 21st century but they were still alive and kicking and interestingly enough it seems that these Stone Age peoples also other related Andamanese tribes possibly dealt better with these tsunamis than the modern Indian population because of their lifestyle in 2006 and that's so cool you know in a way they have these guys that will be like bring it a helicopter like come at me and they're like you know launch and stuff at it that's so neat but yeah it was kind of he said I was kind of predicting in a ways that those tsunami devastation Arkana aren't going to affect as much of a Morneau madacorp less sedentary civilization than somewhere else would like India which would devastate the whole structure so maybe in a way it is it isn't going to be India nearly as impactful as I could in other places to fish is possibly who were drunk they were actually fishing for crabs on the local shores they let the boats going too far and they were also killed by the centum of these tribesmen there when they got too far so clearly the sentries don't want any contact with the outside world rowing which might not have been too bad of an idea and of course more recently literally within the last week has been the death of this guy John Allen Chow I heard about this I remember hearing about the American who wanted to bring the gospel the word of Jesus to these Islanders but just as the others who've tried to come to the island was killed by the Sentinelese now of course he's not the only missionary that's quite a historical thing and it's really it was a really weird headline that struck me and why I decided to make this video obviously there's many examples throughout history especially the periods I talked about of missionaries being killed by people who don't want to accept the word of the Lord so for example of course I'm gonna bring up st. Boniface or 20 facts yes he was killed by the Friesians martyred in Bochum in free slum today you can still see where that occurred there is a big fat laughing Boniface when he entered welcome in fleece long so that's one example there and I want to look at the question why can't you visit North Sentinel island I mean other than the fact they might get attacked is there I'm wondering if there are legal protections and stuff like that of course it's a dangerous place as these examples would say people have died and increasingly so actually people try to get on to the island with this last example of the American missionary people being killed there so it's for the safety of the outside world to not come onto the island these are essentially primitive people's as much as we can learn from them and as much as theirs nothing wrong with that they are primitive people's and they are dangerous now as well it might be a case that it's actually better for them that we don't come on to the spinal disease it hasn't exactly gone down too well for the native peoples and still today they are plagued by things like alcohol addiction and cigarettes and okay so what people say it was with this is the assimilation of some of these groups into society has not gone very well I can Native American ativ Americans here in the United States like they're saying is that a history of that and that cultural assimilation has been very difficult for those cultures for a lot of reasons which have decimated these populations and it's true that in another example the Jarawa who have already mentioned they chose to integrate into the modern world and they are really suffering as a consequence in 1997 a few years after they'd sort of been they'd made clear that they wanted to be added into the modern world and to receive help and things from the Indian government they aren't doing too well right now on their suffering from problems like people going through stagecoaches on some kind of human Safari of these tribal peoples and it's really not been great so perhaps the North's enemies have made a wise decision to stay away from the rest of the world and to ward off the rest of the women in such a violent way ya know as well and interestingly enough disease is a huge factor in why the Indian government stopped doing their visits so this makes sense history shows us that that kind of long period those long periods of isolation will create disease things and it would definitely be one that would go towards the Sentinelese people so it would be surprising me if a contact increase that they honestly got wiped out by something to stop this from happening and this is because if we look at the new world for instance I think it's Jared Diamond who says 90% Guns Germs and Steel and up to that of the native population the New World was killed by various European diseases which is a phenomenal figure this is millions hundreds of billions of people being wiped out by disease I mean there are probably 30 million people in the Aztec empire and 90% of them so I mean you're talking millions upon millions of people it's the biggest effect of that has happened between the two hemispheres right and they're their isolation from each other so the North Sentinel island could be like a little microcosm of that a little you know smaller version so if we look for instance and why this is it also applies to the north central ease and why perhaps John Allen Chou has actually endangered the lives of all of these people and that anime soon actually be wiped out because of germs not even because of his preaching so if we look at why the Europeans and Asian's and to a lesser extent some African peoples they domesticated livestock very early on and they lived in very close proximity with this is very a lot of stuff that came out of Jared Diamond's book Guns Germs and Steel which is one of the most important books in recent history about development of civilizations and why civilizations develop and that the the big factors as Guns Germs and Steel so germs right because of diseases right and and most of the communicable large deadly communicable diseases have come from from passing between humans and animals and if you're in a society that lives close to animals the obviously domesticated animals you'll develop an immunity if you're a society that didn't do that like again in the Americas that did not really have domesticated animals you will not be able to have an immune immune system because you've been exposed to those germs that can carry those diseases they often lived in the house in the barn with the livestock because of this and because the livestock could living together they produced a lot of germs and they got ill and these virus strains lived on the animals and fleas and things attract so these then because they were living so close to humans these virus strains also developed so that they could cross contaminate humans as they're all for more hosts to live upon so humans started to get sick and then humans started to die this the the whole immunity thing I feel like at least in like general education for me like as a high school teacher I have to add that it's it needs to be a bigger part of the curriculum they say like Gators immunity diseases but I'm really talking about why the biological process just that these people we're immune and these people weren't but why you need to start any any historical conversation about development of civilization you have to start with geography and that's where Jared Diamond's book is becoming fluently because it makes that connection of how your geography is going to determine your civilization it's going to determine it most of the major aspects especially early on and you'll see you see that coming through with these examples with disease but of course not all humans died and some humans built up these protection against this and we're all ancestors in these diseases and this would then spread among the population now then in turn it's kind of a seesaw the virus strain would then mutate and grow stronger more people would die but then humans would grow stronger immunity to these anti to these viruses and then it would go in a cycle like that but when they came to North America imagine that these people have an immunity of level 50 that also means that the viruses which have been developing to get over the immunity to take over a host and then obviously the immunities got stronger then they're also at level 50 but when they came to the Americas the people there had only really some of them domesticated the larvae and they didn't even live at home we didn't eat them or anything they were basically just a pack animal so it wasn't nearly as connected of an animal if you're part of your daily life as the animals that came out of Eurasia immunity to these diseases so suddenly you have a level 50 disease going to a level zero population and that's why you get such a huge amount of Native Americans being wiped out by these seasons now imagine what would happen if this came to north central island this time an island that has had barely any contact with the rest of the world and we have you know we've moved way past that with our antibodies from even what it was in the sixteenth century with the Native Americans it's incredibly dangerous situation and also as a final point while probably it's illegal to visit Lee I think it should remain that way is that from a kind of culturally libertarian point of view if the North Central East people want to continue living in isolation but I mean the way that they've been living for tens of thousands of years then surely they should have the right to do that they should have the right surely if as they have done and to continue to do so despite the modern world and it's not really our place to intrude on them so I hope you found this video interesting it's a bit different I saw it in the news and I thought this is such a wacky headline that I have to really make a video about this some interesting points that old use soon I'll be making some more videos in my series of the North's colonization to the west across the Atlantic Ocean in Iceland Greenland and North America and as you've seen I've drawn some comparisons there so I hope you enjoy this video video much more to come soon many more things for Christmas and of course the face reveal so I hope you've enjoyed and I'll see you all very soon alright thanks Albert for awesome video and yeah I was really happy to say this was the story I had heard of I guess at the beginning but to see more of the the history behind it and that sort of thing I think a lot of people would agree with kind of what he said at that at the end there about you know I think after these lessons just leave those people alone right let them be there they don't need to be a science experiment or you know dragging them to civilization right don't do that it's not the the 19th century of imperialism a-all right but yeah yeah interesting though but with that I'm glad they he spent a good devote of time on disease because that would definitely be a huge threat to these people if they do have that the one the one thing that kind of you know is it's still out there that I just I wish we could know was what is their perspective of this hostility that we say that they have is it philosophical is it survival what is it that is driving these people to be basically have this kill on sight type of philosophy or known as their philosophy but just the behavior that they have there and that would be really interesting to know that so there's definitely been a history like you said of contact they're going back many many years I mean they said Marco Polo had possibly visit area at King Leopold the British have been all over and probably much more extensive that like I was saying that whole Indian Ocean trade era that dominated well before Europeans showed up there and what that interaction must have been like but they also had evidence you know one of the strong pieces of evidence that he brought up that they're probably long isolation is the difference of their language as how different was just two islands very very close in proximity which is great evidence of isolation they're not being able to have any kind of discernible communication ability to communicate there so that was awesome I'm glad I were able to look at this so I guess there's a lesson in there don't avoid them leave the people alone otherwise you might end up like it seems like a lot of people have over the centuries which is you end up dead go in there so but it is it is a fascinating little thing about an isolated Stone Age community that exists in 2020 because there's not much of that anywhere right so it's pretty fascinating would be fascinating to study that but I think it's important enough to disrupt the whole lifestyle there right no no what do you guys think about that so all right anyway um awesome if you like this video go down below link to it is there give Albert a subscription they're given the view give them a like that's that's really important the mean that you do that if you liked what you saw here too definitely hit that sub button over here and enable those notifications because I like to premiere and all my videos and do live streams and be part of community there another plug is to join our discord server we've got lots of people thousands of people in our discourse server go down below join in the awesome conversations you can talk about this video too and what do you think should be happening with this island of anything what do you think about that alright with that you guys I think we'll go ahead and head out thanks to the patrons that's voted on this if you'd like to be a patreon member there's a link down below starts at $1 a month if you want to join and you easily get access to the or right away get access to polls and there's 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Channel: Mr. Terry History

Views: 69,977

Keywords: react, history, North Sentinel Island

Id: yLKRD5nyAew

Length: 34min 20sec (2060 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 24 2020