North Sentinel Island is a part of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. There are 572 islands in total in the Andaman and Nicobar archipelago. Only 38 of these are inhabited. Of which, only 12 are open to tourists. The islands have been divided into 3 districts. North and Middle Andaman, South Andaman, and Nicobar. The capital is Port Blair in South Andaman. North Sentinel Island is only about 50 km from here. It is a small island of 60 km². And is covered by a dense forest.
The people living there are called the North Sentinelese. But that’s the name we gave them. We don’t know how the tribe refers to themselves. What’s the name they have for themselves? It’s believed that about 70,000 years ago, some people migrated out of Africa. This is known as the ‘Out of Africa’ theory.
That the first modern human beings, were from Africa. And the people living on Sentinel Island now, are the direct descendant of the people who migrated out of Africa. These first group of humans went to Yemen from East Africa. From there, they walked to the Indian subcontinent eventually reaching Myanmar, South-East Asia, East Asia, and eventually spread across these islands, and reached Australia as well.
During these thousands of years, the humans who decided to live in the middle east, India, south-east Asia, etc. mixed in with each other, because they had similar terrain it was easy to go from one place to another on land. But the humans who settled on the remote islands, couldn’t mix in with the other humans, and remained isolated from the rest of the world.
