September 10, 2025 • 11 mins
One of the last uncontacted people in the world live in the Bay of Bengal and they have made it clear they don’t want you to visit.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. Josh here, Chuck here,
that's it, and this is short stuff.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (00:09):
I kept thinking we had covered this, but I don't
think we covered it this specifically. And what made me
think of this was the other day I saw a
video that was a drone flying over North Sentinel Island. Yeah,
and these you know, this uncontacted tribe looking up obviously,
(00:31):
and they were pretty high up. They weren't buzzing them,
I will say that. But I was also like, and
I was heartened to find the Instagram comments were mainly
like please leave them alone largely, but North Sentinel Island
is part of a larger island chain called the Andaman
and Nicobar Islands and the Bay of Bengal, about seven
hundred miles off of India. And it is noteworthy because
(00:55):
anywhere between fifty and five hundred of these Sentinel Theese
people live there completely uncontacted, even though they're like maybe
twenty miles away from islands that are have incorporated some
modern spoils.
Speaker 1 (01:10):
Yeah, and they live essentially in the same manner as
Neolithic cunter gatherers. Don't wear clothes, They walk around naked
as the day they were born, They spearfish, they use
dugout canoes that aren't particularly seaworthy, and they don't like
visitors at all. Essentially, there's been one one event of
(01:32):
contact with them that you could even remotely consider peaceful.
I guess it would definitely be a piece. Yeah, Yeah,
But every other contact with them has either been repelled
by a volley of arrows or has resulted in the
person's death, I should say, and or resulted in the
person's death from that volley of arrows. And that's why,
(01:53):
like those Instagram comments were saying, like, leave these people alone.
They've clearly told the modern world leave us alone.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
Yeah. In other words, these people are your heroes.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
Yeah, kind of like the naked part especially. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
I really think a lot of these folks. I got
to get me a bow and arrow.
Speaker 3 (02:12):
In the eighteenth century is when they were first discovered
with Dutch, Austrian and British merchant ships looking for better
trade routes, and the first European settlers arrived there in
the eighteen fifties, when Britain built a penal colony on
an island about thirty miles from North Sentinel Island and
kind of not too long after that, I guess it
(02:34):
was about forty years or so, there was a prisoner
who tried to escape on a raft from that penal
colony washed up on shore of North Sentinel and they
found him dead by arrow or arrows rather.
Speaker 1 (02:47):
Yes, And that confirmed those sightings from the seventeen seventies
that there were definitely people living on this island. You don't, like,
there's no natural arrows that you can fall on top of.
That's just how it goes. I'm sorry, I don't know
the roard.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
Everyone knows that you don't fall on an arrow.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
Right, but even still, if you do fall on an arrow,
somebody made that arrow. So it definitely suggested human in
human habitation of the island. And it also showed, yeah,
they probably don't want people showing up even accidentally like
that prisoner did.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
Yeah for sure.
Speaker 3 (03:24):
Yeah, he was like I got out of there, I
washed up on this island, so amazing.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
Yeah, ooh, that's a really good arrow sound.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
Message for you, sir.
Speaker 3 (03:35):
In nineteen sixty seven, the Anthropological Survey of India sent
a team of twenty people to try and make peaceful
contact with them. And you know, they were well known
at this point for like any ship that comes by,
they're going to get arrowed at at least as a warning,
you know, probably not killing anyone from the shore to
(03:56):
a ship, but that message again saying please don't come here.
Speaker 2 (04:00):
And they went ashore, and.
Speaker 3 (04:03):
They basically had gone into hiding. They saw their huts,
they saw that they had fires going, and abandoned their meals.
I am quite sure that they were, you know, the
sentinel knees were sitting there watching them from wherever they
had perched.
Speaker 1 (04:16):
Sure, kind of.
Speaker 3 (04:17):
Going through their stuff, and so they left them some gifts.
They left them coconuts because they didn't have coconuts. They
left them iron rods and.
Speaker 2 (04:26):
Sporks.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
Yeah, plastic utensils, which is so bizarre.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
Yeah, I didn't get that part.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
It's like, hey, why don't you learn how to litter?
That'll make you modern?
Speaker 3 (04:36):
Yeah, like, is this the best thing we can offer
you that you haven't seen yet.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
You mentioned that they had fires going. I read somewhere
that they are thought to not actually know how to
make fire, and that they keep embers tended from lightning
strikes or fires created naturally from lightning strikes.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
Quest for fire, remember that one.
Speaker 1 (04:54):
Yeah, that was a good one. Should we take a break, Yeah,
and let's go watch Quests for Fire, right, be right back.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
Right on Chong.
Speaker 1 (05:23):
Yeah, and uh, what was the guy's name?
Speaker 2 (05:26):
Oh?
Speaker 1 (05:27):
Uhh, yeah, the guy Sonny Bono.
Speaker 2 (05:32):
Wasn't it a question fire?
Speaker 1 (05:34):
What's his face?
Speaker 3 (05:35):
Uh?
Speaker 1 (05:35):
The hell boy?
Speaker 2 (05:36):
Hell boy?
Speaker 1 (05:37):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (05:37):
Ron, No, oh, I can't think people are screaming at
us right now.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
He's a feisty guy.
Speaker 1 (05:46):
In real life.
Speaker 2 (05:47):
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (05:48):
He was great in Drive. You remember that movie?
Speaker 3 (05:52):
Uh?
Speaker 1 (05:52):
Yeah, I love Drive, great movie. I think I've told
you before. I did a double feature of Drive and
Neon Demon in my brain was melting.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
Wow, Ron Perlman, everybody.
Speaker 1 (06:03):
Thank you? Yeah, Ria Perlman.
Speaker 2 (06:06):
Oh, wonder if they're related.
Speaker 1 (06:07):
Maybe they look very similar.
Speaker 2 (06:11):
All right, so where did we leave off?
Speaker 3 (06:15):
They came back after their their one semi successful you know,
offering of coconuts and things like that, and in the
early nineteen nineties they said, hey, let's take another stab
at this and let's bring a woman this time, which
turned out to be a really good idea.
Speaker 1 (06:32):
It seems like, yeah, because this was the one encounter
that you could truly call peaceful, because they actually did
encounter the Sentineleese this time, and it totally makes sense
that the presence of a woman would have made it
a peaceful encounter, because I could see that if the
Sentinelese followed typical patriarchal structures, they don't take women on
(06:53):
raiding parties. So the presence of a woman would suggest
that this wasn't a rating party. And they let their
guard down for one reason, or I think that's the
likeliest reason. They let their guard down. And the way
that the Anthropological Society got them to basically interact with
them was to float coconuts to them from the boat.
And I guess from that first gift of coconuts in
(07:14):
the sixties, the Sentinel'ese were very happy to see those
things again.
Speaker 3 (07:18):
Oh man, it's been decades. You tease this with coconuts.
These things are amazing.
Speaker 1 (07:23):
My grandfather told me about these.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (07:26):
Basically, so they did not fire any arrows. They floated
the coconuts. Some of the Sentineliese came into the water,
collected those things up, and they waded out to the boat,
even examined the boat, and allowed some of the outsiders
even to walk around on the beach and interact with
the women teenagers and children who they brought out, which
(07:47):
was I mean, this was a rousing success that just
should have stopped there.
Speaker 1 (07:52):
Yeah, it should have. I guess, well it kind of did,
didn't it. I mean that after that, India passed the
law that said no one to contact the Sentinel, least.
Speaker 3 (08:03):
As far as the official Indian government goes. But that
didn't stop a certain someone from going.
Speaker 1 (08:08):
No. Oh, actually no it didn't. In two thousand and six,
some fishermen from me and mar had to make an
emergency landing and they were killed. Their bodies were buried
in the sand of North Sentinel Island. But the more
famous death on North Sentinel Island came much more recently.
I think it was in twenty eighteen that a twenty
six year old missionary and adventurer named John Allan Chow
(08:31):
died from arrow wounds on North Sentinel Island. And this
was not the first time he showed up on North
Sentinel Island.
Speaker 2 (08:39):
No, he was trying to spread the word of God.
Speaker 3 (08:44):
He was chronicling all of this in his diary, and
he knew what he was in for. He you know,
to his credit, he got all the vaccinations to make
sure that he didn't get them sick and stuff like that,
and he brought dental forceps apparently in case he got arrowed,
because he knew that was a possibility. He made a
few different trips. He had this you know, local fisherman
kind of take him out and back. The first time
(09:06):
he waited up, he brought a fish as a gift
and said, my name is John, I love you and
Jesus loves you, and it was harrows.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
They did not get him.
Speaker 3 (09:19):
He came back, they arrowed at him again, did not
get him again. And I guess fool me twice wasn't
in John Allen Chowles's repertoire because he came back a
third time and was arrowed for good.
Speaker 1 (09:34):
Yeah. The fisherman he bribed to take him out there,
and bribed as the word because they were knowingly breaking
the law by helping him. Contact the North Sentinelese they
reported that they saw his body being dragged along the
sand by the sentinelsee, and that they buried it. And
they buried all these guys, yeah, which I find interesting because.
Speaker 2 (09:57):
It's respect, you know.
Speaker 1 (09:58):
Yeah, But John Allen chows remains are still there today,
as are the two fishermen who had to make an
emergency landing the fishermen from me and mar because part
of not contacting the Sentinellees is not raiding nor Sentinel Island,
trying to bring the people who killed those guys to
justice and or even recover the remains. So they're there
(10:20):
for well, who knows how long.
Speaker 3 (10:23):
Probably for good. I also failed to mention that in
his second of the three trips, when he is arrowed at,
and I believe this was in his diaries, a young
boy actually shot an arrow through his waterproof bible that
he was holding up. And if that sort of symbolic
message wasn't enough to keep them away, then nothing would happen.
Speaker 1 (10:44):
No, Yeah, because he came back. But yeah, he's on
one side, especially among evangelicals, he's viewed as literally a martyr.
On other sides, probably people on Instagram, he's viewed as
an interloper who should not have been where he was, Julie.
Speaker 3 (11:01):
Yeah, And of course I don't think any loss of
life like that is okay. But I just think people
should heed the warnings like they don't want to be contacted.
Speaker 2 (11:12):
Yeah, so just don't contact.
Speaker 1 (11:13):
Them, leave the North sent and the leaves alone. Yeah,
short Stuff is out.
Speaker 2 (11:22):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. Josh here, Chuck here,
that's it, and this is short stuff.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (00:09):
I kept thinking we had covered this, but I don't
think we covered it this specifically. And what made me
think of this was the other day I saw a
video that was a drone flying over North Sentinel Island. Yeah,
and these you know, this uncontacted tribe looking up obviously,
(00:31):
and they were pretty high up. They weren't buzzing them,
I will say that. But I was also like, and
I was heartened to find the Instagram comments were mainly
like please leave them alone largely, but North Sentinel Island
is part of a larger island chain called the Andaman
and Nicobar Islands and the Bay of Bengal, about seven
hundred miles off of India. And it is noteworthy because
(00:55):
anywhere between fifty and five hundred of these Sentinel Theese
people live there completely uncontacted, even though they're like maybe
twenty miles away from islands that are have incorporated some
modern spoils.
Speaker 1 (01:10):
Yeah, and they live essentially in the same manner as
Neolithic cunter gatherers. Don't wear clothes, They walk around naked
as the day they were born, They spearfish, they use
dugout canoes that aren't particularly seaworthy, and they don't like
visitors at all. Essentially, there's been one one event of
(01:32):
contact with them that you could even remotely consider peaceful.
I guess it would definitely be a piece. Yeah, Yeah,
But every other contact with them has either been repelled
by a volley of arrows or has resulted in the
person's death, I should say, and or resulted in the
person's death from that volley of arrows. And that's why,
(01:53):
like those Instagram comments were saying, like, leave these people alone.
They've clearly told the modern world leave us alone.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
Yeah. In other words, these people are your heroes.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
Yeah, kind of like the naked part especially. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
I really think a lot of these folks. I got
to get me a bow and arrow.
Speaker 3 (02:12):
In the eighteenth century is when they were first discovered
with Dutch, Austrian and British merchant ships looking for better
trade routes, and the first European settlers arrived there in
the eighteen fifties, when Britain built a penal colony on
an island about thirty miles from North Sentinel Island and
kind of not too long after that, I guess it
(02:34):
was about forty years or so, there was a prisoner
who tried to escape on a raft from that penal
colony washed up on shore of North Sentinel and they
found him dead by arrow or arrows rather.
Speaker 1 (02:47):
Yes, And that confirmed those sightings from the seventeen seventies
that there were definitely people living on this island. You don't, like,
there's no natural arrows that you can fall on top of.
That's just how it goes. I'm sorry, I don't know
the roard.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
Everyone knows that you don't fall on an arrow.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
Right, but even still, if you do fall on an arrow,
somebody made that arrow. So it definitely suggested human in
human habitation of the island. And it also showed, yeah,
they probably don't want people showing up even accidentally like
that prisoner did.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
Yeah for sure.
Speaker 3 (03:24):
Yeah, he was like I got out of there, I
washed up on this island, so amazing.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
Yeah, ooh, that's a really good arrow sound.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
Message for you, sir.
Speaker 3 (03:35):
In nineteen sixty seven, the Anthropological Survey of India sent
a team of twenty people to try and make peaceful
contact with them. And you know, they were well known
at this point for like any ship that comes by,
they're going to get arrowed at at least as a warning,
you know, probably not killing anyone from the shore to
(03:56):
a ship, but that message again saying please don't come here.
Speaker 2 (04:00):
And they went ashore, and.
Speaker 3 (04:03):
They basically had gone into hiding. They saw their huts,
they saw that they had fires going, and abandoned their meals.
I am quite sure that they were, you know, the
sentinel knees were sitting there watching them from wherever they
had perched.
Speaker 1 (04:16):
Sure, kind of.
Speaker 3 (04:17):
Going through their stuff, and so they left them some gifts.
They left them coconuts because they didn't have coconuts. They
left them iron rods and.
Speaker 2 (04:26):
Sporks.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
Yeah, plastic utensils, which is so bizarre.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
Yeah, I didn't get that part.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
It's like, hey, why don't you learn how to litter?
That'll make you modern?
Speaker 3 (04:36):
Yeah, like, is this the best thing we can offer
you that you haven't seen yet.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
You mentioned that they had fires going. I read somewhere
that they are thought to not actually know how to
make fire, and that they keep embers tended from lightning
strikes or fires created naturally from lightning strikes.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
Quest for fire, remember that one.
Speaker 1 (04:54):
Yeah, that was a good one. Should we take a break, Yeah,
and let's go watch Quests for Fire, right, be right back.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
Right on Chong.
Speaker 1 (05:23):
Yeah, and uh, what was the guy's name?
Speaker 2 (05:26):
Oh?
Speaker 1 (05:27):
Uhh, yeah, the guy Sonny Bono.
Speaker 2 (05:32):
Wasn't it a question fire?
Speaker 1 (05:34):
What's his face?
Speaker 3 (05:35):
Uh?
Speaker 1 (05:35):
The hell boy?
Speaker 2 (05:36):
Hell boy?
Speaker 1 (05:37):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (05:37):
Ron, No, oh, I can't think people are screaming at
us right now.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
He's a feisty guy.
Speaker 1 (05:46):
In real life.
Speaker 2 (05:47):
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (05:48):
He was great in Drive. You remember that movie?
Speaker 3 (05:52):
Uh?
Speaker 1 (05:52):
Yeah, I love Drive, great movie. I think I've told
you before. I did a double feature of Drive and
Neon Demon in my brain was melting.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
Wow, Ron Perlman, everybody.
Speaker 1 (06:03):
Thank you? Yeah, Ria Perlman.
Speaker 2 (06:06):
Oh, wonder if they're related.
Speaker 1 (06:07):
Maybe they look very similar.
Speaker 2 (06:11):
All right, so where did we leave off?
Speaker 3 (06:15):
They came back after their their one semi successful you know,
offering of coconuts and things like that, and in the
early nineteen nineties they said, hey, let's take another stab
at this and let's bring a woman this time, which
turned out to be a really good idea.
Speaker 1 (06:32):
It seems like, yeah, because this was the one encounter
that you could truly call peaceful, because they actually did
encounter the Sentineleese this time, and it totally makes sense
that the presence of a woman would have made it
a peaceful encounter, because I could see that if the
Sentinelese followed typical patriarchal structures, they don't take women on
(06:53):
raiding parties. So the presence of a woman would suggest
that this wasn't a rating party. And they let their
guard down for one reason, or I think that's the
likeliest reason. They let their guard down. And the way
that the Anthropological Society got them to basically interact with
them was to float coconuts to them from the boat.
And I guess from that first gift of coconuts in
(07:14):
the sixties, the Sentinel'ese were very happy to see those
things again.
Speaker 3 (07:18):
Oh man, it's been decades. You tease this with coconuts.
These things are amazing.
Speaker 1 (07:23):
My grandfather told me about these.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (07:26):
Basically, so they did not fire any arrows. They floated
the coconuts. Some of the Sentineliese came into the water,
collected those things up, and they waded out to the boat,
even examined the boat, and allowed some of the outsiders
even to walk around on the beach and interact with
the women teenagers and children who they brought out, which
(07:47):
was I mean, this was a rousing success that just
should have stopped there.
Speaker 1 (07:52):
Yeah, it should have. I guess, well it kind of did,
didn't it. I mean that after that, India passed the
law that said no one to contact the Sentinel, least.
Speaker 3 (08:03):
As far as the official Indian government goes. But that
didn't stop a certain someone from going.
Speaker 1 (08:08):
No. Oh, actually no it didn't. In two thousand and six,
some fishermen from me and mar had to make an
emergency landing and they were killed. Their bodies were buried
in the sand of North Sentinel Island. But the more
famous death on North Sentinel Island came much more recently.
I think it was in twenty eighteen that a twenty
six year old missionary and adventurer named John Allan Chow
(08:31):
died from arrow wounds on North Sentinel Island. And this
was not the first time he showed up on North
Sentinel Island.
Speaker 2 (08:39):
No, he was trying to spread the word of God.
Speaker 3 (08:44):
He was chronicling all of this in his diary, and
he knew what he was in for. He you know,
to his credit, he got all the vaccinations to make
sure that he didn't get them sick and stuff like that,
and he brought dental forceps apparently in case he got arrowed,
because he knew that was a possibility. He made a
few different trips. He had this you know, local fisherman
kind of take him out and back. The first time
(09:06):
he waited up, he brought a fish as a gift
and said, my name is John, I love you and
Jesus loves you, and it was harrows.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
They did not get him.
Speaker 3 (09:19):
He came back, they arrowed at him again, did not
get him again. And I guess fool me twice wasn't
in John Allen Chowles's repertoire because he came back a
third time and was arrowed for good.
Speaker 1 (09:34):
Yeah. The fisherman he bribed to take him out there,
and bribed as the word because they were knowingly breaking
the law by helping him. Contact the North Sentinelese they
reported that they saw his body being dragged along the
sand by the sentinelsee, and that they buried it. And
they buried all these guys, yeah, which I find interesting because.
Speaker 2 (09:57):
It's respect, you know.
Speaker 1 (09:58):
Yeah, But John Allen chows remains are still there today,
as are the two fishermen who had to make an
emergency landing the fishermen from me and mar because part
of not contacting the Sentinellees is not raiding nor Sentinel Island,
trying to bring the people who killed those guys to
justice and or even recover the remains. So they're there
(10:20):
for well, who knows how long.
Speaker 3 (10:23):
Probably for good. I also failed to mention that in
his second of the three trips, when he is arrowed at,
and I believe this was in his diaries, a young
boy actually shot an arrow through his waterproof bible that
he was holding up. And if that sort of symbolic
message wasn't enough to keep them away, then nothing would happen.
Speaker 1 (10:44):
No, Yeah, because he came back. But yeah, he's on
one side, especially among evangelicals, he's viewed as literally a martyr.
On other sides, probably people on Instagram, he's viewed as
an interloper who should not have been where he was, Julie.
Speaker 3 (11:01):
Yeah, And of course I don't think any loss of
life like that is okay. But I just think people
should heed the warnings like they don't want to be contacted.
Speaker 2 (11:12):
Yeah, so just don't contact.
Speaker 1 (11:13):
Them, leave the North sent and the leaves alone. Yeah,
short Stuff is out.
Speaker 2 (11:22):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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