Imagine living less than 30 miles from a massive and modern international port city and not having mastery of fire and zero knowledge of life outside of your 20-square mile island. That’s life for the few inhabitants of North Sentinel Island in the Indian Ocean, one of the last true uncontacted civilizations.

The uncontacted tribe we are looking at deals with much less interference than the Amazon tribes. There are three big reasons for this. First, the simple fact that the tribe is on a small, isolated island helps keep people from simply walking or driving to the Sentinelese.

Secondly, as we will look at more, the Sentinelese are exceptionally violent. In all but one known encounter, the Sentinelese have attacked visitors.

Lastly, the island itself has little in the way of resources for miners or loggers to bother about.

Put all of this together and the Sentinelese are one of the most isolated uncontacted tribes on earth. We have no notion of their language, what they call us or themselves, or how many there are.

Few missions to contact the Sentinelese are planned. They were believed to have been wiped out by the massive 2004 earthquake and tsunami, but helicopter surveys were met with the familiar arrow volleys. The tectonic activity helped the Sentinelese as it lifted the island a bit, adding more area and forming a land bridge to a very small island to the south. Estimates of their population range from only a few dozen to as many as a few hundred, we really have no good way to peer through the thick jungle to find out.