Two Islands and the Two Ways of Being Human
The first island that I think has something to tell us about human history is Mahé, upon which I sit as I write this. It is the largest of the Seychelles Islands in the Indian Ocean, about 900 miles east of Africa and west of . . . not a whole lot.
No humans living in either of the ways that will be discussed in this article—without or with agriculture—lived on Mahé until 1770. That’s when the first settlers (French, Indian and some African slaves they, despicably, dragged along) arrived.
That makes Mahé and the other 114 Seychelles Islands unusual—along with the Pitcairn Islands in the South Pacific, the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic and, of course, Antarctica. For by then humans—living without and then with agriculture—had found ways to live on just about every other significant land mass on earth.
* * *
Going anywhere near North Sentinel Island, the other island I’ve been thinking about, is prohibited. However, I once managed to spot it in the distance from a ship and then a plane. And I did spend some time a quarter century ago with Triloknath Pandit, a director of the Anthropological Survey of India.
Pandit is one of the few outsiders who has managed to visit North Sentinel Island—one of the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal—without being killed. Pandit brought gifts. But, during his visits was careful to stay in the boat or stand in the water. He never dared set foot upon North Sentinel Island.
Those who live on the other Andaman Islands are engaged in modern life or are beginning to participate in modern life or are at least aware of modern life. (Though, when I was on one of the other Andaman Islands, also a long
time ago, one wild-haired, scantily-clad fellow did aim a bow and arrow at me—in jest, I assumed.)
North Sentinel Island is different from the rest of the Andamans.
It is estimated that somewhere between 50 and 200 people now live there (way below the number needed to avoid inbreeding). And the people who live there will fight to keep others out.
They want no intercourse with modern life—whatsoever. They have no understanding of modern life. They do not play nicely with others—modern or otherwise.
Indeed, the Sentinelese—a name for them they are not familiar with—attack most of those few people who have been foolhardy enough to try to set foot on their island.
A young Christian missionary, who succeeded in striding onto North Sentinel Island in 2018, was quickly killed by the natives. (A story told in the documentary, The Mission to Contact.)
Yet, many anthropologists believe the inhabitants of North Sentinel Island have a remarkable distinction: they are the last surviving hunter-gatherers on earth.
* * *
Mahé harbors 105-thousand or so people—most of the inhabitants of the Seychelles.
The French ruled the Seychelles until the islands were captured by the British during the Napoleonic Wars. The Seychelles obtained independence from Britain in 1976.
Today Mahé is populated by peoples of African, Indian and European descent, along with a sprinkling from the world’s more recent reshufflings. Individuals from a variety of cultures, in other words, have adopted this island as their home—
making this one of the more variegated locales in this increasingly variegated world. Most of the people who reside on Mahé, or elsewhere on the Seychelles, speak three languages: French, English and a local creole.
Mahé has a bustling, ramshackle marketplace similar to that you might find in any third-world locale. But it has become—thanks to its good weather and a healthy tourist business—a place many immigrate to rather than emigrate from. (My backpack was repaired by a couple of guys with sewing machines who had recently arrived from Bangladesh.)
And, in my week or so there with my wife, Mahé seemed one of the friendlier, cheerier places we’ve been.
I am using this island as an example of the lives developed by homo sapiens after the big boost given by the development of agriculture. I am using it as an example of the way humans have lived once they stopped depending entirely upon hunting and gathering. I am using it as an example of the way of being human followed, more or less, by all of the humans in the world today with one exception.
* * *
North Sentinel Island is much smaller than Mahé. Indeed, it is almost exactly the size of another small island—the one upon which I normally reside: Manhattan.
The people who live on North Sentinel Island—without benefit of a subway or even carts (the wheel was invented after agriculture)—must continually move from one hunting or foraging area to another hunting or foraging area as those areas are exhausted and, in time, replenished. Such is the hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
However, hunter-gatherers who live primarily off fish, as the Sentinelese do, have less reason to be peripatetic. The fish do much of the moving around in the coral reefs that surround North Sentinel Island. And fish are their primary source of sustenance.
Indeed, there is no evidence of these people—who are entirely un-variegated—having ever gone anywhere besides their island and the waters around it. They have been frozen in place and in time.
I am fascinated by the inhabitants of this island and the glimpse they provide—or are fighting not to provide—of what it seems an anachronism to call their “lifestyle.”
For you don’t have to go that far back in time—about 12-thousand years—for the Earth’s entire population of humans to consist of hunter-gatherers.
And that—picking or killing their food and then, when they had picked or killed an area clean, moving on—was the way all homo sapiens lived until the invention of agriculture, which means that was the way all homo sapiens lived since homo sapiens first evolved, about 300,000 years ago.
This was for almost all of the history of human beings the only way of being human.
* * *
Mahé—having been uninhabited until 1770—never harbored hunter-gatherers. That is unusual. For much of the spreading out around the world that humans have accomplished was initially accomplished, without the benefit of maps or compasses or tall ships, by hunter-gatherers.
Indeed, Mahé is among the few exceptions that prove a remarkable rule: after some homo sapiens finally successfully implanted themselves outside of Africa about 60,000 years ago, those hunter-gatherers began going all over the place.
First some homo sapiens settled in Asia and then Europe, where there was considerable interbreeding with two species of archaic hominins: Denisovans and Neanderthals, before they died off or were killed.
Then, over the next 35,000 or so years: hunter-gatherers somehow made it to and settled Australia, North America, South America, New Zealand and the islands in between—though not the Seychelles and that small number of other exceptions. And hunter-gatherers managed all this exploration and settlement without the benefit of maps or compasses or tall ships.
The invention that would eventually lead to maps, compasses and tall ships, the invention that more than any other would transform human history, first arrived about 12,000 years ago: the domestication of plants and animals.
Cultivating rice and raising cows was difficult, labor-intensive work compared to picking berries and trapping animals. But it allowed humans, for the first time, to settle in one place—a village. And villages became towns and towns became cities, including the city of Victoria, capital of the Seychelles, on Mahé.
And, as agriculture developed it began producing enough food so everyone in the city did not have to be devoted to securing food: some could govern, some could sew clothing, some could recite poems and some could invent writing and, therefore, maps.
But agriculture—maybe because it was so labor intensive—spread in fits and starts.
And in the second half of the 20th century there still were tribes to be found in the Amazon, in New Guinea, in Africa and in dense jungles elsewhere, who did not plant anything or did not trade with people who did, who hunted and gathered all their food.
No longer.
This new way of being human began infiltrating even these tribes.
* * *
Except on North Sentinel Island.
All the hunter-gatherers in other remote parts of the world have been contacted by now. Most have had a chance to sample at least a few of the wonders of modern life, such as, potato chips, Band-Aids or wheeled carts.
The Sentinelese—being resolutely, vehemently, violently reclusive and intolerant of strangers—have succeeded in holding onto the hunter-gatherer way of life, while more or less all the world’s other hunter-gatherers have melded into, or at least shown signs of beginning to meld into, the world of towns and cities and nations that agriculture created.
The inhabitants of North Sentinel Island have succeeded in living—probably for millennia, maybe for tens of thousands of years—in a no-progress-of-any-kind, for-real, no-exceptions zone. They make the Amish look like the Jetsons.
It would indeed be fascinating to know what the inhabitants of North Sentinel Island are thinking—though finding out might be difficult given their tendency to kill, rather than engage with, visitors. And, even if they were inclined to converse, there is no one in the world who can translate their unique language.
And, yes, there is something attractive about the sense of community the Sentinelese presumably have. Yes, there is something attractive about their undeniable closeness to nature, to the earth and what lives upon it. Some local anthropologists think the Sentinelese better survived the Asian tsunami in 2004 by sensing it coming and climbing up trees.
And no, they are not growing fat on processed foods or being hypnotized by social media. (However, the fact that the Sentinelese are wont to murder strangers—actually an inclination not uncommon among hunter-gatherers—would have to be noted on the other side of the ledger.)
Still, whatever you think of them, it is hard to imagine that these last of the hunter-gatherers will be able to maintain their lifestyle much longer.
Coconuts are not native to their part of the world. And coconuts were among the gifts Triloknath Pandit gave the Sentinelese on his visits there. He told me they had been planted. Is that agriculture? Are they already on the road toward cultivation and civilization and, eventually, piña coladas?
How long before someone with a pocket stuffed with candy is welcomed on their island? How long before they are shown images of themselves on an iPhone?
Homo sapiens have been around for about 300,000 years. Until the invention of agriculture 12,000 years ago, all of them—all of us—were hunter-gatherers. That means that, all humans were hunter-gatherers for 96 percent of human history.
Once the Sentinelese discover the control they can get over their food supply by planting, cultivating and harvesting, once they then begin leaving their island and discover grocery stores and baseball caps, no humans will be hunter-gatherers.
And a profoundly different way to be human will be gone. Humankind will be less diverse. And living memory of how humans lived for almost all of human history will be lost.
That is, I guess, a kind of tragedy.
* * *
But modern human life—life in Mahé, for example—certainly has its compensations.
The now mechanized and globalized food system available today on Mahé provides not just great convenience and variety but the life-saving benefit of reliable, famine-resisting sustenance.
And wow have people, around the world—freed from the daily search for food—been able to invent and manufacture lots of not only useful but life transforming stuff.
Oral cultures did, indeed, have their own unique ways of preserving wisdom, most of them involving elders and repetition. But wisdom that is written down is not only preserved it can be examined and improved upon.
And today most of the information and ideas now available in the world can—thanks to the internet—be easily accessed in Mahé. The bulk of the research and writing for this article was undertaken not in Paris or New York, but by a fellow with a laptop on the Seychelles.
Entertainments, too, flow into Mahé electronically. It is much more difficult to be bored in this modern world than one would assume it is on North Sentinel Island.
And life expectancy on Mahé is more than twice what it was among hunter-gatherers. A lot of that had to do with a reduction in deaths in childbirth or infancy in the past century or two. But still your chances of living a full life are much, much greater on modern Mahé.
In what few images we have of North Sentinel Island, the residents seem angry. That, undoubtedly, has something to do with circumstances: they felt, at the time, threatened.
But I can’t help noting that most of the people I encountered on the streets, shops and beaches of Mahé were smiling.
