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Early warning? Ask Nicobar's
stone-agers
By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI - Stone-age tribes living
on India's remote Andaman and Nicobar Islands
not only survived the devastating December 26
tsunami - triggered by an undersea quake whose
epicenter was close to their homelands - but may
actually have a few lessons in reading natural
early-warning systems for their less perceptive Asian
neighbors, say scientists.
While close to
150,000 people have been confirmed dead on the
coasts of a dozen countries around the Bay of
Bengal and the Andaman Sea after being caught
unaware by giant killer waves, the Onges, Jarawas,
Sentinalese and Great Andamanese who live in the
archipelago escaped unscathed because they took
to the forests and higher ground well in time.
"These tribes live close to nature and are
known to heed biological warning signs like
changes in the cries of birds and the behavior
patterns of land and marine animals," V
Raghavendra Rao, director of the Kolkata-based
Anthropological Survey of India (ASI) told Inter
Press Service (IPS) in a telephone interview.
Based on reports from his field staff on
the badly devastated archipelago of 550 islands,
strung out between Myanmar's main port of Yangon
and Indonesia's Sumatra island, Rao confirmed to
IPS that there were no known casualties among the
five tribes - although there are unconfirmed
reports of a few missing Onges.
The
Andaman and Nicobar Islands have a population of
about 500,000 people, of which the tribals form
less than 30,000. Of the tribals, the biggest
group is the Nicobarese, at about 20,000.
Confirmation of their safety
also came from the Indian Coast Guard, which
carried out surveys over the 60-square-kilometer Sentinel
island last week in low-flying helicopters, which
were greeted with arrows and spears by the hostile
Sentinalese.
The director general of
the coast guard, Vice Admiral A K Singh, said
on Monday that he was relieved to see the
hostility because it was sure sign that the Sentinalese
were fighting fit and not interested in
receiving outside help after the tsunami. He had
pictures of Sentinalese aiming arrows at his
chopper to prove the point.
Rao and other
ASI experts believe that the tribes may hold the
key to building a resource base for a reliable and
cost-effective coastal warning system against
future catastrophes.
Experts
around the world have blamed the unusually high
human toll from the tsunami, which was spawned by
a huge undersea quake in the northern tip
of Sumatra, on the absence of a reliable early-warning
system, such as the sophisticated Pacific Tsunami
Warning Center based in Honolulu, Hawaii.
But top Indian scientists think
that such a system may not be practical for the
countries of the Indian Ocean, where tsunamis
are extremely rare. "Building up a tsunami-prediction
network for the Indian Ocean will be a gigantic effort
- after all, we cannot build shelters
against 25-foot-high [7.6-meter] waves to cover hundreds of
kilometers of coastline," said S Z Qasim, India's
best-known oceanographer and vice chairman
of the Society for Indian Ocean Studies.
"As soon as things settle down we
are planning to document the vast and
valuable indigenous, intangible knowledge and
survival skills that exist on the islands - not only
on impending catastrophes but also on herbs
and medicinal plants," said Rao, one of the few
Indian officials authorized to speak on the
subject..
"Immediate documentation is
important because we also need to record how the
tribes that live by hunting and foraging adapt to
the major geomorphological changes wrought to
their habitat on the islands by the December 26
events," he said.
The tribes have origins
reaching into the Mesolithic and Upper Paleolithic
eras (between 20,000 and 60,000 years old) and
efforts at scientifically studying their unique
genetic characteristics have been made in
collaboration with the Hyderabad-based Center for
Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB).
DNA studies carried out by the CCMB have shown
the Onges, who inhabit reservations on Dugong
Creek and the South Bay of Little Andaman Island, to
be the most primitive of the tribes and
closely related to African pygmies. That also makes
them the most endangered, with fewer than a
100 individuals now known to exist, partly as a
result of catching diseases such as hepatitis from contact
with outsiders that began under British colonial
rule in 1886.
Another Negrito group, the
Jarawas on Great Andaman island, suffered not only
as a result of diseases introduced by outsiders
but also because of punitive expeditions carried
out by the British and the Japanese, who occupied
the islands and built bunkers and fortifications
on them during World War II.
Since the
construction of the Andaman truck road connecting
the administrative center of Port Blair with
Diglipur, on Great Andaman, the Jarawas have been
increasingly coming into contact with Indian
settlers who originally came to build the road but
then stayed on as encroachers.
The
Sentinalese, who are believed to be originally an
offshoot of the Onges, live on North Sentinel
island west of South Andaman and are probably the
last of the world's Paleolithic people that have
no contact with the rest of the world because the
island is completely out of bounds to outsiders.
Scientists believe that because of the
extreme isolation of the Sentinalese, this tribe
has become biomedically valuable. They warn that
these tribespeople, in the future, could be
targeted by bio-prospectors for valuable genetic
traits that may have long ago vanished in other
ethnic or racial groups.
Apart from the
four Negrito groups, the southern part of the
archipelago (Nicobar group) is home to tribes of
Mongoloid origin, like the reclusive Shompens,
numbering 300, and the more sophisticated
Nicobarese, who may have migrated from Indonesia's
Sumatra island nearby.
Most of the tribal
victims of the tsunami were Nicobarese and as many
as a quarter of their population of 20,000 people,
who are mostly coastal farmers and followers of
the Christian faith, may have perished when the
killer waves struck.
After the
tsunami, Indian authorities have refused
permission for international volunteer agencies
seeking to go beyond Port Blair to carry out
relief work on the grounds that they do not want
the aborigines to be disturbed in any way.
Besides the need to protect the
aborigines, the Andaman and Nicobar islands
bristle with defense installations and have since
2001 supported a joint-service command involving
elements of the army, navy, air force and coast
guard under a single commander.
(Inter
Press Service) |
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