Reply #9: similar tribes exist in India's Andaman islands... [View All]

[varun]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4314267.stm

After decades of efforts to bring the tiny population of what some anthropologists call "Stone Age aboriginals" into the mainstream, the administration in India's Andaman and Nicobar Islands has finally decided to leave them alone.
"It will now be our avowed policy to minimise unnecessary and inappropriate contact between the primitive tribes and settlers ," says Uddipta Ray, tribal welfare secretary in the government....

..."The less contact we have with them, the better is their chance for survival," says Dr Ratan Chandra Kar, whose services in saving the Jarawa tribe from a measles epidemic in 1998-99 have been highly acclaimed by the authorities.

"Every time a primitive tribe has developed much contact with the settlers, they have been hit by epidemics."