1. gnxp
  2. Say "bye bye" to the Stone Age

Say "bye bye" to the Stone Age

By razib on July 12, 2006.

A few months ago I posted on a conundrum that faces liberal moderns when it comes to engaging "traditional" peoples. The short of it is that the typical Eurasian pathogen load is deadly over the life history of individuals from many smaller isolated populations. I posted after reading Land of the Naked People, an attempt by an Indian science journalist to assay the situation on the ground in the Andaman Inslands. Now, John Hawks points to an article in Science which moots many of the issues I brought up.

Fundamentally a liberal order assumes equality before the law, but, as realists who know there is human variation we generally take this as an idealization. Nevertheless, we assume that within reasonable bounds blindness before the law can work because we share powerful commonalities as human beings. But contact with other human beings might be fatal from some humans, and as a whole the Andanman Island population seems very vulnerable. Should we care? Should we treat them like ethnic Bubble Boys?

Tags
genetics

More like this

I say "race" and you say "population substructure"
John responds to the "race" response from Matt & I. I'm not interested in making a point-by-point response to the response because I don't think the "objective" difference in opinion is that great, rather, it seems to be that we are clashing in the turbulent waters of nominalism. First, I…
Why "primitive" people won't stay primitive long....
...because they die!!!!. I got to thinking about this when I saw this article titled Leaving the Wild, and Rather Liking the Change, about the emergence of an isolated tribal population into the Columbian mainstream. This caught my eye: Though it is unclear how big the Nukak population once was…
Hutterites are like Icelanders
The Spittoon points to a new paper, Drawing the history of the Hutterite population on a genetic landscape: inference from Y-chromosome and mtDNA genotypes, which I've been meaning to look at more closely. Unlike some attempts to use genetics to illuminate questions about the human past here the…
Civilization makes you short: the Andaman Islanders
A few days ago I pointed to a paper, Stature, Mortality, and Life History among Indigenous Populations of the Andaman Islands, 1871-1986. It looks at the specific case of the Andaman Islanders to explore the general phenomenon of "pygmy" populations, especially among "Negritos." The Andaman…

Yes, the rest of the human race should definitely stay away from North Sentinel Island, the last "uncontacted" Andamanese. The Jarawa tribe first came into regular contact with Indians in the late 1990s and there population has dropped significantly already from diseases. The Sentinelese don't want to be contacted -- they killed two drunken Indian fishermen who washed up on their shore just a few months ago -- so let's leave them alone.

To read more about them, here's my interview with George Weber, founder of the Andaman Society:

http://www.isteve.com/Andamanese.htm

Steve,

That's why I wonder if the Sentinelese may harbor Neanderthal genes, as they are possibly the most isolated community on earth??

Of course to check this theory out, might destroy them.

That's why I wonder if the Sentinelese may harbor Neanderthal genes, as they are possibly the most isolated community on earth??

well, if they took the southern route that is unlikely. though i am not totally convinced that they have been isolated for "30,000 years." looking at a uniparental lineage can confuse when you go back tens of thousands of years.