Andamanese

The Andamanese are the Negrito hunter-gatherers of the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal, comprising the Great Andamanese, Jarawa, Onge and Sentinelese, each speaking mutually unintelligible languages. They settled the islands at the end of the last ice age, more than twenty thousand years ago, and lived in near-total isolation, meeting outsiders with arrows.

The Chola king Rajendra I seized the chain as a naval base against Srivijaya, and an inscription of 1050 names it Ma-Nakkavaram. Marco Polo's travels of 1294 repeated sailors' tales of dog-headed cannibals, so in 1337 the Andamanese remained known to outsiders only through rumour.

Their seclusion ended in 1789, when the Bengal Presidency built a penal settlement at Port Blair. Disease ravaged the islanders, the post was abandoned in 1796, and in 1824 its harbour served a British fleet in the First Anglo-Burmese War.