https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sentinel_Island for anyone interested.

Well, I mean, technically, but it would absolutely be better if the NSI people could warn them off using similar mathematical and diagram-based signaling techniques as would be used for space aliens.

They've made it very clear. The guy in 2018 just wouldn't take a clear no for an answer.

Suicide by cop, instigated by life-after-death fiction.

Should the publishers be made responsible? How about mandatory warnings like on cigarette packs?

It’s because they aren’t cutting down all the trees there. They’ve found a way to just actually live off the land without destroying. Way more than a millennium, they’ve been doing it for 50,000 years. It’s no joke.

Yeah no wonder they kill anyone who tries to come

Good for them. Honestly.

That's not a life you would want to live though.

Try telling that to the Marshallese, Torres Strait, Tiwi and Elcho Islanders though.

They'll tell you it's all good apart from colonists, blackbirders, and atomic tests.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXkwDeaQS08

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vEntK3fwp8

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackbirding

https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/location/marshall-islands/

Implying that that the majority of the people living there somehow made a conscious and at least a marginally informed choice to live how they do is more than bizarre.

That's certainly true of both the UK and Germany (and many other countries) where the majority of the population found themselves Born, Never Asked [1].

Is there a reason you'd make such a banal generic point specific to the Torres Strait Island or Tiwi Islands?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0ltGjJ7_U8

Implying that because they live in worse material conditions they have worse mental health or lower levels of happiness is even more bizarre. Makes you think what aspects of life you’d want to optimize for.

It goes both ways, dude.

No it doesn’t. If fully informed basically nobody living in modern society would chose to adopt that lifestyle (even if they somehow magically acquired all the skills required to succeed there etc.). The opposite is certainly not true

Hunter gatherers are like you. They are bound to their identity and are incapable of imagining things any other way unless it is forced upon them. They prefer to stick with what they know.

I'm not telling that to a paleolithic or neolithic islander, I'm telling that to you, a Western dude used to cars and planes, (public) medicine that mostly works, a heated and cooled house, kitchen appliances, TimTams, lattes, running water and sanitation. And I stand by my words.

No, but it’s probably a pretty good life if that’s the only thing you know. They have a lot of sex on the beach (actually) and don’t look malnourished.

Ok, but what’s the child mortality rate? Maternal mortality rate? Average life span? Rate of death from infected wounds? Random diseases caused by inbreeding? We may not have direct data on many basic quality of life indicators but we can make educated guesses from lots of historical analogues.

But how happy are they?

What an utterly absurd question. You've clearly lost sight of what's important: The metrics.

Yeah the islanders might say they are happy but are they meeting or exceeding their OKRs?

More importantly, how much did their 401k grow last year?

It’s easy for a society to be “happy” (whatever that mean and however you measure that) when only fully healthy people get a chance to live and everyone else is dead.

Are more people individually less happy better than fewer people individually more happy? Do you just multiply the two together to decide which is morally better?

More importantly, do you factor in people died from otherwise treatable diseases as negative happiness, or neutral (as they no more have a brain to secrete serotonin)? Is death unhappiness? For the subject and his relatives? When death is commonplace is it still a source of unhappiness or accepted as a part of natural flow, with human life being regarded as less permanent and more ephemeral, with greater emphasis on the present moment and less on future plans and ambitions?

Death is commonplace everywhere. Everybody dies.

I actually don’t think that’s too relevant of a question. If there’s a high amount of suffering and cruelty, along with a mental philosophy that allows for happiness in spite of that (for the survivors), that still doesn’t make the suffering ok. To say otherwise is to take a step toward justifying slavery if the slaves are conditioned to be happy…

Sometimes the quantitative measures cannot comprehend the life satisfaction.

Tooth decay rate? Smoking and obesity related diseases?

Probably pretty bad. But they don’t know a “better” paradigm exists. They’ve probably found ways to deal with those things as a society and accept it as the natural course of things/god based destiny etc. The real question is how happy and content are they on a day to day basis.

These people have survived for 50,000 years (!) on a resource limited island and have managed to continue to have a martial arm and frivolous beach orgies. I would have to assume they’re pretty happy on a day to day basis.

Not just that. Absent birth control and constrained by their food base, they have to actually kill a lot of their own kids.

Reminds me of the parable chiding the fisherman relaxing at the beach to work hard, so he can later retire relaxing at the beach.

Yes, that is a good one.

Googled and found a few versions. Here is one:

https://thestorytellers.com/the-businessman-and-the-fisherma...

Also see who thestorytellers are a part of (at the top).

The “Easter Islanders cut down all their trees and collapsed society” as posited by Jared Diamond has long been disproven https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/rethinking-easter...

Your article says: "It’s therefore possible that it was the newcomers from Europe who contributed to the island’s societal collapse in the years to come."

Right, as usual, the evil Europeans were the cause of the collapse, and the fact that there were no trees left on the island for hundreds of years prior, and therefore no wood for building things, had absolutely nothing to do with the collapse. This modern rewriting of history according to modern sensitivities is incredible in a society that preaches to value reason and science rather than wishful thinking.

Diamond argued for a environment caused degradation + diverse factors of their society and thus indirectly attacked the west-"centric-diabolist meat pots.

These papers are a attempt to reconquer lost funding by the very same academics who happily ignore other cultures atrocities, be they in the past:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sultanate_of_Zanzibar

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-african-h...

Or in the present: https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/09/23/russia-partial-military...

Its extraordinary that such a blatantly racist (west centric diabolism) and ideological charged movement is still recognized as academia.

Like it or not, it's what current research - the science you appeal to -- appears to show. As stated here:

"...the researchers determined that the island experienced steady population growth from its initial settlement until European contact in 1722. After that date, two models show a possible population plateau, while another two models show possible decline."

and

"Current research shows that deforestation was prolonged and didn’t result in catastrophic erosion; the trees were ultimately replaced by gardens mulched with stone that increased agricultural productivity. During times of drought, the people may have relied on freshwater coastal seeps." [1]

"Evil Europeans" is your term in an attempt to make it seem as if the European culture is being attacked. There is no "modern rewriting of history according to modern sensitivities", it's rewriting of history taking into account new knowledge that Pacific peoples weren't stupid, had spread across the Pacific using navigation methods unknown to Europeans for thousands of years and recognising the effects of the introduction of outside cultures - disease, slavery and theft.

https://www.binghamton.edu/news/story/3155/resilience-not-co...

Sure, but we have a modern day example in Haiti. It’s also common sense in some regards.

Because they are incapable of producing any economic surplus and thus have no population growth whatsoever. The whole noble savages trope you seem to be be leaning to might sound quite romantic but they didn’t really make a conscious choice to live how they do.

> It’s no joke.

So is high infant mortality, low life expectancy due to a very high likelihood of dying from a trivially treatable diseases, living in abject poverty etc etc.

In much of the world, hunter-gatherers have needed to spend no more than two hours per day on practical activities, year-round. Temperate climates have been more demanding.

In the highlands of India, remaining time is often spent brewing and drinking alcohol, with the biggest problem being elephants finding and raiding the brew pots.

This doesn't mean it is a "success" in the context above. The population living there might have lost most of its previous technological abilities and stabilized in a permanent "collapsed" state. There is no reason that humans have to go extinct when they lose their cultural achievements, after all, other animals survive without having those in the first place.

Humans would only go extinct if they lived in an environment which required a certain minimum of cultural ability, e.g. making clothes in areas with a colder climate, as humans don't have sufficient fur.

This is a central theme in Vernor Vinge’s Deepness books. Space travel is slow (100s-1000s of years), so travellers are forced to calculate the likelihood that their destination will have experienced societal collapse by the time they arrive. The idea of a perpetually-sustained civilization is a failed dream. Technology helps societies bet larger and last longer, but also more dependent on the technology to sustain their growth.

In real life you could take a ship between two different distant lands and when you arrive it is ravaged by war started a couple of days ago

But the population size theory says this is increasingly unlikely the larger the population gets. Even Gran Canaria was large enough to avoid the loss of crops for a thousand years, unlike the populations on the smaller islands.

> Learning this makes North Sentinel island seem like a wild success story. It’s been continuously supporting a population with no outside help for at least a millennium.

IIRC, the closely-related Andamanese lost technology. Years ago I read something that said they did not use boats, but still occasionally constructed something like them (I'm thinking something like a dugout canoe) for purely ritual purposes.

Well, they did get a big supply of metal in 1981, and there might have been trading with other islands up to 150 years ago:

> Submerged in the crystal-clear waters off North Sentinel Island is a mysterious shipwreck with a truly hair-raising backstory.

> It belongs to The Primrose, a 16,000 ton freighter which ran aground in a storm while transporting a cargo of chicken feed from Bangladesh to Australia on August 2, 1981.

> [...]

> Footage of the tribespeople taken during "friendly" contact with a group of visiting Indian anthropologists in 1991 shows some members carrying metal tools for the first time.

> It is believed the tools were forged from metal scavenged from The Primrose, which remains in its resting place atop a coral reef near the island.

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/hair-raising-story-behind-m...

> Gonschor argues that, rather than being isolated, the Sentinelese visited other Andamanese peoples. Their isolation wasn’t ancient, he thinks, but the product of British and Japanese colonialism, and in particular, the British invasion of the island in 1880.

> We can use Lana Lopesi’s new book False Divides to understand what the North Sentinelese have suffered. Lopesi laments the way that, in the Pacific as well as the Indian Oceans, colonisation interrupted histories of inter-island voyaging, trade and marriage.

https://thespinoff.co.nz/society/04-12-2018/three-myths-abou...