ISBN: | 978-5-5107-2134-8 |
High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The Andamanese people are the various aboriginal inhabitants of the Andaman Islands, which is the northern district of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands union territory of India, located in the southeastern part of the Bay of Bengal. They include the Great Andamanese, Jarawa, Onge, Sentinelese, and the extinct Jangil. Anthropologically, they are usually classified as Negritos (sometimes also called Proto-Australoids), represented also by the Semang of Malaysia and the Aeta of the Philippines. Their ancestors are thought to have arrived in the islands 60,000 years ago from coastal India (or crossed over a land bridge from Burma during a glacial period) as part of the first human peopling of India and Southeast Asia, in the initial Great Coastal Migration on what is now the Continental shelf of the northern Indian Ocean that was the first expansion of humanity out of Africa that began 60,000 years ago. With very little contact with external societies or each other for nearly all this period the tribes have mutually unintelligible languages. This comparatively long-lasting isolation and separation from external influences is unequaled, except perhaps by the aboriginal inhabitants of Tasmania.