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Long-Held Beliefs About Skull Islanders in King Kong Movies are Actually Wrong (Part II)
Continued considerations on the very real science beneath Skull Island’s science fiction.
Mirrored in the film Gow and travel tome The Sea Gypsy are detailed views of the almost otherworldly locales visited by Salisbury and Cooper. One of the earliest referenced of these is the little-known Andaman Islands, a small chain of islands south of Sri Lanka and west of Myanmar (formerly Burma). And it’s there in the Andamans that one of the three living populations that informed the image of the Skull Islanders can be found.
Estimates suggest that the first humans to reach the Andaman Islands did so as many as 60,000 years ago…or as few as 2,000 years ago.
Clearly, the math on that estimate still needs to be recalculated a tad, but whenever it was that humans definitively began to populate the Andamans, what is certain is that from that time until fairly recently, the Andaman Islanders lived in near total isolation from the rest of the world.
Of those tribal groups that formerly lived there when the Andamans were first documented by the West, only four remain today. One of them is now fiercely hostile towards foreigners and with very good reason.
In the late 19th century, after Britain claimed the Andamans during its colonization of India, there were actually eleven different tribes. But contact with the outside world left them exposed to vices — smoking and drinking among them — and diseases for which they had no natural immunity.
Within a century, the majority of the ancient tribes that lived across the islands of the Andamans were silently ushered into extinction.
The four remaining tribes in the Andaman Islands today are the justifiably hostile Sentinalese, the Onge, the Jararwa, and the Great Andamanese, whose numbers now are severely diminished. Of the four just named, it was also the Great Andamanese that had perhaps the most significant (albeit unknown) influence on the development of the islanders…
