Birds can drop fish after they've captured them. Not longer than a year now, we were visiting my wife's family, and me and my father in law got to Walmart there was a dead fish in the front, but when we mentioned it to my wife who got there before us (separate cars) she said it was struggling for life when they saw it, I don't think there was a lake nearby enough, but I wouldn't be surprised if birds have accidentally introduced life into new bodies of water.
More likely is that birds move fish between bodies of water because of fish eggs they carry on their bodies. This is how most bodies of water become supremely populated in Texas. In Texas all ground water sources, other than 1 lake on the far east side, are created by people in recent decades and almost all of these bodies are full of fish that did not get there on their own.
Yeah, but at least two live fish (a male and female) being dropped into the same remote lake, then finding each other at spawning time seems increasing implausible. Never say never, but ...
Apparently some fish species do have small sticky eggs that can stick to the legs of water fowl, or even (with very small probability) pass through them intact, so this seems much more likely. Maybe a group of ducks feeding in one place then flying off to another?
Close, I looked it up out of curiosity, it seems Waterfowl eat the eggs, but they travel through their digestive system fully alive. Really interesting even so!
I’ve wondered if natural phenomena like tornadoes could carry fish eggs those kinds of distances. Or even just carry the eggs into the clouds, to be rained down large distances away.
In this case they have carbon dated wooden equipment for fish farming and know due to geological factors when the lake could support fish, though of course the fish might have gotten there first somehow. I thought this was interesting because it predates agriculture in the same area.
Artifacts that survive this long are usually found in a buried context, which can, under favorable conditions, preserve them for long periods of time.
The artifact can be buried by colluvial(gravity driven), or alluvial(water driven) deposition before they have a chance to decay. For more information you can consult a geomorphologist, which I am not.
Intact human bodies thousands of years old have been found in Irish bogs - cold, anoxic, acidic. Apparently in this case cold and anoxic were part of it, and also pine resin in the wood acting as a perservative.
Humans were shaping their environments to produce food long before they plowed fields. Hunter-gatherers didn't just hunt and gather willy-nilly, picking up whatever they found, oblivious to how it got there.
Yeah, you have to consider that when you're living in nature you actually need to identify the plants that are edible so you can't actually just eat everything you find even if you could eat it in theory.
So if you wanted to gather plant food how do you make sure that the food you find is edible?
It's quite simple. If you know a plant is edible you take the seeds and you carry them with you and broadcast them all over the place.
The interesting part about this is that this is also a form of selective breeding, since you're choosing the edible plants over the inedible plants.
Note that you do not tend to the plants or do any form of agriculture, you're still foraging from random plants you encounter.
But I always thought the explanation was eggs randomly getting stuck to bird feet. Or maybe a bird carries a fish with eggs up there and eats it or something. Inevitably it happens though...
Lakes have connected rivers and streams that provide paths for fish and eggs to move around. There are human and animal activities that affect this. Your bird example and beavers causing floods could allow movement.
A lot of people are unaware of how much husbandry hunter-gatherers still did. They may not have been farmers, with field plantings, weeding, and harvest seasons designed to maximize every acre under production, but they weren't stupid and still spent time to bend the world around them to the task of providing them more resources than it would have on its own. On a bang-for-the-buck basis they often did better than the farmers, it's just that without farming you can't get that density and net return.
Many ponds have seasonal streams. In spring (when the snow melts) they get connected to the local river system by a shallow stream, then when the water levels go down the stream disappears but the pond remains. Also beavers may flood a large area, then move on leaving a formerly connected pond isolated again.
There’s a stream in my back yard that doesn’t hold fish over the winter because it’s too shallow/cold. A large property near me has a pond that overflows into my stream. The fish survive in the deeper waters of the pond and spring rain usually washes fish eggs or even fish into my stream. They gather in the rocks in my backyard near the storm drain.
Alpine lakes are fed by snow met. There’s not going to be fish eggs on the snowpack that melts into the lake.
> There’s fish eggs being washed everywhere during rain storms. The eggs come from upstream and wash into random places.
Do you realize that in the summer mountains below 4000m are mostly snow-free and thawing point ie in Europe has been pushed above 5000m repeatedly during summers. Its easy to have 25C in 2500m in today's alps (ie today 22C in 2000m in Chamonix, France).
The term 'alpine lake' doesn't mean anything specific, and most are fed from rain during entire summer without any/much of snow or ice contribution.
Apparently if you introduce a large fish species to your pond, the bullfrogs will not eat them, not sure how you would secure the eggs though. Maybe some sort of area that could shelter from them, but once they come out of shelter when they hatch, its kind of the same problem.
Could also introduce fish that will eat the frogs to keep them under control. Or just leave it all as-is.
Before we developed a taste for fish, marine life was far more abundant, particularly in rivers. There are rivers that we consider to be in good health today that have a fraction of the original species. For example, the Thames in London was once full of eels, nowadays an eel in the Thames poses a mystery as to 'how it got there'.
By full, that means not being able to see the bottom of the river due to the amount of eels present.
We ate them all.
The eels made it all the way to the Sargasso Sea and back, for breeding purposes. Clearly they would not be able to get from the sea to a fully landlocked lake, with no route to the sea.
However, my point is that we had so much marine life before we cleared out the rivers, to then need the sea, to go from coastal waters to the depths of the Antarctic ocean in the quest for any fish that have survived previous quests. It is just hard for us to imagine the abundance there once was, and, therefore, the relative ease to populate an isolated alpine meadow lake with fish in former times.
Somewhat related, after desert rains you can often see fairy shrimp (think sea monkeys you might have had as a kid) swimming around in the isolated pools that form. I looked this up after wondering how the heck these water creatures could survive dozens of miles from the nearest permanent water source.
The answer is that their eggs are extremely lightweight, so much so that wind can carry them long distances. Their entire life cycle is extremely accelerated. Once water soaks the eggs the critters can hatch, develop, and lay new eggs in a matter of days. The newly laid eggs have a tiny chance of reaching a new seasonal pool area.
hmmm, I have seen big fish in much bigger birds claws, and have seen even bigger birds dive bombing other birds to force them to drop there fish
plus a bird can get a fish over ANY lake in
minuits, vs an all day random fish carrying hike?
so to recap, I have seen many birds with fish, but zero human fish hikers
To be fair, Gemini says there are no presumed cases of specifically brown trout populating an isolated water body by means other than human stocking. For other types of fish, maybe (eggs stick to bird legs, or one gets pooped out intact), but for brown trout, no! The eggs only survive in cold water, not inside a bird, are relatively large and non-sticky.
To survive a long schlepp up a mountain in a waterskin, it would presumably have been fertilized eggs that were transported (can be found in river gravel) since they have low oxygen needs. According to Gemini even baby fish might only survive a couple of hours, but eggs (if kept in cold water) could survive days or weeks, and obviously would be more practical to transport a sufficient number to have a decent chance of establishing a breeding colony.
Interesting stuff, but maybe better considered as reconstructive history than science.
I thought bird poop was the commonly accepted explanation
7000 years ago is the edge of recorded human civilization
(well 8000 years, I remember this because it's also the edge of a gamma ray burst in light years that could destroy all life on earth after traveling all that time)
If writing is your yardstick then 7000 years is way too far back. There was likely proto-writing back then (some of the figures at gobekli tepe are found in a very similar form in later scripts of the area[1], there are clearer forms of proto-writings from CA 6000~7000 BCE in various cultures) however writing proper is only currently known from 3000 BCE onwards.
> The concept of a cradle of civilization has a focus where the inhabitants came to build cities, to create writing systems, to experiment in techniques for making pottery and using metals, to domesticate animals, and to develop complex social structures involving class systems
> Today, scholarship generally identifies six areas where civilization emerged independently: the Fertile Crescent, including Mesopotamia and the Levant; the Nile Valley in Northeast Africa; the Indo-Gangetic Plain; the North China Plain; the Andean Coast; and the Mesoamerican Gulf Coast
Civilization refers to cities, not literature. Urban societies need writing and complex social rules to survive, but it's not as if those things can't or haven't arisen in other types of human societies.
Yes. One thing that becomes very obvious if you go along "native" human villages in Africa is the reason civilization develops. When you look at villages that don't grow, but do the normal human thing. Grow, war (2 kinds: young vs old and village/tribe vs village/tribe), grow.
It's not because of agriculture. They have agriculture (they grow maniok, and you don't need much. They have fire, weapons, ... Also the entire countryside is full of grain). It's not that they don't understand how things work. They just don't care.
It's not because they're dumb. In fact on pretty much all measures the humans living in those villages are better, in a genetic sense, than we are. They're smarter. They're more beautiful. Every last one is in shape, even the oldest (the oldest, btw, are maybe 45, not that they even know themselves. In both villages I saw the oldest was a couple). They're even better, genetically, than the black people living in cities around them. They have no sick (maybe 1), because the sick are dead. Even sick children regularly die. They bury their dead, with respect, after a burial but to say they have a religion is overstating matters. They have noone that can't run a marathon, or is fat, or ... because if you can't hunt you don't eat. Wounds are deadly. Not because the wound is so serious, but because you're nearly guaranteed to develop fever and die. Most people die from complications with infections. They have only beautiful men and women, because if you can't participate in "evening activities" you'll go hungry or get murdered (and it's not just men: women have lovers kill other men due to "insults", or they poison someone. And regularly it doesn't take much incentive at all for a murder to happen). Sometimes they (try to) treat cities the way the treat neighboring tribes: they attack them to kill everyone (at the very least all men). That usually fails due to guns, but it's not like it never works.
There are very few people in those villages that want to leave. And they're not about to starve. There's no need for civilization, and, frankly, they don't want to. But also, I don't care what religion or non-religion you have: you will find that way of live thoroughly immoral.
Great point until the end. None of your descriptions imply a lack of morality for living isolated from a greater civilization. If anything, such small societies inhabit a neutral position, in that they don't care, which is something you already stated.
I think the only people arguing that the North Sentinelese are immoral are religious, for instance (hence why most attempts to visit are done by missions). The general consensus is otherwise awe for being separated from the rest of us, relatively unmolested.
Because you believe you are proclaiming the truth and have a duty to do so. That does not mean you think they are immoral. Its just an extreme version of things such as the Christian duty to spread the word. Christianity has always had the concept of virtuous non-believers.
They don't care and "respond strongly" to insults or territorial disputes (which involve both actual land, men, women, and children), to the point that sometimes dozens of people die in the resulting fight. They kill because of insults (which mostly involves sex). Oh and they do quite a bit for alcohol. They'll fuck visitors, just to see if their next kid is white (but, of course, if you go along with that you lose whatever protection that "outsider who maybe brings alcohol" gave you. And you're sure to lose almost any fight). Also: don't make the mistake of still visibly having any alcohol when leaving the village.
Certainly it would be accurate to say that both the cities in the neighborhood and the central government have issues with this sort of thing. To say nothing of when cities get attacked.
Sounds like you need alcohol, and also a pistol, with a few full magazines. Just in case. Try not to let the women see it, if you have occasion to remove your clothes.
> That is the only possible explanation for how fish could have populated isolated mountain lakes
isn't that a common question?
"How do fish appear in landlocked lakes/ponds/etc"?
After digging a pond and letting it fill with rainwater/groundwater, fish appear. I don't think its because people carried them there.
(don't really know the common answer though)
Birds can drop fish after they've captured them. Not longer than a year now, we were visiting my wife's family, and me and my father in law got to Walmart there was a dead fish in the front, but when we mentioned it to my wife who got there before us (separate cars) she said it was struggling for life when they saw it, I don't think there was a lake nearby enough, but I wouldn't be surprised if birds have accidentally introduced life into new bodies of water.
More likely is that birds move fish between bodies of water because of fish eggs they carry on their bodies. This is how most bodies of water become supremely populated in Texas. In Texas all ground water sources, other than 1 lake on the far east side, are created by people in recent decades and almost all of these bodies are full of fish that did not get there on their own.
Yeah, but at least two live fish (a male and female) being dropped into the same remote lake, then finding each other at spawning time seems increasing implausible. Never say never, but ...
Apparently some fish species do have small sticky eggs that can stick to the legs of water fowl, or even (with very small probability) pass through them intact, so this seems much more likely. Maybe a group of ducks feeding in one place then flying off to another?
Life, uh, finds a way
Fish eggs often travel long distances by sticking to the feathers or legs of waterfowl I have been told at school long ago.
Close, I looked it up out of curiosity, it seems Waterfowl eat the eggs, but they travel through their digestive system fully alive. Really interesting even so!
I can see how the evolutionary advantage of such hardened eggs would be huge!
I would think that would lead to a lot of inbred fish
If it happened just once, yes.
a high rate of mutations would be an advantage in a new environment, though.
Right, as long as you can still get out.
I’ve wondered if natural phenomena like tornadoes could carry fish eggs those kinds of distances. Or even just carry the eggs into the clouds, to be rained down large distances away.
In this case they have carbon dated wooden equipment for fish farming and know due to geological factors when the lake could support fish, though of course the fish might have gotten there first somehow. I thought this was interesting because it predates agriculture in the same area.
How did wooden equipment not whither away in 7000 years?
Artifacts that survive this long are usually found in a buried context, which can, under favorable conditions, preserve them for long periods of time.
The artifact can be buried by colluvial(gravity driven), or alluvial(water driven) deposition before they have a chance to decay. For more information you can consult a geomorphologist, which I am not.
Intact human bodies thousands of years old have been found in Irish bogs - cold, anoxic, acidic. Apparently in this case cold and anoxic were part of it, and also pine resin in the wood acting as a perservative.
I have the same question - My guess is at that altitude, temperature, and under an ice sheet, and silt until the lake was drained. Here's the paper: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/in...
Likely isolated from oxygen in deep water or sediment
Humans were shaping their environments to produce food long before they plowed fields. Hunter-gatherers didn't just hunt and gather willy-nilly, picking up whatever they found, oblivious to how it got there.
Yeah, you have to consider that when you're living in nature you actually need to identify the plants that are edible so you can't actually just eat everything you find even if you could eat it in theory.
So if you wanted to gather plant food how do you make sure that the food you find is edible?
It's quite simple. If you know a plant is edible you take the seeds and you carry them with you and broadcast them all over the place.
The interesting part about this is that this is also a form of selective breeding, since you're choosing the edible plants over the inedible plants.
Note that you do not tend to the plants or do any form of agriculture, you're still foraging from random plants you encounter.
Mountain lakes are completely different.
There’s fish eggs being washed everywhere during rain storms. The eggs come from upstream and wash into random places.
This doesn't provide an answer for lakes.
But I always thought the explanation was eggs randomly getting stuck to bird feet. Or maybe a bird carries a fish with eggs up there and eats it or something. Inevitably it happens though...
Lakes have connected rivers and streams that provide paths for fish and eggs to move around. There are human and animal activities that affect this. Your bird example and beavers causing floods could allow movement.
Isolated alpine lakes do not have connected rivers and streams, yet a ton are stocked with fish by humans.
Is it unbelievable that ancient hunter-gatherers would do the same thing?
A lot of people are unaware of how much husbandry hunter-gatherers still did. They may not have been farmers, with field plantings, weeding, and harvest seasons designed to maximize every acre under production, but they weren't stupid and still spent time to bend the world around them to the task of providing them more resources than it would have on its own. On a bang-for-the-buck basis they often did better than the farmers, it's just that without farming you can't get that density and net return.
This looks like a good overview paper for interested folk: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3048989/
We are on the same side. I’ve been trying to show the difference between natural water processes and some else like birds or humans spreading fish.
So many lakes do not have rivers flowing in and out. A low spot in an area will become a lake.
Many do have rivers; many don't. Ponds even more so don't have attached rivers.
Many ponds have seasonal streams. In spring (when the snow melts) they get connected to the local river system by a shallow stream, then when the water levels go down the stream disappears but the pond remains. Also beavers may flood a large area, then move on leaving a formerly connected pond isolated again.
"Life finds a way"
- Dr. Ian Malcolm
How did they appear upstream?
There’s a stream in my back yard that doesn’t hold fish over the winter because it’s too shallow/cold. A large property near me has a pond that overflows into my stream. The fish survive in the deeper waters of the pond and spring rain usually washes fish eggs or even fish into my stream. They gather in the rocks in my backyard near the storm drain.
Alpine lakes are fed by snow met. There’s not going to be fish eggs on the snowpack that melts into the lake.
You yourself wrote in this thread:
> There’s fish eggs being washed everywhere during rain storms. The eggs come from upstream and wash into random places.
Do you realize that in the summer mountains below 4000m are mostly snow-free and thawing point ie in Europe has been pushed above 5000m repeatedly during summers. Its easy to have 25C in 2500m in today's alps (ie today 22C in 2000m in Chamonix, France).
The term 'alpine lake' doesn't mean anything specific, and most are fed from rain during entire summer without any/much of snow or ice contribution.
A tornado?
In California, it's because people (the state department of fish and wildlife) put the fish there.
You can even see their scheduled fish plantings online:
https://nrm.dfg.ca.gov/FishPlants/PublicPlantSearch
https://theonion.com/wildlife-officials-restock-lake-by-drop...
I've had a pond for 11 years that has not acquired fish. It existed before that, too, but I'm not sure for how long (I think several decades).
It has lots of amphibians and snakes. Rarely any birds.
Maybe the snakes have been eating the fish eggs / baby fish?
The bullfrogs are the big carnivores, and sure, maybe.
Snakes are active but I doubt they eat nearly as much as the bullfrogs.
Apparently if you introduce a large fish species to your pond, the bullfrogs will not eat them, not sure how you would secure the eggs though. Maybe some sort of area that could shelter from them, but once they come out of shelter when they hatch, its kind of the same problem.
Could also introduce fish that will eat the frogs to keep them under control. Or just leave it all as-is.
Before we developed a taste for fish, marine life was far more abundant, particularly in rivers. There are rivers that we consider to be in good health today that have a fraction of the original species. For example, the Thames in London was once full of eels, nowadays an eel in the Thames poses a mystery as to 'how it got there'.
By full, that means not being able to see the bottom of the river due to the amount of eels present.
We ate them all.
The eels made it all the way to the Sargasso Sea and back, for breeding purposes. Clearly they would not be able to get from the sea to a fully landlocked lake, with no route to the sea.
However, my point is that we had so much marine life before we cleared out the rivers, to then need the sea, to go from coastal waters to the depths of the Antarctic ocean in the quest for any fish that have survived previous quests. It is just hard for us to imagine the abundance there once was, and, therefore, the relative ease to populate an isolated alpine meadow lake with fish in former times.
It's not the only possible explanation. Fish can get sucked up by tornatos and get dropped later.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain_of_animals
> Tornadoes and waterspouts may lift up animals into the air and deposit them miles away.
Somewhat related, after desert rains you can often see fairy shrimp (think sea monkeys you might have had as a kid) swimming around in the isolated pools that form. I looked this up after wondering how the heck these water creatures could survive dozens of miles from the nearest permanent water source.
The answer is that their eggs are extremely lightweight, so much so that wind can carry them long distances. Their entire life cycle is extremely accelerated. Once water soaks the eggs the critters can hatch, develop, and lay new eggs in a matter of days. The newly laid eggs have a tiny chance of reaching a new seasonal pool area.
https://archive.is/ZuKV6
Thank you!
"Someone brought the black bass to this lake from far away, changing the biological distribution of the lake."
https://youtube.com/watch?v=5w35n0Hm_m0
An alternative vector: "cloud seeding" (https://www.theguardian.com/science/2004/sep/09/science.rese...)
Charles Fort collected numerous data for his famous "The Book of the Damned" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_the_Damned
It rained fish in my front yard in South Carolina back in the 80's, it's definitely a real phenomenon.
I wouldn't be so sure. Were there ever any ducks?
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/special-delivery-d...
hmmm, I have seen big fish in much bigger birds claws, and have seen even bigger birds dive bombing other birds to force them to drop there fish plus a bird can get a fish over ANY lake in minuits, vs an all day random fish carrying hike? so to recap, I have seen many birds with fish, but zero human fish hikers
Someone below mentions bird poop, but could a fish egg survive the human (or a dogs) digestive system as well?
> That is the only possible explanation for how fish could have populated isolated mountain lakes
I hate how much of historical science is performed this way. Speculation is not very scientific.
Unfortunately the full article that they are reporting on is paywalled.
https://www.khm.uio.no/english/about/organisation/archaeolog...
To be fair, Gemini says there are no presumed cases of specifically brown trout populating an isolated water body by means other than human stocking. For other types of fish, maybe (eggs stick to bird legs, or one gets pooped out intact), but for brown trout, no! The eggs only survive in cold water, not inside a bird, are relatively large and non-sticky.
To survive a long schlepp up a mountain in a waterskin, it would presumably have been fertilized eggs that were transported (can be found in river gravel) since they have low oxygen needs. According to Gemini even baby fish might only survive a couple of hours, but eggs (if kept in cold water) could survive days or weeks, and obviously would be more practical to transport a sufficient number to have a decent chance of establishing a breeding colony.
Interesting stuff, but maybe better considered as reconstructive history than science.
I thought bird poop was the commonly accepted explanation
7000 years ago is the edge of recorded human civilization
(well 8000 years, I remember this because it's also the edge of a gamma ray burst in light years that could destroy all life on earth after traveling all that time)
> 7000 years ago is the edge of recorded human civilization (well 8000 years
The earliest pre-pottery Neolithic complexes are nearly 4000 years older than that.
Did they have writing and kept records that we've found? That's the "recorded" part.
If writing is your yardstick then 7000 years is way too far back. There was likely proto-writing back then (some of the figures at gobekli tepe are found in a very similar form in later scripts of the area[1], there are clearer forms of proto-writings from CA 6000~7000 BCE in various cultures) however writing proper is only currently known from 3000 BCE onwards.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/330759548_World's_F...
some disagreement emerges from the fact that there are several "cradles" of civilization, not just one where everything spread from
so they each have different timelines/landmarks
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cradle_of_civilization
> The concept of a cradle of civilization has a focus where the inhabitants came to build cities, to create writing systems, to experiment in techniques for making pottery and using metals, to domesticate animals, and to develop complex social structures involving class systems
> Today, scholarship generally identifies six areas where civilization emerged independently: the Fertile Crescent, including Mesopotamia and the Levant; the Nile Valley in Northeast Africa; the Indo-Gangetic Plain; the North China Plain; the Andean Coast; and the Mesoamerican Gulf Coast
In Norway, the oldest written records are barely 1000 years old.
It doesn't matter if it's recorded. This is inferred, not written down.
Hunter-gatherers aren't known for their civilizations.
Civilization refers to cities, not literature. Urban societies need writing and complex social rules to survive, but it's not as if those things can't or haven't arisen in other types of human societies.
Yes. One thing that becomes very obvious if you go along "native" human villages in Africa is the reason civilization develops. When you look at villages that don't grow, but do the normal human thing. Grow, war (2 kinds: young vs old and village/tribe vs village/tribe), grow.
It's not because of agriculture. They have agriculture (they grow maniok, and you don't need much. They have fire, weapons, ... Also the entire countryside is full of grain). It's not that they don't understand how things work. They just don't care.
It's not because they're dumb. In fact on pretty much all measures the humans living in those villages are better, in a genetic sense, than we are. They're smarter. They're more beautiful. Every last one is in shape, even the oldest (the oldest, btw, are maybe 45, not that they even know themselves. In both villages I saw the oldest was a couple). They're even better, genetically, than the black people living in cities around them. They have no sick (maybe 1), because the sick are dead. Even sick children regularly die. They bury their dead, with respect, after a burial but to say they have a religion is overstating matters. They have noone that can't run a marathon, or is fat, or ... because if you can't hunt you don't eat. Wounds are deadly. Not because the wound is so serious, but because you're nearly guaranteed to develop fever and die. Most people die from complications with infections. They have only beautiful men and women, because if you can't participate in "evening activities" you'll go hungry or get murdered (and it's not just men: women have lovers kill other men due to "insults", or they poison someone. And regularly it doesn't take much incentive at all for a murder to happen). Sometimes they (try to) treat cities the way the treat neighboring tribes: they attack them to kill everyone (at the very least all men). That usually fails due to guns, but it's not like it never works.
There are very few people in those villages that want to leave. And they're not about to starve. There's no need for civilization, and, frankly, they don't want to. But also, I don't care what religion or non-religion you have: you will find that way of live thoroughly immoral.
Great point until the end. None of your descriptions imply a lack of morality for living isolated from a greater civilization. If anything, such small societies inhabit a neutral position, in that they don't care, which is something you already stated.
I think the only people arguing that the North Sentinelese are immoral are religious, for instance (hence why most attempts to visit are done by missions). The general consensus is otherwise awe for being separated from the rest of us, relatively unmolested.
Well, they sure are xenophobic.
I do not think anyone is arguing the Sentinelese are immoral?
Why would you bring a mission to a hostile island otherwise?
Because you believe you are proclaiming the truth and have a duty to do so. That does not mean you think they are immoral. Its just an extreme version of things such as the Christian duty to spread the word. Christianity has always had the concept of virtuous non-believers.
Because you think god is immoral, and you want them to meet his mercy?
Do we know anything about their morals, aside from that they kill immigrants at sight?
Given how other Andaman islanders have been treated by outsiders hostility towards people who come there uninvited is understandable.
People going to their island are not "immigrants" - no intention of remaining.
They don't care and "respond strongly" to insults or territorial disputes (which involve both actual land, men, women, and children), to the point that sometimes dozens of people die in the resulting fight. They kill because of insults (which mostly involves sex). Oh and they do quite a bit for alcohol. They'll fuck visitors, just to see if their next kid is white (but, of course, if you go along with that you lose whatever protection that "outsider who maybe brings alcohol" gave you. And you're sure to lose almost any fight). Also: don't make the mistake of still visibly having any alcohol when leaving the village.
Certainly it would be accurate to say that both the cities in the neighborhood and the central government have issues with this sort of thing. To say nothing of when cities get attacked.
Sounds like you need alcohol, and also a pistol, with a few full magazines. Just in case. Try not to let the women see it, if you have occasion to remove your clothes.
It's not obvious at all from your comment.
The answer is that they don't have a shared enemy in the form of an inhospitable environment like winter or the Egyptian desert.