Extinct: last of the Great Andaman tribe dies
Boa Sr, the last speaker of ‘Bo’, one of the ten Great Andamanese languages, died last week, according to an indigenous rights group. She was 85. Her death marks the extinction of the Bo, a group thought to have lived on the Andaman Islands for as long as 65,000 years, “making them the descendants of one of the oldest human cultures on Earth,” according to Survival International. The tribe was decimated when the British colonized the Andaman Islands in 1858. The Bo died at the hands of British soldiers and of introduced disease. … “The Great Andamanese were first massacred, then all but wiped out by paternalistic policies which left them ravaged by epidemics of disease, and robbed of their land and independence,” he said in a statement. “With the death of Boa Sr and the extinction of the Bo language, a unique part of human society is now just a memory. …”
