Fact or fiction

If there is one thing that gets me going, it's newspaper articles that are poorly researched. Take, for example, an article from the Good Weekend about a tribe called the Sentinelese who live on North Sentinel Island. It's an article that was first published in the London Observer under the title Survival comes first for the last Stone Age tribe world".
The last paragraph in the Good Weekend edition reads

"When the tsunami struck in 2004, the Sentinelese knew the evil spirits were up to no good. Minutes before the waves struck, tribal leaders scattered pig and turtle skulls around their settlement and hurled stones toward the ocean before gathering their baskets, bows and arrows and amulets of ancestral bones for protection.

They all survived - for how long, though, it is hard to say."


I found this hard to believe mainly because the whole article was about how isolated this tribe was and how little contact they had had with the outside world. The first question to arise was, how did the reporter know that this scenario in fact happened? I decided to check the facts.

Firstly let's look at the first contact after the tsunami struck. Two days after the tsunami, the Indian Coast Guard decided to check the damage caused to the island. The helicopter pilot saw and took pictures of a lone man firing one arrow at the helicopter. This fact turns into a group of tribesmen firing a shower of arrows. Sounds so much better then just one guy. This "fact" is now used in subsequent stories.

The paragraph states that all of the islanders survived. I'm sorry, but the author cannot definitely know this to be true. Why? Firstly, no one outside the island knew before the tsunami what the population was. The Indian government made an educated guess but that's all it was, a guess. Other guesses put the population between 50 - 250 inhabitants. After the tsunami, no outsider was able to count the population. So to say with certainty that they all survived is just fiction.

As to the story of turtle and pig skulls being scattered around by the Sentinelese, this again is just made up. No one has successfully interviewed an islander since the tsunami struck (highly impropable since no one knows how to speak the language) so it is impossible to know what they did. So where do they get this story from? It is known that that Onge tribe from another island of the Andamans do scatter these objests about during ceremonies. Onge/Sentinelese, what's the difference? Anyway, it makes for a better story. Why let the facts get in the way.