SOME of the last remaining Palaeolithic tribes appeared last night to have survived the Asian earthquake, easing fears that they had been washed away by the raging tsunamis.

Officials in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands claimed that all five of the archipelago’s primitive tribes had been accounted for, some by moving up to high ground.

“The great Andamanese tribes are all OK,” Lieutenant-Governor Ram Kapse said. “There are no casualties.”

There are believed to be fewer than 1,000 tribesmen living in the islands’ lush forests and coral-fringed beaches, including the 100-member Onge, 250 hostile Sentinelese, 48 of the almost extinct Great Andamanese, 350 Jarawa and 250 hunter-gatherer Shompen.

Indian Coast Guard vessels landed supplies for some of the aboriginal groups on beaches hit by the tsunamis, while helicopters reported sightings of other groups spared the worst of the onslaught.

Late yesterday, three naval patrol boats were still searching Campbell Bay, seeking evidence of survivors among the Shompen who inhabit the Great Nicobar cluster of islands at the southernmost tip of the 500-mile archipelago. The semi-nomadic tribes of hunters, fishermen and fruit-gatherers coexist precariously with Indian settlers 1,600km (1,000 miles) east of the Indian mainland. Some Shompen now have relations with the Indian authorities and have established an exchange system by which they deliver all the honey, beads, coconuts and betelnuts that they can gather, which the Indian Government sells on their behalf.

Witnesses had been disturbed by destruction in the indigenous islanders’ territory, which begins at a 35km milestone that demarcates the boundary between their mangrove habitat and the area occupied by Indian settlers in Campbell Bay.

“Beyond 35 km, bridges and jetties have been washed away and houses flattened, and we saw bodies littered on the roads,” Rajendra Jamwal, the naval chief in Campbell Bay, said.

Some of the Shompen, who share the mongoloid features of the much more populous Nicobarese further north, have been almost entirely cut off from the outside world since their ancestors first arrived on a now-submerged mountain chain south of Burma as much as 60,000 years ago.

A coastguard helicopter pilot saw several groups of Sentinelese on their North Sentinel island yesterday. When the pilot tried to drop food parcels, the islanders reportedly threw stones at the helicopter.

“There is a lot of debate whether we should leave them to their own way of life or try to assimilate them,” S. Vasudeva Rao, deputy inspector-general of police, told The Times in Port Blair. “But they are considered to be aggressive.”

Also safe are the Great Andamanese, the original island inhabitants who fought the British when they arrived in the 19th century to build a prison.

Wayne Harrigan, 46, an Australian traveller returned from an ill-timed holiday to Little Andaman, paid testament to official optimism over the fate of the Onge tribe, who had been stranded on higher land until Indian naval and Coast Guard vessels arrived to provide relief.

Dr Pronob Sarkar, an expert on aboriginal tribes who lives in Port Blair and runs an aid agency for the welfare of tribal societies, said that Indian officialdom cared little for the aboriginals, whose designation as scheduled or primitive tribes puts them at the bottom of the caste system.

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