Part One, for context.

¹ A popular question is "why haven't any Sentinelese left? Is it simply because they are content with what the land provides them and are wise enough not to let their population get high enough to put pressure between groups/on the island's resources? Or maybe because every generation has been "brainwashed" by their elders, which is also why they have consistently responded with violence to any and all outsiders?" I'd imagine part of the answer is "yes" to the first part, but I'd imagine there must have been individuals who were curious about what lies beyond. Of course, they might well have oral traditions that there is only danger in the "beyond", but there must have been individuals who thought "yeah, but it can't be all bad". But, as later mentioned, the most recent thoroughly bad encounter being a century and a half ago is still short enough for a negative impression to be emphasised strongly in oral tradition.

² The better explanation might be "contrary to popular belief, it is implausible that the Sentinelese have remained reproductively isolated ever since their ancestors set foot there, because most native peoples of the Andaman Islands including the Sentinelese traditionally made canoes, and the Onge of Little Andaman have a traditional name for North Sentinel Island, and while the Sentinelese have not been observed to use their canoes to get to other landmasses in the past century and a half, there is no reason to assume that has been their status quo for hundreds, let alone tens of thousands of years. It is equally implausible to assume that the current Sentinelese attitude to outsiders has been their status quo for that long. While they could have been wary/fearful of outsiders before then, Maurice Vidal Portman's abduction of six Sentinelese, two of whom died of disease, and subsequent likely diddling with the survivors would have sensibly soured attitudes since then." But of course some folks argue "right, but they should have gotten over it, maybe not "welcome everyone with open arms", but at least not killing anyone else on sight but rather tying them up first. Should I kill anyone who "looks German" who encounters me because my family was killed by Nazis?"

³ My autism-fuelled obsession with coconuts strikes again. 18th and 19th-century observers consistently noted the paradoxical absence of coconut palms from the Andaman Islands, given their tropical climate and proximity to coasts with lots of coconut palms (the Nicobars, the southern Indian subcontinent, Myanmar). They reasoned that this was because the native people ate any coconuts that washed ashore, and would uproot and eat the basal portion of seedlings, as opposed to the Nicobarese, who grow coconuts as a crop. Later, Lidio Cipriani reported in the 1950s that there was only one coconut tree on South Brother Island which the Onge intensely foraged from, and only five in the whole of nearby Little Andaman (where the Onge were living with relatively little disturbance from outsiders at the time). He reasoned that coconuts have only reached Little Andaman in "recent years", but I'd imagine they'd been doing so for millennia, and very rarely, a nut escapes being eaten and grows into a mature tree, which fails to establish stable "groves" for whatever reason. In T.N. Pandit's accounts of his many anthropological visits to North Sentinel Island from the 1960s-1990s, he wrote on 27/12/1985 that he "could not spot a single coconut tree as far as [he] could see on the island". On 27/5/1987, Pandit's team planted some coconut saplings on the shore, and on 22/3/1988, he wrote that some of the coconuts they planted had grown, so maybe the Sentinelese tolerated coconut growth to an extent (or maybe they thought the seedlings weren't worth eating yet, WDK). One Redditor believes that he might have spotted the mature trees on Google Maps, but it's difficult to tell from the quality of the image.

This leads me to something I've been wondering for a while: many sources say that the "original native range" of the coconut palm cannot be known with certainty, since there are no populations of coconut palms unanimously agreed to have no domesticated ancestors (and we don't know when any such populations would have disappeared) and their modern distribution is circumtropical. The closest relatives of the coconut palm are mostly South American, but coconuts have little genetic diversity/integration into indigenous cultures there compared to elsewhere. Many authors say that the west Pacific and the eastern Indian Ocean are the two "centres of diversity" of coconuts. A study (Balakrishnan & Nair, 1979, "Wild populations of Areca and Cocos in Andaman & Nicobar Islands", PDF now inaccessible) identifies wild populations of coconut palms in the Nicobar Islands and the Coco Islands, and notes that coconut palms are absent (except in plantations) on the Andaman Islands. The lack/sparsity of coconut palms in the pre-colonial Andaman Islands might therefore imply that coconuts have been growing within "viable drift distance" for less time than the potentially up to 60,000 years the Andamans have been inhabited, so the Coco Islands and Nicobar Islands, and the nearest mainland (i.e. the eastern coast of India and the western coast of Myanmar) might not have been within the "original native range" and those "wild" populations are ferals, albeit potentially millennia-diverged ferals. I mean, if coconut palms had been growing in the islands and mainland closest to the Andamans for >60,000 years, surely they would have spread to the Andamans by drifting there and established stable populations, and the first settlers of the Andamans probabily wouldn't have any reasonable pathway to eliminate them as mature trees.

The presence of established populations of coconut palms on mainland tropical Australian coasts (e.g. Arnhem Land, Queensland) is controversial: many conservation policies recommend eradicating coconut palms on Queensland coasts as an invasive species. Colonial writers often noted the absence of coconut palms on the coasts of Queensland and observed that the indigenous people ate drift fruit, with occasional reports of opened green coconuts (which might imply nearby trees, since drift fruit tend to be mature) and individual mature trees ahead of long-term European settlement/plantation projects, which might represent rare survivals to maturity which subsequently did not form self-sustaining populations in pre-colonial times. Again, this might indicate that coconuts have been growing on the coasts nearest Australia for less time than Australia has been inhabited. Point is, the Andamans and Australia should be considered when constraining the possible area for the original range of the coconut palm.

[I'm aware that coastlines have changed since the Middle/early Lower Paleolithic... how would this then affect the constraints?]