It looks like the last verified contact with them has been in 2018. Recently a youtuber went there and tried to get their attention, but couldn’t find them.
Is it possible they’re not even still around? Maybe a disease found its way onto their island and took them out. It could have even been from the last visitor in 2018.
With so few of them, it wouldn’t take much to end them all.
With 200, half would be female, and maybe a third of them would be child bearing.
A food crisis, or internal strife, or disease, or all three at once, could easily drop that number to too few to sustain the population, and that would be the end of them.
Just because it hasn’t happened before, doesn’t mean it can not have happened recently. For all we know, they were suffering such a crisis for the past twenty+ years, and now the last of them have died off, or will die off soon.
There were 200? I understand that is exactly the lowest genetic pool limit for avoiding unsustainable inbreeding. They are likely dying off, if not already gone.
Not totally correct, the 200 number does assume that you have a mix of genetics and the average numbers of genetic diseases. There are models that show that populations that have been isolated long enough to basically “outlive/outgrow” most genetic diseases in their population they need lower numbers (which has been the case for some indigenous communities in Australia, Papua and is likely the case for some in the Amazonas - and the Sentinelese).
We don’t know if that is the case,but it might be. We simply don’t know.