IT’S VERY sad that missionary John Chau was killed by a so-called ‘sex crazed’ tribe cut off from the world for 30,000 years.

But the American knew what he was getting into before he set off for the remote island of North Sentinel in the Bay of Bengal. Visitors are not welcomed by the small band of locals who call it their home.

Other curious visitors over the years have been seen off with poison arrows and machetes, or killed.

Direct descendants of the first humans in Asia and believed to be the world’s last pre-Neolithic tribe, the Sentinelese don’t want any contact with the outside world. And who can blame them?

Like the few surviving tribes across the world who keep to themselves, they may look odd to us, and I daresay the photos in the media of a band of near-naked men on a beach waving their longbows raises many a guffaw in the developed world - but are we any stranger?

If these people were shown images of us, racing about, a tiny black rectangle glued to our hands, onto which we frequently tap our fingers, they’d laugh their heads off.

If they saw us in our cars, bumper-to-bumper, queuing on ring roads for hours on end, they’d weep with hilarity.

And if they could see how we spend our spare time, looking at pictures of other people enjoying their spare time, they would think we were bonkers.

We call ourselves the ‘modern world’, the ‘developed world’, but they are in many ways more advanced than us. Incredibly, the whole population survived the Tsunami on Boxing Day 2004 in which 250,000 people died.

It is believed that, like animals - who ran for higher ground before it struck - they detected the impending disaster and climbed trees.

They survived without outside help. Yet in our world we’d panic without the multitude of things we rely on to survive, ranging from 24-hour supermarkets to central heating, hot water and the internet.

In a global crisis, they would be likely to pull through. We wouldn’t.

At least they understand their own world, a tiny, lush, mangrove-swamped 20-square mile island, where they feed off the fruits of the land.

Do we understand ours? I certainly don’t. I was being left behind years. I don’t understand why our lives are dominated by phones and computers, I don’t know why we feel we have to own so much to feel good about ourselves and it baffles me as to why we are so obsessed with the lives of others.

I don’t even understand adverts on TV. “What was that about?”, “What’s that advertising?” I will say every evening to my husband. He won’t know either.

As for the tribe being sex-crazed. That assumption is based on a visit by anthropologists who approached the island and, as well as being showered with arrows, witnessed a ‘sort of community mating’.

I’ll bet it was far less lewd than anything young holidaymakers get up to on Ayia Napa.

This tribe is bound to have contact with the modern world in some form or another. Their beautiful sandy beaches will be subjected to a continuous washing-up of our plastic waste.

There is an official exclusion zone around the island to protect the people, whose population is unknown. This can only be a good thing. If the world was allowed open access, the tribe would probably be wiped out and the island put to use as a location for I’m a Celebrity.

These people may jump up and down waving bows and arrows, but they are clearly sufficiently intelligent to know what is good and what is bad for them. And we, for all our advancements, ain’t good.