CNN wrote:New Delhi, India (CNN) -- The last member of an ancient tribe
that has inhabited an Indian island chain for around 65,000 years has
died, a group that campaigns for the protection of indigenous peoples
has said.

Boa Sr, who was around 85 years of age, died last week
in the Andaman islands, about 750 miles off India's eastern coast,
Survival International said in a statement. The London-based
group, which works to protect indigenous peoples, said she was the last
member of one of ten distinct Great Andamanese tribes, the Bo.

"The Bo are thought to have lived in the Andaman islands for as long as
65,000 years, making them the descendants of one of the oldest human
cultures on earth," it noted.

With her passing at a hospital, India also lost one of its most endangered languages,
also called Bo, linguists say.

"She was the last speaker of (the) Bo language. It pains to see how one by one we
are losing speakers of Great Andamanese and (their) language is getting extinct.
(It is) A very fast erosion of (the) indigenous knowledge base, that we all are helplessly
witnessing," read an obituary in Boa Sr's honor posted on the Web site of the Vanishing
Voices of the Great Andamanese (VOGA) project.

Project director Anvita Abbi, a professor at New Delhi's Jawaharlal
Nehru University, met with Boa as recently as last year. "She was the
only member who remembered the old songs," Abbi recounted in her
obituary.

"Boa Sr was the only speaker of Bo and had no one to
converse with in that language," Abbi told CNN. Her husband and
children had already died, the linguist said.

Other than Bo, she also knew local Andaman languages, which she
would use to converse, according to Abbi.

Boa Sr was believed to be the oldest of the Great Andamanese, members of
ten distinct tribes. Survival International estimates there are now
just 52 Great Andamanese left.

There were believed to be 5,000 of them when the British colonized
the archipelago in 1858. Most of those tribal communities were subsequently
killed or died of diseases, says Survival International.

The British also held the indigenous tribes people captive
in what was called an Andaman Home, but none of the 150 children born
there survived beyond two years of age, according to the group.

Boa Sr also survived the killer Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004.

She recorded in Bo what she saw when the giant waves arrived. "While we
were all asleep, the water rose and filled all around. We did not get
up before the water rose. Water filled where we were and as the morning
broke the water started to recede," reads a translation of her tsunami
narrative posted on the VOGA Web site.

Activists are expressing alarm over her death.

"Boa's loss is a bleak reminder that we must not allow this to happen to the
other tribes of the Andaman islands," Survival director Stephen Corry
said in the statement. Andaman and Nicobar Islands authorities put at
least five tribes in their list of vulnerable indigenous communities.

According to Corry's group, the surviving Great Andamanese depend largely on the
Indian government for food and shelter and abuse of alcohol is rife.

Among the tribes are the Sentinelese, who inhabit a 60-square-kilometer island.

Officials believe the group is probably the world's only surviving Paleolithic
people without contact with any other community. They said the
Sentinelese are very hostile and never leave their Island. Very little
is known about them.