History of Discovery
The Shompen people were known to Ptolemy and Arab geographers, but there was no reliable information before the 19th century. Danish Admiral Steen Bille was the first to contact them in 1846 and Frederik Adolph de Roepstorff, a British officer who had already published works on the languages of Nicobar and Andaman, collected ethnographic and linguistic data in 1876. Since then very little has been added to the stock of reliable information on the Shompen, mainly because access to the Nicobar Islands has been restricted for foreign researchers since Indian independence.
Read more about this topic: Shompen People
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