The Great Andamanese are an indigenous people of the Great Andaman archipelago in the Andaman Islands. Historically, the Great Andamanese lived throughout the archipelago, and were divided into ten major tribes. Their distinct but closely related languages comprised the Great Andamanese languages, one of the two identified Andamanese language families. The Great Andamanese were clearly related to the other Andamanese peoples, but were well separated from them by culture and geography. The languages of those other four groups were only distantly related to those of the Great Andamanese and mutually unintelligible; they are classified in a separate family, the Ongan languages. They were once the most numerous of the five major groups in the Andaman Islands with an estimated population between 2,000 and 6,600, the Great Andamanese were heavily decimated by diseases, alcohol, colonial warfare and loss of hunting territory. Only 52 remained as of February 2010; by August 2020 there were 59 (of whom 10 tested positive for COVID-19). The tribal and linguistic distinctions have largely disappeared, so they may now be considered a single Great Andamanese ethnic group with mixed Burmese, Hindi and aboriginal descent. Origin The Great Andamanese are classified by anthropologists as one of the Negrito peoples, which also include the other four aboriginal groups of the Andaman islands (Onge, Jarawa, Jangil and Sentinelese) and five other isolated populations of Southeast Asia. The Andaman Negritos are thought to be the first inhabitants of the islands, having emigrated from the mainland tens of thousands of years ago. Until the late 18th century, the Andamanese peoples were preserved from outside influences by their fierce rejection of contacts (which included killing any shipwrecked foreigners) and by the remoteness of the islands. Thus, the ten Great Andamanese tribes and the other four indigenous groups are thought to have diverged on their own over the course of millennia. Demographics In 1789, when the British established a colonial presence on Great Andaman, the Great Andamanese were divided into 10 main tribes with distinct languages, each counting between 200 and 700 individuals. Their territories spanned most of the Great Andaman islands, including Ritchie's Archipelago and Rutland Island but excluding Little Andaman (inhabited by the Onge) and the North and South Sentinel Islands (of the Sentinelese). On South Andaman the Great Andamanese coexisted with the Jarawa, and on Rutland Island with the Jangil. Arranged by territory, roughly from north to south, the original tribes