The group, five men, one woman and three girls, fled onto a hilltop when the tsunami struck on Dec. 26, before getting lost in the jungles. They were finally found by a police search team near Campbell Bay on Great Nicobar island, after getting help from a more primitive tribe in the island's interior.

"The tribals say they met a boy from the Shompen tribe on the hillock who taught them how to light a fire using sticks," Commander Salil Mehta told Reuters from Port Blair, the capital of the island chain.

"They ate jungle products and wild boars and had walked deep inside the jungle when the search party found them."

The tiny, primitive hunter-gatherer Shompen tribe are nearly 400-strong and live in the forests and hills on the island.

The cluster of more than 550 islands, of which only about three dozen are inhabited, are home to six tribes of Mongoloid and African origin who have lived there for thousands of years.

Many of these tribal people subsist by hunting with spears, bows and arrows, and by fishing and gathering fruit and roots. They still cover themselves with tree bark or leaves.

Many of the tribes have been gradually exposed to outside influences since colonial rule and their numbers have steadily dwindled over the same period, making many anthropologists pessimistic about their longer-term chances of survival.