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Cowrie Shells, Myanmar, 2005

A Moken tribesman in Myanmar's Andaman Islands displays two large cowrie shells. The Moken, a nomadic sea people who live among the 800 islands of the Mergui Archipelago, are divers and beachcombers, taking what they need each day from the Andaman Sea. They accumulate little and live on land only during the monsoons.

(Text adapted from and photo shot on assignment for, but not published in, "Sea Gypsies of Myanmar," April 2005, National Geographic magazine)

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Photograph by Nicolas Reynard