Back in 2010, 750 miles from the coast of India, an 85-year-old woman died, bringing an end to a legacy that existed for the last 65,000 years. The repository of their language came to an end with her passing. Though there are more than 52 people left from this tribe, Bao Sr was the last one to have known the original language of this tribe. Miriam Ross of Survival International said, “Her death is not simply the loss of a single person but of an entire ethnic group and up to 65,000 years worth of history. It is also a cautious indication that other communities in other regions of the world may suffer the same fate.”

It was this very year when the British came to the island to colonize the Bo people. During those days, the number of people forming the Great Andamanese people was five thousand. However many of them were either killed or infected due to the diseases that were carried by the British. Not only diseases, but other factors like consumption of alcohol, opium, and mental trauma due to the loss of territories, all affected the tribe. When the Bo people discovered that several of them were showing symptoms of diseases, they resorted to killing them one by one. Due to the constant killings, the number of Bo people was reduced from 62 in 1911 to 6 in 1931.

The survivors of the merged tribe continued to follow their style of life as much as they could in the archipelagos, despite their rapidly falling numbers. The British once forcefully relocated the Great Andamanese to a small island to "domesticate" them. The tribe was relocated to an "Andaman house," where 150 babies were born. None of them lived to the age of two. However, in the aftermath of the relocations, tribal identities became mostly symbolic. Due to intermarriage and other circumstances, the tribe's cultural and linguistic distinctiveness had all but vanished by 2006.

Before Bao's demise in 2010, Bao Sr's mother passed away forty years earlier. She was the only member of the tribe who spoke Aka-Bo. The songs and tales that Bao was familiar with were difficult for other members of the Great Andamanese language community to understand. She was also conversant in Great Andamanese, a synthesis of the ten indigenous languages of the Andaman Islands, and Andamanese Hindi. Boa Sr. was raised in the way of Bo and was born in a lush forest. Bao Sr assisted in gathering all the information she could about the Bo culture and language with the assistance of Anvita Abbi, a professor of linguistics at JNU, Delhi.

Bo used to say, “The significance is immense. Language is not just a way of communicating. It is a viewfinder of an ancient world. Language is a representation of society and the pattern of human migration.” Abbi described Bao Sr as someone very patient, happy, and full of humour. Linguist Narayan Choudhary also discussed what Boa Sr's death means in academic and personal terms "Her death is a loss not just for the Great Andamanese people, but also for various areas of study, including anthropology, linguistics, history, psychology, and biology. To me, Boa Sr. embodied the entirety of mankind in all of its colours and with a richness not found anywhere else.”

Although there are still some members of the Bo tribe on the island, none of them can communicate in the language. As a result, the tribe's remaining indigenous culture and identity are under greater threat than ever, which is indicative of the unfortunate circumstances surrounding the tribe.