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I can't stop thinking about Papua New Guinea

• deleted 19d ago
  [deleted]
• karel-3d 19d ago
  I have read somewhere that the cannibalism claims are overrated and kind of artificially inflated by the natives. (Most natives are actually Christian.) I have not looked closely into it though. Unrelated. We have servers across the world; one in Mount Hagen. It has by far the biggest latency in the world; so I always use it as a "benchmark"; if it works in Mount Hagen, it works everywhere.
  • sampullman 19d ago
    I randomly had a conversation with a guy at a bar in Taipei who was an administrator during the transition to self rule, and he said basically the same thing. He said about many of the tribes modernized within a generation or two, and the ones that didn't still dropped the cannibalism stuff in the 50s.
  • stingraycharles 19d ago
    I’ve just asked a friend of mine who lives in PNG and yeah, this definitely happened. Nowadays it doesn’t happen anymore except potentially in some insanely remote areas. Supposedly the Japanese during WW2 also resorted to cannibalism.
    • applfanboysbgon 19d ago
      > Supposedly the Japanese during WW2 also resorted to cannibalism. Germans and Russians did too. Most humans with a survival instinct will turn to cannibalism if it their only means to survive. This is completely unrelated to cannibalism as a cultural practice.
      • hermitcrab 19d ago
        Apparently cannibalism after sea disasters was considered acceptable, as long as there was a fair lottery! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannibalism_at_sea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannibalism_at_sea
    • hermitcrab 19d ago
      President Bush (snr) was nearly eaten by Japanese soldiers: https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoryMemes/comments/qr1zth/in_september_of_1944_9_us_pilots_ejected_out_of/ https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoryMemes/comments/qr1zth/in_sep... (before he was president!)
  • burner420042 19d ago
    Servers for mining companies? Just curious if the hospital still exists there. Do you know?
  • Arnt 19d ago
    I had to look that up. Wow. Does someone rent out rack space in Mount Hagen, or how did you come to have a server there?
    • karel-3d 19d ago
      It's not a publicly available server house. It's local partner. Cannot say more sorry
  • Modified3019 19d ago
    I visited Papua among some other places ~20 years ago. The steep elevation changes and extreme rain and infinitely deep mud means roads to many areas aren’t viable, will rapidly degrade if built, or there simply isn’t anything worth building a road to. You can see on Google Maps areas void of settlements. So I rode a twin engine Aztec into fuck knows where anymore, hiked barefoot through muddy rainforest, and met some Korowai. Treehouses, sago grubs and all. From what I learned from groups that work with the Korowai, the cannibalism stuff was very real at one point, but wasn’t really something they liked to do. It was a matter of fear, superstition and ritual, rather than a method of substance. My poorly remembered summary (take with a grain of salt): if someone got sick, it was because of a witch doctor or someone possessed by an evil spirit putting a curse on them. Only way to deal with the curse/evil spirit) was the find the caster (through torture of course) and kill and eat them. If you just kill them the evil spirit will keep being a problem, ritually eating them is what actually disperses the evil. Naturally, intertribal violence also gets mixed into that to blur lines. At some point long prior to my arrival, the Indonesian government managed to get consistent enough access to the area to start governing the area to a degree. One of it’s first priorities was convincing them to stop the practice, which sometimes involved the ever classic “gather them around, shoot one of their pigs and let them consider it carefully” method of persuasion when some were persistent about continuing. So while cannibalism wasn’t completely gone at that time, in practice it was then mostly a story to tell curious and generous visitors. The Korowai greatly prefer instant ramen packets in any case. Beautiful and interesting area if you have a naturalist bent, though otherwise not a place to go if you have a normal idea of “fun”. I’m not generally a tropical/heat guy, but Indonesia is a country that I sometimes think of returning to.
  • defrost 19d ago
    Kuru: the science and the sorcery is a film worth looking into, it tracks the work of Australian medical researcher Michael Alpers from 1961 onwards. ~ https://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/screen-guide/kuru-the-science-and-the-sorcery-19328/ https://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/screen-guide/kuru-the-sci...
  • HarHarVeryFunny 19d ago
    I used to have a book about Papua and some westerner who had visited, that had a photo in it of a human head being cooked on a flat metal dish over a fire.
• itake 19d ago
  PNG is on my list to visit. It’s relatively complex to get to. Most flights either leave from Australia or Jakarta, they don’t run frequently enough to where you will probably spend the night in Jakarta or Australia in order to catch the flight the next day. I visited Timor Leste earlier this year and what an interesting country
  • nephihaha 19d ago
    It sounds like it is easy to get to Port Moresby (which is apparently a bit of a dump and very dangerous), but difficult to get anywhere else. PNG has changed very rapidly. Parts of the country were in the Stone Age within living memory and are moving over.
    • itake 19d ago
      ChatGPT advised me to not even leave the Port Moresby airport and to fly immediately to one of the small domestic fishing towns for safety reasons.
      • deleted 19d ago
        [deleted]
  • damidekronik 19d ago
    Any cool facts to share about Timor Leste? My usual go to - wikipedia - does paint a rather mundane picture of it.
    • sampullman 19d ago
      What's your criteria for mundane? Basically every decent sized island in that part of the world is going to have beautiful beaches, coral reefs, mountains, and jungles.
    • FabHK 19d ago
      Crypto scammers have long operated in Cambodia, Philippines, Myanmar after being kicked out of China, and were looking to go to Sri Lanka and Timor Leste next - but Timor Leste's politicians and population got together and fought back successfully, it seems: https://theconversation.com/asias-scamming-gangs-target-timor-leste-as-their-next-frontier-but-they-may-have-misjudged-the-small-island-nation-271776 https://theconversation.com/asias-scamming-gangs-target-timo... (More on those scam factories: https://theconversation.com/it-seemed-like-a-good-job-at-first-how-people-are-trafficked-trapped-and-forced-to-scam-in-southeast-asia-scam-factories-podcast-ep-1-250444 https://theconversation.com/it-seemed-like-a-good-job-at-fir... And from The Economist - lamentably paywalled: https://www.economist.com/audio/podcasts/scam-inc https://www.economist.com/audio/podcasts/scam-inc)
• mike_tyson 19d ago
  two great films in PNG are joe leahy's neighbours and black harvest really excellent insight into society and values there as it meets capitalism
  • Arathorn 19d ago
    Black Harvest (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103817/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103817/) is an incredible documentary; everyone should see it.
• nephihaha 19d ago
  One of my parents' friends had spent a lot of time doing research in PNG as well as remote parts of South America. He was the nearest real life equivalent to Indiana Jones I've ever met. He told us some wild stories about the place. He would have been old enough to see the place when cannibalism was still around.
• lifestyleguru 19d ago
  lol don't go there it's a trap. Civilization, despite all these people, is good.
• yreg 19d ago
  There was a discussion on it here yesterday: https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1wfdnus/why_i_cant_stop_thinking_about_papua_new_guinea/ https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1wfdnus/why...
• tthbalazs 19d ago
  I used to watch https://www.youtube.com/@MissionaryBushPilot https://www.youtube.com/@MissionaryBushPilot deliver stuff around PNG in a Kodiak. If you're into aviation, the videos are golden
  • walrus01 19d ago
    On the other hand, the MAF is a highly questionable organization that exists specifically to convert the local people away from their own belief systems into whatever brand of evangelical Christianity its supporters are peddling. There's plenty of bush plane videos from Alaska, Nunavut and other challenging places in the world from ordinary small commercial bush plane operators. It's morally indefensible in my opinion for a bunch of random people from many thousands of km away to go off to some pre-technology rural villagers' home territory and basically say "everything you believe is wrong, here's our god, you must follow and believe in him or you're going to hell". If people want to go do bush plane things in remote areas and work in very challenging environments as weird foreigners, there's plenty of ways to justify that in the form of a secular NGO (something like Medecins Sans Frontiers) without combining it with missionary work.
    • papua_is_being_ 19d ago
      > On the other hand, the MAF is a highly questionable organization that exists specifically to convert the local people away from their own belief At this stage in the ecocide and genocide of West Papua, any eyes are welcome no matter what their biases. If they want to convert people to their belief system, honestly I couldn't care right now as long as they protect the indigenous West Papuans from being genocided by Prabowo and his cronies and the beautiful ecology of the island from being ecocided.
    • desterothx 19d ago
      If there is no funding for helping the people coming from the non evangelical sources, i'm sure the people would rather have medicine than keep dying, no matter the indoctrination they receive
    • ShinyLeftPad 19d ago
• avadodin 19d ago
  [flagged]
• ggm 19d ago
  A friend (now a very fine lawyer in London) travelled PNG during an election assisting in some fashion for several weeks if not months. She came home with a crimp in her hair and ridges on all her toe and fingernails from nutritional deficiencies. This is when I realised differences in standards of living were not theoretical.
  • avazhi 19d ago
    > A friend travelled PNG during for several weeks if not months. She came home with a crimp in her hair and ridges on all her toe and fingernails from nutritional deficiencies. Gonna press X to doubt on that one, bro.
    • etcetcetcetceta 19d ago
      F is for respect, X is for doubt.
      • avazhi 19d ago
        Touche. F, even.
      • pwillia7 18d ago
        f
  • hackernud3s 19d ago
    Malnutrition after 3 weeks? I mean, pack 21 multivitamins.
    • TheOtherHobbes 19d ago
      I had ridges in my nails after an exceptionally bad bout of flu. It's not obscure or complex.
    • jesterson 19d ago
      Indeed. Given average western diet, 3 weeks of malnutrition can only do good.
• skissane 19d ago
  > People still shoot arrows at each other in urban centres My mother (who is a doctor, although she's retired now) was part of the medical team who worked on this case: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/arrow-attack-attempted-rape-in-papua-new-guinea/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/arrow-attack-attempted-rape-in-... My mother isn't mentioned in that article, but the "Allan Mason" it mentions is her husband
  • defrost 19d ago
    It's ongoing in both PNG and the Northern Territory (Australia). Northern Territory Police are investigating a series of disturbances in Ngukurr after a 14-year-old boy was speared in the back on Saturday afternoon. ~ (Sept 2026) https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-09-07/nt-14yo-boy-speared-in-back-airlifted-careflight-ngukurr/107123936 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-09-07/nt-14yo-boy-speared-i... Police respond to armed disturbance in Wadeye involving up to 100 people, bows, spears ~ (today) https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-09-15/nt-100-people-in-wadeye-disturbance-armed-with-bows-spears/107155288 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-09-15/nt-100-people-in-wade... Going back to the 1970s and 80s: Kiaps, known formally as district officers and patrol officers, were travelling representatives of the British and Australian governments Kiap Song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FK5N_ObFeQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FK5N_ObFeQ
    • mapmeld 19d ago
      Maybe they are using traditional weapons for a completely different reason, but I'm reminded of why India and China have their soldiers on the disputed border carry poles and clubs. It looks old school, but it prevents clashes from turning into a larger shooting war where everyone's getting killed.
      • nephihaha 19d ago
        Maybe for the simple reason that a pike doesn't need to be charged up, or stocked up with ammunition. Maybe sharpened.
  • ActorNightly 19d ago
• kijin 19d ago
  > So nearly all groups eventually internalized a similar set of norms, a similar food culture and similar political institutions, without ever being part of the same political unit. They managed to achieve eventual consistency in a distributed system, thousands of years before we even thought of it.
• mtrlbs 19d ago
  That was a great read !
• cinkhangin 19d ago
  This is those articles that I would just skip but I didn't...very interesting
  • asimovDev 19d ago
    i opened it and thought "neat, I will add to my reading list" but instead found myself reading and reading until the end. I got really hooked by the shell inflation part
• culi 19d ago
  Indonesia's dictator Suharto (who was put into power by the US) annexed West Papua in the 60's on behalf of US corporations. Indigenous groups united together to form the Free Papua Movement (OPM) and wage a guerilla war of resistance. The resistance is ongoing and most of West Papua (which is basically a colony) and PNG (which is basically a banana republic) want reunification
  • netsharc 19d ago
    Carved open whole mountains: https://imgsrv2.voi.id/kn25_PwLY-AF-WW29WhOyKglpuHx95_W7T90yZV_PD0/auto/1200/675/sm/1/bG9jYWw6Ly8vcHVibGlzaGVycy81MTI4MTUvMjAyNTA5MDkwMDE5LW1haW4uY3JvcHBlZF8xNzU3MzUxOTg3LmpwZWc.jpg https://imgsrv2.voi.id/kn25_PwLY-AF-WW29WhOyKglpuHx95_W7T90y... In regards to Suharto, it seems the 1965 coup attempt that got him into power was a surprise even to the US embassy in Jakarta, but of course they welcomed it, considering the previous president (Sukarno) was anti-imperialist and was flirting with the 3rd largest communist party in the world (after USSR's and China's). Somewhat relatedly, a documentary moviemaker realized what was behind the curtain of Indonesian society and said "it's as if I had wandered into Germany 40 years after the Holocaust only to find the Nazis still in power.". He made a documentary following a man who was sanctioned by the Suharto regime to kill a lot of "communists" in 1960's Indonesia: The Act of Killing (available at e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TDeEObjR9Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TDeEObjR9Q ). A review: > Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing is a challenging documentary. It is not only difficult to watch, but it also probes into one of the most grotesque aspects of human nature: the capacity for self-delusion in the face of horrific atrocities. This isn’t a film about history, facts, or statistics; it’s about the memories of the men who killed, the stories they tell themselves, and how they continue to live with the horrors they’ve inflicted on others. The film’s power lies in its ability to take the viewer beyond a surface-level understanding of evil and into the psychological abyss of those who have committed atrocities—and seemingly moved on with their lives. From: https://docthisway.com/2024/09/23/the-act-of-killing-review/ https://docthisway.com/2024/09/23/the-act-of-killing-review/
    • szatkus 19d ago
      The link is down. Did anyone from here report the movie?
• broodbucket 19d ago
  Random PNG fun facts: their most watched sporting event is State of Origin, a rugby league competition between two Australian states, over which many people have died in PNG. Australia recently allowed them a team in the NRL, its premier rugby league competition, essentially in exchange for PNG not signing a security agreement with China like the Solomon Islands did.
  • amunozo 19d ago
    This does not make sense I love it. Why State of Origin and not just simply the NRL?
    • ikr678 19d ago
      Maybe because State of Origin is the 'tribal' grudge match series, players are only ever eligible for the one team.
      • broodbucket 18d ago
        Some players do manage to be eligible for both, you just can't swap once you've decided
    • broodbucket 18d ago
      It's safe to say they're both highly watched in PNG, Origin is just more of an event (a three game series, compared to the NRL which is a full season + playoffs). It's the same two sides every game, you're maroon or you're blue. Meanwhile there's 17 clubs in the NRL, I assume people from abroad pick one arbitrarily, of which only two clubs are going to make the grand final every year.
    • asp_hornet 18d ago
      The origin teams are comprised of the all the best players in the league across clubs so they’re like dream teams.
• mig1 19d ago
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  • zemvpferreira 19d ago
    This virtue signalling where everything surrounding an indigenous people or other minority must be handled with the fluffiest epistemological gloves is really exhausting. Can the author describe his own personal wonder at discovering this factoid (maybe with the same wonder as when he learned about penicillin in fact) without being de facto labeled a racist?
  • doginasuit 19d ago
    A group of people find out another group of people exist and react with surprise. That's not a mindset, it's been happening since ever since there were people. Jumping at every opportunity to apply a moral perspective just undermines its credibility.
  • JuniperMesos 19d ago
    The New Guinea highlanders were equally ignorant of the existence of the Australians, or most of the other peoples outside of the New Guinea highlands. But it wasn't one of the New Guinea highlanders who took the initiative to make the discovery, it was "some random Aussie". So I think it's fair to credit the discovery of New Guinea highlanders to the Australians, rather than the other way around.
  • xienze 19d ago
    > Coloniser's mindset much? Finding out people live in a place where is not the same as discovering Penicillin. Well the people living there certainly weren't going to make themselves known to the rest of the world now were they? The importance of the discovery is debatable but it seems that whitey did legitimately make a discovery, sorry to disappoint you.
• vova_hn2 19d ago
  The "Pre-bronze age war between two tribes in West Papua, 1963" video in the article is an embedded tweet. Twitter currently doesn't allow to view it without an account (extensively discussed on HN [0]). Fortunately, it is also available on Youtube [1] (longer version [2]). [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49694296 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49694296 [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNHIP2FJzko https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNHIP2FJzko [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JI4uirwxx1Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JI4uirwxx1Y
  • consumer451 19d ago
    Thanks for posting the videos. Two thoughts that came from watching that: 1. It is really interesting that we live on a planet that has such a society, along side one that had built nuclear weapons, and was soon to walk on the moon. 2. Our modern society has not progressed at all from any of these base instincts, and in some cases & applications we have gotten worse.
    • logicchains 19d ago
      >Our modern society has not progressed at all from any of these base instincts, and in some cases & applications we have gotten worse. Not at all surprising given that base instincts come from genetics and genes take tens to hundreds of thousands of years to change significantly.
      • consumer451 19d ago
        Agreed. My theory about our "great filter" event is that our technological advancement proceeds so much faster than our genetics, and that will be our ruin. To put in plain terms, we keep inventing far better "spears" (including kinetic, bio, and chemical) that allow one to kill many, while still behaving like cavemen.
        • orwin 19d ago
          In my opinion,it is more about culture than it is genetics, although I do think genetics are modified by culture in the long term.
• a_bonobo 19d ago
  It's really strange how close Papa New Guinea is to Australia (by territory, not people to people) and how little contact there is between the two countries, and how little interest there is. Australians couldn't tell you a thing about PNG, its people, or its politics (except those few who've gone to PNG for mining jobs). Compare with New Zealand - NZ is further away by continental distance, but closer to the main cities of Australia. Completely different relationship.
  • apexalpha 19d ago
    Isn't it still hundreds of kilometers from the mainland? The straight of Gibraltar is 10km and barely any Europeans have anything more than superficial knowledge about North-African cultures.
    • jiggawatts 19d ago
      The closest land to PNG in Australia is nearly uninhabited. Northern Queensland may as well be on the Moon. Cape York Peninsula has a population of only 18,000 people! Northern Alaska has significantly more, as a point of comparison.
  • ericmay 19d ago
    It’s of interest certainly but why would it be strange that Australia, a member of the Commonwealth and New Zealand, also a member of the Commonwealth have closer ties? The US has closer ties with the UK than it does Cuba, for example.
    • austhrow743 19d ago
      PNG is in the commonwealth. It was also part of Australia for a bit.
      • ericmay 19d ago
        You're right, I hadn't realized that. But you get the broader point.
• pelzatessa 19d ago
  >I can't stop thinking about Papua New Guinea Me too, this track is certified classic at this point, cant get it out of my head. https://archive.org/download/fsol-papua_new_guinea-vinyl-1992/A1-Papua%20New%20Guinea%20%2812%20inch%20Original%29.mp3 https://archive.org/download/fsol-papua_new_guinea-vinyl-199...
  • defrost 19d ago
    Aside from the name, what does it actually have to do with PNG aside from the imagining of Brits taking drugs in Manchester? ~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papua_New_Guinea_(instrumental) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papua_New_Guinea_(instrumental... Why not Pink Floyd's Mudmen and other tracks from Obscured by Clouds (named after the PNG highlands)(eg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-u7BPpAYsM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-u7BPpAYsM ) or even something with voice of a PNG artist, eg: Tabaran : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdvNFKL8h2U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdvNFKL8h2U
    • fiatpandas 19d ago
      They sampled a few of the sounds from a nature documentary on PNG.
  • papua_is_being_ 19d ago
    > I can't stop thinking about Papua New Guinea I can't stop crying about West Papua. It is such a horror story, an ecocide and a genocide happening simultaneously.
    • alt227 17d ago
      https://www.freewestpapua.org/ https://www.freewestpapua.org/
  • gbraad 19d ago
    Same thought here: FSOL, 1991. Classic Off-topic
  • tim333 19d ago
• hermitcrab 19d ago
  Fascinating read. I also found the stuff about PNG very interesting in Jared Diamond's 'Guns Germs and Steel'. IIRC he said you could trade and marry with the the tribes in the next valley. But if you want 2 valleys away, they would likely kill you.
  • emptyfile 19d ago
    [dead]
  • sampo 19d ago
    The mentioned book "First Contact: New Guinea's Highlanders Encounter the Outside World" is also a nice read. https://www.amazon.com/First-Contact-Guineas-Highlanders-Encounter/dp/0670801674 https://www.amazon.com/First-Contact-Guineas-Highlanders-Enc...
    • OrangeMusic 18d ago
      I really want to read it but can't find a digital version for my reader anywhere :(
      • sampo 18d ago
        https://archive.org/details/firstcontact00conn https://archive.org/details/firstcontact00conn
  • Der_Einzige 19d ago
    That book is so garbage, psudoscientific, empirically wrong, sinophobic, and I'm probably forgetting a bunch. Also lol to it's explanation for no beasts of burden in Africa. Sorry, folks have actually mostly domesticated the zebra. The explanations for why Zebra's were not domesticated after all this time are a massive cope. Even worse copes are the non recognition/misunderstandings of Elephant usage in large numbers for warfare / burden from Africa to India, "It is possible that having evolved under pressure from the many large predators of Africa, including early humans, they became more aggressive, thus making domestication more difficult.[104] However, zebras have been trained throughout history. In Rome, zebras are recorded to have pulled chariots during amphitheatre games starting in the reign of Caracalla (198 to 217 AD).[105] In the late 19th century, the zoologist Walter Rothschild trained some zebras to draw a carriage in England, which he drove to Buckingham Palace to demonstrate that it can be done. However, he did not ride on them knowing that they were too small and aggressive.[106] In the early 20th century, German colonial officers in East Africa tried to use zebras for both driving and riding, with limited success." Oh and also Africa had cattle and donkies and the donkey was actually domesticated in Africa. West African empires like Mali, Songhai, and the Oyo Empire famously maintained massive cavalry units. They adapted horses to tropical conditions, using them for state-building and warfare long before the arrival of Europeans. Also uhh Camels! Environmental Determinism is the ultimate racism.
• CarlitosHighway 19d ago
  [flagged]
  • pornel 19d ago
    or perhaps The Proper English has been adopted by LLMs, so now real people have to write like middle-schoolers to avoid being accused of publishing slop.
• deleted 19d ago
  [deleted]
• avazhi 19d ago
  > They were having bow and arrow battles as late as 1963 They still do this, in fact.
• jtotheh 19d ago
  I was there in '84, I have a page here with pictures and recordings of an interesting encounter. The subjects are from a coastal town though, not the highlands, but they were at the "Highlands Show". https://vin-dit.org/amyours.html https://vin-dit.org/amyours.html
  • jtotheh 19d ago
    Almost forgot - I was at the annual highlands "sing-sing" competition and took a lot of pix, but only really recently got them digitized. They're not that well-preserved etc but there's a ton of them here: https://vin-dit.org/goroka84/gallery1.html https://vin-dit.org/goroka84/gallery1.html
    • Gravityloss 19d ago
      Very nice music. It has the same song three times?
      • jtotheh 19d ago
        These are recordings I made on a walkman-like thing in 84, I don't remember all the details of the encounter. I think when I got them digitized and listened to them, they were separate recordings with some differences. Maybe the Amyours band only knew one song, or maybe we can't tell their songs apart. The one has me trying to talk to them in Tok Pisin asking what they call the thing where they hit the bamboo tubes with flip-flops and he responds "Bamboo!" "Thong!" :)
        • jtotheh 19d ago
          I realized it may not be apparent from my page; the dominant sound of the recordings sounds sort of like a rubbery bass guitar being played with a pick, but it's actually flip-flops striking the bamboo pipes they're sitting on. They had pipes in appropriate lengths to produce various notes.
      • TheOtherHobbes 19d ago
• wswin 19d ago
  What a useless title
• contingencies 19d ago
  I have a small collection of traditional PNG artifacts. Spears, masks, oars, axes, etc. I really like them and consider them generally very under-valued as evidence of the dominant technologies over the majority of human history. Some good places to see them are the Asian Museum in Lisbon, the Wereldmuseum in Rotterdam, the Ethnology Museum in Berlin.
• mintflow 19d ago
  What a joy to read this article, and the shell dump to the highlanders seems make me know a bit more of how money works and why bitcoin's scarcity make it have that high price
  • mechazawa 19d ago
    that's a pretty bad take away
    • scrumper 19d ago
      It's not a sophisticated take but if you haven't really thought about inflation before and its relationship to monetary supply it's a pretty good illustration. I'd not really want to knock someone for having an insight.
      • PhunkyPhil 19d ago
        The juxtaposition of someone's instinct to be thinking of bitcoin when reading about indigenous trade is at the best a bit funny, and at the worst small-minded when you consider the havoc those Australians brought onto their culture. Basically wiped out a foundational part of their way of life in an instant for their own gain. It's sad. That was my takeaway.
• walrus01 19d ago
  I did a ctrl-f in the article for "missionary" or "missionaries" and found nothing. There's a real problem (in my opinion) with weird evangelical Christian missionaries who treat the population of PNG as some sort of religious terra nullus. It's a bit weird to write a reasonably lengthy and detailed article about New Guinea and not mention the missionaries...? They see it as some great holy mission from god to go out into the hinterlands and convert the local people from their local existing belief system to their own particular form of Christianity. The "mission aviation foundation" collects considerable amounts of money to operate bush planes for this purpose. Edit: PNG is really the most egregious example, but there is clearly a phenomenon that exists of evangelical christian missionaries that seek out the "least developed" or most "bone in the nose" pre-technology isolated cultures and then do fervent work to convert them into dedicated followers of their own specific niche of Christianity. You'll see it in very rural parts of Africa as well. If you spend some time in the churches where they raise funds for these and look at the presentations of the guest speakers brought in to solicit funds for their ongoing missionary campaigns you'll know exactly what I'm talking about.
  • kurtis_reed 19d ago
    Congratulations on your opinion?
  • embedding-shape 19d ago
    Well, colonialism also been an issue for hundreds of years, but wouldn't it be boring to bring that up every time a country impacted by it is mentioned? This article is clearly not about missionaries, why would they be required to mention them? Half the world been impacted by missionaries one way or another, we'd never hear the end of it if it'd be mentioned every single time...
    • walrus01 19d ago
      It's a very incomplete picture of the situation in PNG to describe it in a reasonably lengthy article (particularly the situation in the post 1945 modern era) without at least spending a paragraph on the presence and influence of missionaries. It's like trying to describe Idaho and neglecting to mention the potato farming area in the fertile flat land within a few hundred km radius of Boise, for example. Missionaries put a very specific special emphasis and great deal of attention on PNG as a "target", so yes they're worldwide, but they're very much more so in PNG.
• etcetcetcetceta 19d ago
  why is there so much gps blocking on inland PNG, does anyone know?
  • nmeofthestate 19d ago
    Mountainous jungle terrain?
• jtotheh 19d ago
  This is interesting also (and very sad) https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/08/24/the-scientist-who-lived-with-dozens-of-children-from-the-south-pacific https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/08/24/the-scientist-...
  • nchase 19d ago
    I happened upon this article around the same time this was posted, too. Very sad indeed. Everything somehow kept getting worse after the cannibalism and the related neurological disease.
  • SamBam 18d ago
    TL;DR, one of the main scientists and Nobel Prize winners for his work on the Kuru disease and discovery of prions, Carleton Gajdusek, was also bringing home (essentially kidnapping) young boys from his expeditions, in theory to experiment with how well they could adapt to Western civilization, but in practice to sexually abuse them. And the NIH department that was funding him basically knew it and didn't care.
• dgarciaf18 19d ago
  this is peak rabbithole material
• broccoluvr 19d ago
  i remember been intrigued by Papua new guinea ages ago.. back in the day there was a documentary made by some italian dudes (my fellow countrymen) you could watch for free on YT, but i can't find it anymore.. Anyway.. there is this scene where they were witnessing some big show-off between two tribes and at some point everybody stops as they notice the white dudes and have to decide if they have to kill them or not, in the end they manage to bribe their way out of it.. crazy stuff, they even go visit some tribal ossuaries where the bones of the enemies are kept. Can't help but think of 'Chinua Achebe - Things Fall Apart' .. if you haven't read the book, you really should
• landgrave 19d ago
  Nitpicking here, but Finnish and Hungarian both arrived to Europe after PIE language family.
  • chr15m 18d ago
    Excellent.
• vertnerd 19d ago
  My first exposure to this was reading Lost in Shangri-La (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_in_Shangri-La https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_in_Shangri-La), which concerns the search for an airplane that crashed in PNG in 1945, the recovery of survivors, and the ensuing media sensation (heightened because one of the survivors was a woman).
  • Aethernaut 19d ago
    Just a fantastic book.
• wodenokoto 19d ago
  I think it is overall a well written and engaging article on a topic I knew nothing about. However, about half way through the author writes > The only place on the whole island where the two worlds nearly collide is the Markham valley […] Author then goes into a bit of detail on that place before giving two reasons why he believes “that”. Two reasons I cannot for the life of me parse > The reason why I believe that, despite the minimal trade that existed, the highlands were functionally cut off, is that when the Europeans occupied New Guinea, they themselves did not ever speak of or show knowledge of the highlanders. Similarly, when the highlanders first encountered Australians, they had no concept of the coastal people, or where the shells came from, or any further concept of the broader world. So the reason the highlanders world nearly collided with the coastal dwellers at Markham Valley is because the Europeans didn’t meet the highlanders when they occupied the island? The other reason is to do with genetics, which I find equally detached from the core subject of those paragraphs.
  • bradrn 19d ago
    No, the reason it occurred in the Markham Valley is because of the bit immediately after that sentence: > a 1,000 metre climb over about 30 km takes you straight up onto the edge of the eastern highlands i.e. because the Markham River provides a pathway from the Lowlands into the Highlands. The paragraph you quote concerns a different proposition, as may be clearer if some of the subordinate clauses are elided: > The reason why I believe that […] the highlands were functionally cut off, is that […] they themselves did not ever speak of or show knowledge of the highlanders. Similarly, when the highlanders first encountered Australians, they had no concept of the coastal people, or where the shells came from, or any further concept of the broader world.
    • walrus01 19d ago
      As I understand it one of the reasons why PNG developed so many unique languages is the extreme geographic complexity of the place. This resulted in language developing in isolation. I have a personal theory that people living hunter/gatherer or very small scale subsistence agriculture lifestyles historically did not have a ton of surplus calories to spend on hiking over multiple ridges and mountain ranges to discover who's living in the valley 45 km away. The complexity of the jungle environment also makes it very difficult to 'bush whack' through somewhere that no trail exists. And if a foot trail isn't frequently used it will become overgrown very quickly. Google "language isolates in papua new guinea". https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=language+isolates+in+papua+new+guinea https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=language+...
• jchook 19d ago
  Never going to be able to see “PNG” written again without secretly thinking “Papua New Guinea” in my mind.
  • layer8 18d ago
    I submit Jean-Paul Gaultier for your consideration.
• philipallstar 19d ago
  > They practice cannibalism, and Michael Rockefeller was likely eaten there, and maybe Joe Biden’s uncle too - and one group ate their dead relatives’ brains at funerals so consistently that they gave themselves a mad cow type disease called kuru, which killed a large percentage of their population and then, within a few generations, evolved a genetic mutation that protects against it, one of the fastest cases of natural selection ever documented in humans > Jared Diamond thinks the people there are genetically smarter than Europeans Never seen two consecutive paragraphs so completely contradict each other.
  • elil17 19d ago
    Well Jared Diamond is referring to individual intelligence, not the wisdom of their cultural practices. More specifically, he states: "My perspective on this controversy comes from 33 years of working with New Guineans in their own intact societies. From the very beginning of my work with New Guineans, they impressed me as being on the average more intelligent, more alert, more expressive, and more interested in things and people around them than the average European or American is. At some tasks that one might reasonably suppose to reflect aspects of brain function, such as the ability to form a mental map of unfamiliar surroundings, they appear considerably more adept than Westerners. Of course, New Guineans tend to perform poorly at tasks that Westerners have been trained to perform since childhood and that New Guineans have not. Hence when unschooled New Guineans from remote villages visit towns, they look stupid to Westerners. Conversely, I am constantly aware of how stupid I look to New Guineans when I’m with them in the jungle, displaying my incompetence at simple tasks (such as following a jungle trail or erecting a shelter) at which New Guineans have been trained since childhood and I have not."
    • nephihaha 19d ago
      Jared Diamond's whole thesis in Gun, Germs etc is post hoc ergo propter hoc.
    • BoingBoomTschak 18d ago
      No control for prosperity. Lifelong comfort insidiously cripples any people on all these levels. For a fun novel on the very subject, read The Dosadi Experiment.
• mrngld 19d ago
  > they had no way to evolve past this stage of development That infantilizes them, in my opinion. Their state then was an early state of many people around the world that made different choices that lead to different results. They made choices, those choices had consequences, and no one decided to do otherwise -- OR, if they did, they failed and have been lost to history. But lets not remove their agency.
  • hermitcrab 19d ago
    The environment makes a very real difference to what outcomes are possible/likely. It is hard to create a complex society if there is little food surplus and no real way to store food long term.
• som 19d ago
  My parents lived in the highlands in PNG in the late 70s and early 80s and my dad still speaks pidgin (mostly with his current neighbours who are from Port Moresby the capital). I've heard of lot of amazing (and pretty wild!) stories over the years. And met some interesting folk who up were up there with them - locals, missionaries and others. But despite our childhood being fairly steeped in PNG culture - and my name being from there, after a local who used to work with my dad - the closest I've been myself is the Torres Strait :/
  • dyzone 19d ago
    Share some stories with us!
  • yitchelle 19d ago
    That was an amazing introduction to your stories. I would love to hear them.
  • walrus01 19d ago
    I would bet $20 your parents were either evangelical missionaries or working with something directly adjacent to their efforts. Now at the risk of over generalizing, there's basically three major reasons why (presumably white, foreign) people go up into the highland of PNG to live for extended periods of time: 1. Mining 2. Missionary work and ancillary things related to it. 3. Anthropological and linguistic research, biology/ecosystem related research and similar.
    • embedding-shape 19d ago
      [flagged]
      • walrus01 19d ago
        Right, because before today, I have such an extensive history of commenting on missionaries or PNG. My HN history is replete with it! I'm so predictable.
• ls-a 19d ago
  [dead]
• merek 19d ago
  Original footage of PNG tribe's first contact with white man in 1993, filmed by Jean Pierre Dutilleux, Belgian anthropologist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ynx14JEYbyI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ynx14JEYbyI
  • walrus01 19d ago
    Does anyone know what they're smoking in that big pipe at about 25:15 into the video? Imagine showing up in a remote village as an anthropologist and after a few hours the first thing the villagers ask you to partake in is the equivalent of a huge bong hit. And you don't want to offend anyone by refusing...
    • merek 19d ago
      Probably tobacco. The article mentions it was introduced to PNG in the last few hundred years, and the plant made its way into the highland tribes despite limited travel and trade.
    • merek 19d ago
      Actually your comment reminds me of this guy who travels to Vanuatu to try really strong kava. The village chief invites him to drink multiple bowls, which he can't refuse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BtP_B4TBWs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BtP_B4TBWs
      • ramses0 19d ago
        Best place to drop this (related to Vanuatu): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meet_the_Natives:_USA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meet_the_Natives:_USA https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfovX-ia33tF-6W_gfTvLrbeRoHTdiyCo https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfovX-ia33tF-6W_gfTvL... ...basically this is the "take a few near-pre-contact villagers around the U.S. and show them how cool the rest of the world is" that the article talks about. There was another show (might have been "Going Tribal(?)") which did the reverse, where a "modern man" tried to integrate into daily life tribal life, eg: setting fish traps, mauling taro root, trying not to scare away rabbits while hunting with bows and slings, etc.
• axiologist 19d ago
  The mentioned book "First Contact" at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/firstcontact00conn https://archive.org/details/firstcontact00conn The documentary movie related to that book: https://archive.org/details/firstcontact_201602 https://archive.org/details/firstcontact_201602 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Contact_(1983_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Contact_(1983_film)
• jgalt212 19d ago
  Geographic Determinism https://www.litcharts.com/lit/guns-germs-and-steel/themes/geographic-determinism https://www.litcharts.com/lit/guns-germs-and-steel/themes/ge...
• tt_dev 19d ago
  Really well written
• tobin1994 19d ago
  [dead]
• gbraad 19d ago
  Off topic: 1991 Future Sound of London, great song!
• neya 19d ago
  If you live in Asia/Singapore, you know the bulk of the scam calls originate from here unfortunately.
• rembal 19d ago
  Having actually travelled there, a lot of authors assumptions are invalid in a way that reveals our (euro-american) biases. There are no roads, but people travel by plane (both jets, our guide made a joke that there are two kinds of airlines in Papua, ones that crash into mountains and into the sea, or prop on grassy landing strips, you can look up videos from visiting remote villages, those pilots are super skilled) and on the coast - by boat. Smartphones, solar panels, FC Barcelona t-shirts and catholic church made their way into the mountains and jungle before any other sort of infrastructure, and so did the tourists and fake attractions: fake cannibals, fake legends and fake customs (even BBC fell for some). Demand gives birth to supply. One super interesting thing the author does not mention is that Papua is the last stand for betel nut chewing: you can try it if you're into light psychedelics. I can also shill my video essay here of anybody is interested in listening to pseudophilosophical/journey journal ramblings in heavy accent: https://youtu.be/0cCoZguizdg?is=o-5urE4E2GTolaDv https://youtu.be/0cCoZguizdg?is=o-5urE4E2GTolaDv
  • hermitcrab 19d ago
    I read somewhere that the famous tall stilt houses were now mostly made to attract tourists.
    • rembal 19d ago
      That's true and that's what BBC fell for (korowai tribe in eastern Papua AFAIR).
  • anon84873628 19d ago
    Betel nut chewing is still found lots of places in South and Southeast Asia.
    • rembal 19d ago
      Not to that extent: it's against regulations in most cities from Singapore (obviously) to Saigon, and it's considered 'old people thing' in general. In Papua you see people with red teeth all the time, blood like stains on sidewalks accompanied by tiny zipper bags, which are very intriguing when you're out of context. I saw a mother giving betel to her 10 yo daughter on a boat ride - It is a bit calming, so...
• DanielVZ 19d ago
  > This was fuelled by what is known as moka, a system of competitive gift giving, where you give someone in your tribe goods like a pile of pigs and shells, and they are then obligated to give you back more later, and you them more again after that. Whoever gives the most, publicly, becomes the big man. This reminds me of the Reciprocity and Re-Distribution system in the Inca Empire. There wasn't a system of currency or markets. But there was an Ayni (mutual aid) and Minka (collective work) system, paired with a Mita system: work done for the Sapa Inca which was in return "paid" by the Sapa Inca in feasts, food and goods/gifts. This was all glued together by the concept of Ayllu (family), where these obligations were established through family connections and of course the Sapa Inca had marriage connections with subordinate chiefs. I myself can't stop thinking about the Inca Empire Economy and how it shows in reality that currency is not about the paper nor number nor symbols, and more about the "I owe you"s that move in the economy.
  • weakfish 19d ago
    I’d recommend reading the late David Graeber’s “Debt” which does a good job illustrating exactly what you described, which is how currency is at its core an IOU
    • amunozo 19d ago
      I cannot recommend reading this book enough.
    • Henchman21 18d ago
      So… does it follow that the very wealthy basically hold a massive IOU to the general public?
      • marcosdumay 18d ago
        If by wealthy you mean people with a lot of money specifically, than no, the IOU is the other way around.
      • DanielVZ 18d ago
        To expand the sibling comment. In principle the money would reflect IOUs the general public owes them. But also following this logic the way I see it is they accumulated their money was by getting more IOUs through: people employment (being able to command a big pool of work and get a cut of IOUs from it), arbitrage (exchanging lower value IOUs with higher value IOUs), or simply stealing (eg. siphoning government resources).
• smackeyacky 19d ago
  Almost the entire tech crew who were working for Honeywell in Canberra seemed to be from a team that worked in Port Moresby in the late seventies to maybe the early eighties. Their stories were mostly a mix of late stage colonialism and machete terror.
  • Quarrel 17d ago
    and I thought I was old.. My Dad worked for Honeywell in the 70s, in Australia. tbh, I just google'd them and they're still in the Nasdaq-100, 100k employees .. damn. I'm not sure of when I last heard of them. I still think of them as old school punch cards and reels of tapes.
• inshard 19d ago
  Hunter gatherer battles are probably less mass casualty events vs agricultural society battles.
• nosmokewhereiam 19d ago
  Not related but See also: future sound of London's version of P.N.G.
  • ngcazz 19d ago
    one of the all time great rave tracks
• podocarp 19d ago
  This is super interesting given that I had just watched an episode of survivorman where Les Stroud was given the "sing sing" ceremony by the villagers in the mountains, and also was wondering how they learned English that far up in the mountains.
• spidey1 19d ago
  A lot of this appears to be sensationalist and racist and it completely ignores the fact that half of the island (West Papua) is under illegal Indonesian occupation and suffering a genocide in which over 500,000 Indigenous people have been killed. https://www.survivalinternational.org/peoples/papuan https://www.survivalinternational.org/peoples/papuan
• kleton 19d ago
  It is perhaps a blessing that the climate of the Papua lowlands makes the potato impossible to grow. While the potato would grow in the cooler highlands, this village to village transmission mechanism would not get the potato past the hot lowlands where plants would rot in the ground. The potato yields a lot more calories per hectare than the sweet potato, and when introduced to New Zealand, fueled massive wars.
  • pimlottc 17d ago
    Dang, I did not know about this part of New Zealand's history, what an incredible and sad story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musket_Wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musket_Wars
• catigula 19d ago
  The idea that they’re genetically smarter than Europeans beggars belief.
• HexDecOctBin 19d ago
  > when the Australians later sent highlanders to work on coastal plantations in the 1950s, they died at alarming rates What is this referring to? Indentured Servitude? Slavery?
  • weberer 19d ago
    It says Malaria further in.
    • HexDecOctBin 19d ago
      No, I am asking why were Australians sending the Highlanders anywhere? By what right? Why were they leaving?
      • MaxHoppersGhost 18d ago
        Probably because living in PNG sucks and they would rather risk their lives at a chance of improving their condition. Same reason immigrants came from Germany to the US to live in mud dugout houses in the plains. Or immigrants go anywhere really.
• xhevahir 19d ago
  I love reading about that place, too, but I want to point out that > They practice cannibalism, and Michael Rockefeller was likely eaten there is kind of misleading. If you read Carl Hoffman's book Savage Heart you see that the tribe that are suspected to have eaten Michael Rockefeller probably gave up cannibalism for good not long afterward (i.e. the early 60s).
  • gafferongames 19d ago
    > If you read Carl Hoffman's book Savage Heart you see that the tribe that are suspected to have eaten Michael Rockefeller probably gave up cannibalism for good not long afterward (i.e. the early 60s). He must have tasted pretty bad then.
• forinti 19d ago
  There's a book called Kuru by an Australian doctor who worked in PNG and studied the disease. IIRC, it's by Michael Alpers. It's a fascinating book, and it's a mixture of adventure, medicine, and anthropology. I highly recommend it if you can find it.
• gafferongames 19d ago
  I lived in Igam Barracks in Lae for 2 years when my father was posted there from the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF). His name is William Fiedler. The trappings of colonialism were still all around when we stayed there in the mid 80s. We had a house Mary who came over from a nearby village and worked for us, Mrs C. There was a hut behind each house for the house Mary or house man. Pidgin English was spoken. Betel nut stains covered the sidewalks in Lae. Still it was an incredible experience for a 10 year old I'd like to go back one day, but it's unlikely I'll ever get the chance. Truly an amazing place and people.
  • Aboutplants 19d ago
    Why is it unlikely? Seems like quite the adventure to pursue at some point in your life as a small goal. You should pursue it before your body decides for you.
    • gafferongames 19d ago
      Because it's a dangerous place my friend
  • 747-8I 18d ago
    Lived in Lae as well, em tasol. Did middle & high school at tisol. Many ppl I've met since then cant believe that I lived in png - until I show pics.
• daggersandscars 19d ago
  You may be interested in Ongka's Big Maca (1974)[0]. It is a documentary that shows how the Big Man system and gift based economy work in PNG by following a specific Big Man's (Ongka) effort to put together a huge gift to increase his social status. It's a classic intro to anthropology film. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ongka%27s_Big_Moka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ongka%27s_Big_Moka
• redwood 19d ago
  Great article but there's one bizarre statement that just kind of hangs without a clear connection to the rest of the piece. They describe how bird skins are exported without feet.. yet nowhere do they claim that the yighlanders prized feet ... they prized seashells. What else am I missing?
• Giorgi 19d ago
  >Jared Diamond thinks the people there are genetically smarter than Europeans Well Jared Diamond sounds like a stupid person.
• leo_ilands 19d ago
  [flagged]
• simoncourage 19d ago
  My father lived in the PNG Highlands for a year in 1960 when he was 19, joining a mission station in Simbai (that had only been visited by the white man maybe 5 years earlier) and had an incredible time. He hatched an idea to help the manpower challenge of trekking supplies between the highland villages, by bringing donkeys to the highlands. He bought 5 donkeys left behind by the Japanese in WW2 in Lae, and together with two boys from the village (Wengi and Kanimnep), who’d never Simbai before, brought them by sea and plane to Aiome, where a gruelling and dangerous trek eventually got man and beast successfully back to Simbai - 4 months later. Crazy adventure, can you imagine what the boys thought of flying in a plane, seeing the ocean and becoming donkey husbandry experts (my father could only explain they were like ‘big pigs’ - nothing similar at all in the highlands) 50 years or so later I found there was a Cultural Festival in Simbai where about 20 tourists would go each year, and went out with some mates, along with prints of my dads slides. What followed was a trip I’ll never forget, as I was welcomed with a warmth and strength unlike I’d ever experienced, from the whole village and particularly from Wengi’s son Steven (his father had sadly died a few years previously). Whilst the donkeys had not transformed travel in a Simbai, and never bred, they were fondly recalled and had shaped the lives of both Wengi (forever known by others as Donkey) and Kanimnep. It was particularly joyous to be able to hand out pictures of peoples parents or family, who never had any photo of them or had any idea one could even exist, before some random person turned up one day I left convinced that my father needed to return, and we did so four years later with me and my mother, which was a mind boggling trip - and another story. It’s an extraordinary country, and incredible to have this documentation of first contact with tribes that had no idea the outside world existed. Highly recommend the First Contact book and film
  • kreco 18d ago
    Thanks for sharing!
  • debo_ 19d ago
    I hear the PNG Highlands are quite picturesque.
    • simoncourage 18d ago
• acquirk 19d ago
  I took a sociology class at Ball State in 2000 and the one thing that stuck with me is that some PNG groups would eat their neighboring tribesmen in an attempt to absorb their spiritual power. Pretty metal. Wouldn't want to be their neighbor.
• ddp26 19d ago
  I spent a summer in PNG in 2010, on the island of Karkar. It was wild. One of my most formative memories was finding out that few of the people who live there, even those who are literate, had books and some DVDs, were high school students, even had occasional access to computers with internet, knew that humanity had landed on the moon!
• gaoshan 19d ago
  One line that got me wondering: "...and one group ate their dead relatives’ brains at funerals so consistently that they gave themselves a mad cow type disease called kuru, which killed a large percentage of their population and then, within a few generations, evolved a genetic mutation that protects against it" I had heard this before but my question now is, did they develop this tradition recently? If it were a historical thing wouldn't that genetic mutation have evolved a long time ago? One would expect that if they had this tradition for a long time the genetic mutation that happened so rapidly would have happened long ago, yet it did not. I'm curious as that thought struck me just now.
  • Sniffnoy 19d ago
    At least according to this article[1], you're correct; the practice of eating brains that caused kuru to spread was a recent innovation. However, the article doesn't say how recent. I guess I'd need to go read the actual book, since I can't quickly find anything else on how long this was occurring. [1] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-the-family-that https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-the-family...
  • OkayPhysicist 18d ago
    CJD develops in about 1/1,000,000 people per year globally, and the Fore people have a population of ~20,000. In theory, that suggests there should be an outbreak within 50 years of the society regularly consuming brain matter. Perhaps that number could be reduced somewhat by the infection rate, but the infection rate seems pretty high, to reach the level it did as fast as it did each person with Kuru needed to infect 1.6 people. Perhaps sporadic CJD isn't as sporadic as we assume, and it's tied to being in environments where others have had CJD? Another possibility is tied to the seeming link between genetics and the infection rate of Mad Cow Disease. Perhaps the population regularly went through boom-bust cycles, where everybody with 2 copies of the recessive gene that makes one more susceptible to transmission gets killed off, then the disease dies off for a long enough time for the carriers to re-introduce their recessive trait back into the gene pool.
• alt227 19d ago
  I personally know Benny Wenda and the Wenda family. Benny Wenda was the West Papuan President before his people were overthrown and violently ousted by the Indonesian government in part in order to gain full control of the largest gold mine in the world, Grasberg mine. The family is still in exile in the UK, and are trying to raise awareness via the Free Papua Movement which aims to separate West Papua from Indonesia and create an independent state. If you care about injustice in the world, have a quick read up on the situation and maybe share the link if you feel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benny_Wenda https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benny_Wenda https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Papua_Movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Papua_Movement https://www.freewestpapua.org/ https://www.freewestpapua.org/
• elmomle 19d ago
  This is fascinating, and there's a key inconsistency in the article that points to an unresolved mystery. The author posits that sweet potatoes and tobacco moved into the highlands through intermarriage. Yet he later acknowledges that genetic evidence suggests no mixing of the highland people with the coastal people. So to me the mystery remains of how those crops got there.
  • kenjackson 19d ago
    There's a key phrase you may have missed. "So the plants crossed over and started moving east along the coast and up into the interior. Beyond that point, there were no merchants. But when a woman married into the next clan over, she took cuttings from her family’s garden with her." The key phrase is "Beyond that point", where that point is up into the interior where there were no merchants. That's when marriage took over.
• oconnor663 19d ago
  "A Blank on the Map" is an incredible documentary about this sort of contact, though 40 years later. Here's an un-paywalled link: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xsynjb https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xsynjb
• jdndndnf 19d ago
  [flagged]
• initramfs 18d ago
  In 2005, I took an ethnography class at my university. There were about 10 students (it was an advanced course - Rhetoric and an introductory Anthropology course were pre-requisites). I didn't travel abroad (although some did), and did a book report on Dr. Robert Klitzman: Wrote The Trembling Mountain: A Personal Account of Kuru, Cannibals, and Mad Cow Disease (1998). At the time, I was majoring in microbiology- studying bacteria, although my coursework covered the basics of prions, which were a relatively new type of virus- a protein one. I was quite disgusted by the whole thing, but I researched it anyways out of a morbid curiousity. https://www.amazon.ca/Trembling-Mountain-Personal-Account-Cannibals-ebook/dp/B00A4JMZVO https://www.amazon.ca/Trembling-Mountain-Personal-Account-Ca... I suppose it's good that some Papua New Guineans evolved immunity to it- I had not heard of such immunity at the time, or at least it wasn't prevalent enough that it was confirmed, but it still of course is an "unspeakable" practice.. I hope I don't get it. https://youtu.be/gQDqRlMeJ4U?t=197 https://youtu.be/gQDqRlMeJ4U?t=197 Maybe other places in the world, such as the river burials in India may develop immunity.
• deleted 18d ago
  [deleted]
• worik 18d ago
  Read a book. Wrote a blog Got nothing to say
• trinsic2 18d ago
  Im kind of sad that tribes, who have never been exposed to the modern world, get exposed to the damaging effects of materialism. It reminds me of that film "The gods must be crazy" [0] [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gods_Must_Be_Crazy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gods_Must_Be_Crazy The moral of the story is that things, when they are coveted, can destroy our humanity. I feel like we are destroying ourselves with modernity and to bring that to a culture like this is dangerous.
  • riffraff 18d ago
    Jared Diamond speaks of this in one of his book (I think "Collapse", but I may be wrong), and highlights how we romanticize the pre-modern world, but we have the clear example of people in PNG who are absolutely super happy to abandon it and join the modern one. (the modern world has plenty of problems, of course)
    • trinsic2 18d ago
      This isnt romanticizing premodern world. Modern doesn't equal better, but I understand the knee jerk reaction to calling out the serious problems with our current society that nobody wants to face.
• medion 18d ago
  If you enjoy the story and history of PNG, be sure to delve into Bougainville - there is a great documentary called 'The Coconut Revolution' if you can find it somewhere.
• poody 18d ago
  FSOL
• hmokiguess 18d ago
  > What I find so fascinating about all of this is just how separated this group was from the rest of history, and that there will never be a finding like this ever again. The world has effectively been explored, but as late as 1930 that wasn’t the case. Honestly, I am not so sure about this.
• ksudb 18d ago
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• pattt 18d ago
  It seems like Alzheimer’s and prion diseases like Kuru share a core molecular mechanism with misfolded proteins propagating and causing brain lesions. I find it really interesting that the gene protecting against Kuru has evolved naturally when according to Wikipedia, prion diseases don’t seem to have any effective treatments.
  • kylehotchkiss 18d ago
    Cells have machinery for removing worn out proteins (tag em with ubiquitin and send them to incinerator [lysomes]). Doesn't surprise me too much a useful mutation (this folding is wrong detector) could work its way in.
• malbs 18d ago
  No one complaining about substack's forced age-verification now.... Maybe it's because I'm in AU. Anyways... https://archive.is/rs2jc https://archive.is/rs2jc
• aadyachinubhai 18d ago
  The title of this post is super intriguing
• NeoByte 18d ago
  [dead]
• peterashford 17d ago
  I was a volunteer in PNG at the PNG Institute of Medical Research, which at that time was run by Michael Alpers, the guy who did the initial scientific investigation into Kuru - the disease mentioned in the article. Fascinating stuff. I lived for just over half a year in Goroka the highlands, then a further year in Madang on the north coast. That was 25 years ago now but I will never forget it.
• 453yuh46 15d ago
  "the same way Indo-European wiped out almost every older language in Europe (except Basque, Finnish/Hungarian)" First of all Uralic languages arrived in Europe after Indo-European language arrived. So around 10 000 years ago, where they mostly were staying in eastern corner of Europe for most of the time. Finnish ethnicity developed under Swedish occupation(before that what is now known as Finland was populated by Karelians), so it is ~ 9th-10th century. Hungarians arrived in central Europe around the same time - around 10th century. ^ They both are very late and one of latest linguistical developments in Europe. There are certainly even younger language developments, but these are one of the youngest "historical" Europeans. Basque is not older language of Europe, that predates IE. It is most probably one of the remnant IE languages or IE transitional languages from earliest IE waves, as current IE languages in Europe are from 3000 years old IE update. Indo-Europeans(IE) themselves did not came to Europe - they actually formed in Eastern Europe(and then spread across to Asia - including Southern Asia - where Indo part is). We do not know what language ancestors of IE were speaking in shores of lake Baikal 30 000 years ago and before, but in Europe they were present from the time period when ice sheets were expanding in the world and which most probably drove them to Europe. Ancestors of IE were already there from the earliest history of Europe - mainly in eastern part of Europe, where they were present from long before, but also in rest of Europe they were from Ice Age - long before arrival of genocidal Anatolian Farmers, that they eventually assimilated as well.