I can't stop thinking about Papua New Guinea
TL;DR
Until 1930, outsiders thought New Guinea's mountain interior was empty. Then gold prospector Mick Leahy walked in and found about a million farmers. He filmed the encounter. Daniel Frank explains how the highlanders stayed cut off from the outside world for 10,000 years. Crops and pigs reached them from the coast, but knowledge of the wider world did not. Papua New Guinea, or PNG, still runs on clan loyalty today.
The article
- In 1930, Leahy climbed out of the Markham valley looking for gold. He found roughly a million people in malaria-free highland valleys. Colonial officials had believed the interior was empty rock. Leahy recorded the contact in thousands of photos and hours of film.
- The highlanders first took the Australians for ghosts of their dead relatives. Shells were the highlanders' scarce prestige currency. The Australians flew them in by the planeload to buy food and labour, until shells became worthless.
- New Guinea invented agriculture on its own about 10,000 years ago. It was the first to domesticate bananas and sugarcane. But taro rots within weeks, and there were no draft animals or writing. So no surplus built up. The valleys stayed groups of a few hundred people at constant war. Non-hereditary "big men" led them and won status through competitive gift giving, called moka.
- Goods crossed the barrier, but knowledge of where they came from did not. The sweet potato reached the highlands 300 to 400 years ago. Brides carried garden cuttings from clan to clan. The crop set off a population boom. Yet nobody knew where it came from beyond the neighbouring tribe.
- Genetics backs up the isolation claim. Coastal people carry 10 to 30% Austronesian ancestry and dense malaria-resistance mutations. Highlanders have neither.
- PNG today has almost no roads, and the capital connects to nowhere. Nobody knows if its population is 10 or 17 million. Loyalty runs through wantok, the people who speak your language, rather than any national identity.
Why it matters
Read it for the shell hyperinflation story and the argument for why plants reached the highlands while knowledge of their origins didn't. Frank also points to the book and documentary First Contact by Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson, which have the actual photos and footage.
The discussion
A big and mostly warm thread. The best parts are firsthand accounts from people whose parents worked in the highlands. The rest argues about the 1963 battle footage, the article's silence on missionaries, and Jared Diamond. Smaller fights cover Indonesia's rule over West Papua and some of the article's claims about history and language.
Ritual battles or lethal raids
The embedded 1963 battle video started the longest argument, over whether highland fighting was ritual tit-for-tat that rarely killed anyone. Several commenters, one citing an anthropology class, said battles ended at the first serious injury or when it rained. Others answered that pre-state warfare is mostly night raids and massacres, and one cited over 20% of PNG men dying from enemy action. A few pointed out that guns arrived in the 1970s and 80s and made the old feuds far deadlier.
I took an anthropology class that focused heavily on the Papua New Guinea highlanders and they fight a ritualized tit-for-tat warfare where they rarely kill and when they do, it’s essentially tribal revenge for the last kill.
In PNG in particular, as I recall, it gets to the point where >20% of all males die from enemy action.
Missionaries, the missing chapter
One commenter faulted the article for skipping missionaries, who did much of the later exploration and still fly bush planes into remote villages. Others replied that gold prospectors made first contact, and that PNG's parliament recently voted 80-4 to declare it a Christian nation. The argument then split over whether isolated people can judge outside ideas for themselves, or whether calling them unequipped is condescending. A doctor's son described secular aid work alongside missions that had finished converting people generations earlier.
I did a ctrl-f in the article for "missionary" or "missionaries" and found nothing.
The mission wasn't currently converting the local population – that had already happened generations ago - and much of the local population combined Christianity with elements of their indigenous belief systems.
Stories from people who were there
The top comment tells of a father who took five donkeys into Simbai in 1960. The son returned 50 years later with prints of the slides and received a festival, new songs and a guest house named for the family. Others had parents in the highlands in the 70s and 80s, and one met Karkar island students who didn't know about the moon landing. The newer accounts are much darker, describing a lawlessness that people who worked there in the 1970s did not see.
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
It's sad because I know of people who worked there in the 1970s (for Australians it was close to home but a bit of extra money because it was overseas) and it was apparently fine back then, but lawlessness has well and truly taken over.
West Papua under Indonesia
Several commenters said the article ignores the western half of the island, where they call Indonesian rule colonial and its treatment of Papuans genocide. Their evidence was a mining economy built around the Grasberg mine, a 2024 torture case, and tight limits on journalists. One commenter disputed the claim that no one can get in, pointing to tourism in the Baliem Valley and Raja Ampat. A side argument covered how much the US was responsible for Suharto taking power.
Indigenous West Papuans are being genocided by settlers from Java.
This is not to dismiss the scale of state violence against the OPM and any civilians caught in the net, but Papua is hardly a hermetically sealed off North Korea.
Diamond, geography, and the article's claims
The article's line about Jared Diamond calling New Guineans genetically smarter pulled in the usual Guns, Germs and Steel fight. One side called environmental determinism racist and sinophobic, and the other said explaining history by geography is the opposite of racism. Other readers checked the article itself, noting that Finnish and Hungarian reached Europe after Indo-European, and that the evidence shows isolation rather than causing it. One reader gave a linguist's count of 862 languages in 43 families and 37 isolates.
Diamond says that the reasons Europeans colonised South America (rather than vice versa) is largely due to geographic factors, not due to any inherent genetic superiority of European over South Americans. I don't see how that is racist.
Consensus
Most readers found the first-contact story and the shell hyperinflation episode gripping. They recommended the First Contact book and documentary, which are free on the Internet Archive. They agreed that PNG today is hard to govern, dangerous in places, and held together by clan rather than state.
Dissent
One group thought the article leaves out too much. It never mentions missionaries or Indonesia's rule over West Papua. It repeats sensational tidbits about cannibalism and Diamond's genetics claim. And saying highlanders "had no way to evolve" past their stage of development denies them agency.