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 :/
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.
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.
Well, in the sense that I'm resolutely opposed to the efforts of missionaries in general and personally believe they have caused a great deal of harm to indigenous cultures around the world, more like the anti-gospel.
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]).
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.
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.
Possibly, but look at modern times. It takes years to build social constructs that might guide us towards cooperation and non-violence. They can be overturned in an instant by a slick turn of phrase that appeals to our genetics.
3. Handing a people that can not progress, exponential tech, without which they regress, but which also kills them all when they regress, is a trapdoor function worthy of St.Fermi .
They had had a long battle with what looks to be hundreds of participants and there were a few wounded, but nobody died. Compare with e.g. battles in the ancient Mediterranean, where the fighting would have continued until one side panics and tries to flee, and the winning side kills anyone who can't run away fast enough. Now maybe they're simply bad at warfare, but I think a more likely explanation is that they're intentionally not escalating to that level of violence and mostly stay at a standoff distance where fatalities are unlikely. The narrator also calls it a "formal battle" at one point.
In any case, I don't think you can ascribe much of their bow-and-arrow tactics to base instincts.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
My preferred source for these things is Palmer’s Language families of the New Guinea Area [0] (part of the extremely comprehensive book, The Languages and Linguistics of the New Guinea Area). Page 10 has a nice map of language families and isolates.
Jared Diamond (not sure which book - perhaps Guns, Germs and Steel) makes the claim that it was because areas were productive enough that people didn't need to move and also heavily protected from other incursion from other tribes - travelling outside your groups territory or meeting a group of people you didn't know was effectively suicide. So although there was occasional trade - no people or knowledge was transferred - which explains why there's over 1000 (very different) languages.
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
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 ).
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.
A book 'The Jakarta Method' by Vincent Bevis is a great exploration of those events and similar cases of deliberate destruction of the independent third world.
> The resistance is ongoing and most of West Papua
I'm unsure if that's an accurate description. I would say it is more accurate to say that West Papua is being genocided. Indigenous West Papuans are being genocided by settlers from Java. More than 500,000 West Papuans have been killed according to estimates by indigenous groups. It is hard to verify since Javanese settlers (Prabowo is Javanese) control the army and no media or journalists, and not even Indonesians are allowed to enter West Papua. This year, thousands of excavators were shipped on barges into West Papua. Western corporations like Freeport McMoran are complicit. It is horrific to see videos that have come out. There is one which I saw, I still get nightmares. It is an indigenous Papuan man being skinned alive in a drum of water. The name that was spread was Defianus Kogoya. It is so sad... West Papua was one of the most beautiful places on this planet with inland seawater lakes that had non-venomous jellyfish in Misool. Cave systems with handprints said to pre-date the Toba erruption. All of this being destroyed.
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.
> 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.
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
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
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!" :)
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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...
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.
> 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.
Why don't you read through the article before you comment on how incomplete or not it is? It's literally not about missionaries but about something else, the first contact with those tribes, which wasn't missionaries at all, but seemingly gold prospectors, if I skimmed correctly.
I read the article and I comprehend the English language. The article puts a specific emphasis on foreigners "discovering" that the rural interior of the country was populated, and foreigners going up into the highlands and contacting the local people. A great many of those foreigners were (and still are) missionaries.
It's a well documented historical fact that a great deal of the "exploration" of the interior of PNG was by Christian missionaries.
> A great many of those foreigners were (and still are) missionaries.
Sure, but not in this case, that the article we're supposed to be discussing, is about! Does every article about PNG need to include that Christian missionaries at one point were there, even if the events the article discusses isn't about Christian missionaries? Like some sort of legally enforced disclaimer in the footer or whatever? Why the crusade here, against some random article about something else??
To be clear I don't have a beef with the author of the article, but the missionaries themselves. I just thought it was odd to write an article about foreigners going up into the PNG highlands and not mention missionaries at all.
Not sure whether it's intentional in the context, but interesting Freudian slip type use of the word "crusade", you might want to consider its etymology and origins.
Very much intentional, because just like the crusades, you're fighting against some imaginary enemy in a very misplaced location. The article is about different set of foreigners going to the highlands, the first ones, which weren't missionaries, so of course the article doesn't talk about 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.
Call me apologist, but I can see no real problem with that. They are willing to take risks and have enough motivation to spend resources. Whatever I think about their belief system in my opinion they are free to do that.
It's not 1800s, if the given population doesn't like missionaries, as far as I'm aware it's equally free not to listen to them. Or to throw them out.
Cargo culting is still a thing, the power imbalance is still real here. Kicking people out is generally much trickier than letting them in, these aren't simple things. Remote populations aren't global idea consumers at the internet-accessible global ideas mart.
At the risk of taking the bait, what percentage of PNG highland villagers living in grass thatched huts do you think have 24x7 electricity and broadband Internet and intermediate to advanced level literacy in one of the Internet's major languages?
It’s not bait. I don’t think the OP that I responded to was speaking about the mechanics of introducing these populations to the Internet (they’re welcome to correct me) but that they shouldn’t be introduced to such things or that the introduction would be tantamount to exploitation of some sort.
I read it more as that a remote highlands PNG villager is not "innoculated" against the concept of, and is not aware of the methodologies that will be used by odd foreigners who have a well thought out plan to convert people to their specific ideology.
Like, if you're out shopping and some person starts up a weirdly friendly conversation with you that leads to a MLM sales pitch, you already know that's a thing which exists and why you're almost certainly not interested in participating even before the pitch arrives.
As someone who knows exactly nothing about PNG, I got curious and had an AI retrieve some numbers:
IFPRI's 2023 survey of ~2,700 rural PNG households (~900 in highland strata) found 57–70% of highland homes thatched; across those same strata, 8–12% were on-grid, 41–68% had solar, and 5–14% had no electricity. This nonrepresentative sample excluded communities more than two hours from motorable road or river access and "areas with known security risks".
The same study found adult literacy of 40–54% (27% for seasonal-highlands women), assessed using Tok Pisin (not English) sentences—directly for household heads and by household-head proxy for other members—and secondary/vocational completion of 4–8% [1].
Phones: the 2016–18 DHS put mobile-phone ownership at 34% of people aged 15–49 nationally [2]; a 2018 rural (lowlands, not highlands) IFPRI survey found just over half of households had no phone-owning member, and only about a quarter of the poorest quintile owned a phone [3]. Cellular connections—distinct from unique owners—subsequently rose from ~2.7M in 2019 [3] to 5.03M in early 2025 [4]; there were 2.57M internet users (24.1% of the population) in early 2025 [4].
> It's not 1800s, if the given population doesn't like missionaries, as far as I'm aware it's equally free not to listen to them. Or to throw them out.
>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
That is, pretty famously, the "great commission" given by the founder of the faith.
>Christian missionaries who treat the population of PNG as some sort of religious terra nullus
Apparently it's not a religious terra nullus, since PNG's parliament recently voted 80-4 to identify themselves as a Christian nation.
> 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
The contemporary role of missionaries is complicated. My mother is a (now retired) doctor, who formerly (>10 years ago) worked for a Seventh Day Adventist church mission in the Solomon Islands (I also mentioned in another comment she worked in the PNG, that was with Australian Doctors International, a secular charity–although even part of that work involved working with a French doctor who happened to be a Catholic nun). My mother isn't a Seventh Day Adventist, she isn't even particularly religious (lapsed Catholic) – her personal motivations weren't about religion, it was about charity, and also the professional and personal experience. She just somehow (I think through some work colleagues who happened to be Seventh Day Adventists) became aware of the mission and ended up working for it–it was essentially volunteering, they may have reimbursed some of her expenses, but whatever she was paid was a fraction of what she'd get working as a doctor in Australia. 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. I guess coming from a Catholic background gave her some personal tolerance for the religious aspect, even if it was never her motivation.
"The captive women told the Spaniards that Carib men traveled by canoe to neighboring islands, killed or captured men and carried away young women. Chanca says the women were kept as servants and concubines. They further alleged that children born to these captive women by Carib men were eaten, whereas children born to Carib women were raised."
IMHO People had it rough before missions. These particular natives left right there and were ready to sign up!
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...
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.
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.
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.
Not that strange, actually, once you understand the geography and ethnography. First of all (although not that significant), straight line distance between the population centres of AU and PNG is further than that of AU and NZ: Sydney to Port Moresby ~4 hours by direct flight, Sydney to Auckland ~3 hours. More significantly, the whole ~1000km length of Cape York Peninsula is one hell of a barrier: virtually uninhabited, no sealed roads most of the way, and extremely inhospitable (cyclones and mass flooding for several months every year, killer crocodiles / jellyfish everywhere, prevalence of dengue fever / malaria).
The Torres Strait Islanders are genetically and culturally part of the peoples of New Guinea, which is why here in Australia we refer to "Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples", why the TSIs have their own flag that's different to the Aboriginal flag, etc. We non-indigenous people of Australia and New Zealand share the same predominantly British ancestry, a very similar (and intertwined) colonial / post-colonial history, etc.
Are you aware of the Australian indigeneous ethnic group called the Torres Strait Islanders? They are considered ethnically distinct from Aboriginal peoples in the rest of Australia. There are about 100,000 of them. They reside on the islands between the north tip of Australia and the south coast of Papua New Guinea. Thus, I would qualify your post by saying: The vast majority of Australians have little contact with PNG, but the Torres Strait Islanders have had contact with PNG peoples for thousands of years.
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.
My first exposure to this was reading 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).
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 ) or even something with voice of a PNG artist, eg:
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
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.
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:
I actually visited abandoned scam centers a couple weeks ago in Bavet, Cambodia. It’s really eery now.
All the units had air conditioning units, which I thought was sweet, considering many Cambodians don’t have that. But the prison bars on the windows and barbed wire surrounding the complex was a bit uncomfortable to see.
I wish I could share photos. Food is insanely cheap. I had street fried chicken, rice, and I think two sides for literally one US dollar.
Their primary currency usd.
They have all the child labor problems that other countries in the region have.
Everybody seems to know each other.
Unlike French colonialized countries, Vietnam, Timor Leste is proudly and vibrantly Portuguese. Similar to Macau but not as wealthy.
The public transit system is basically a tiny van that just drives around in loops around the city. You wave the driver down, jump in, and then tap your money against the metal framing when you’re ready to get off (there are no bus stops). I don’t know if you’ve been to Kenya, but it was like very similar to the vans in Kenya, except even smaller.
I tend to fly cheaply with multiple transfers/layovers. What I figured out recently is that it is nice to combine the flights in such a way that one of the layovers is _longer_.
When the airport has a good connection to a major city then 12 hours during the day are enough, but I'm happy to bump it to 2-3 days.
I have managed to visit some Chinese and Canadian cities this way and it was both more interesting and much cheaper than taking a direct flight.
It seems astonishing to me that a "relatively complex" intercontinental trip these days means "have to spend a whole night waiting for the next flight".
the additional complexity is visas and immigration for that country.
I’m American, so I have to pay $35 every time I enter Indonesia and I’m limited to the number times per year I can enter the country.
Australia is easier. Just need to fill out ETA for a $20AUD fee.
The extra night also eats into your limited vacation time. 18 hours in addition to the 20 hours flying means you’re losing almost 4 days of your trip just transiting.
Also, my flights aren’t intercontinental. I did this monkey dance going from tp hcmc to Timor Leste.
I read about a Japanese flying to Indonesia in 1959 (the president of the country was courting her). She flew from Tokyo to Hong Kong, then to Bangkok, then to Singapore before making the last hop to Jakarta.
That would have been right around the time that airlines were transitioning to jet aircraft. Back before jet travel it could take a whole week to reach the far east.
It’s not a place for most visitors to go off-piste, unless you’re like MacAffee or that British lad Mike who does a hitch-hikers YT travel channel. They both were/are quite a-tuned to where they are think on their feet and are adept at escaping tough situations. Most people ate not like them.
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
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
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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."
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 :/
Share some stories with us!
That was an amazing introduction to your stories. I would love to hear them.
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.
I bet $20 that anytime PNG is mentioned on HN, we'll invariably see a comment from walrus01 about "why is no one mentioning the missionaries yet?!".
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.
Predictability is nothing to be ashamed of.
-DJT
Why the sudden insistence that every discussion about this article needs to include missionaries? Just woke up and felt like sharing the gospel?
Well, in the sense that I'm resolutely opposed to the efforts of missionaries in general and personally believe they have caused a great deal of harm to indigenous cultures around the world, more like the anti-gospel.
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
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNHIP2FJzko
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JI4uirwxx1Y
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.
>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.
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.
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.
Possibly, but look at modern times. It takes years to build social constructs that might guide us towards cooperation and non-violence. They can be overturned in an instant by a slick turn of phrase that appeals to our genetics.
> I do think genetics are modified by culture in the long term.
For example, "self-domestication" by executing or ostracizing individuals that don’t fit into the culture.
You are however under no obligation to grant your instincts unrestricted access to the pilot seat.
In addition, please check out Sentinelese tribe from the North Sentinel Islands in India [1]. It is more mindblogging than this, in my opinion.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sentinel_Island
3. Handing a people that can not progress, exponential tech, without which they regress, but which also kills them all when they regress, is a trapdoor function worthy of St.Fermi .
They had had a long battle with what looks to be hundreds of participants and there were a few wounded, but nobody died. Compare with e.g. battles in the ancient Mediterranean, where the fighting would have continued until one side panics and tries to flee, and the winning side kills anyone who can't run away fast enough. Now maybe they're simply bad at warfare, but I think a more likely explanation is that they're intentionally not escalating to that level of violence and mostly stay at a standoff distance where fatalities are unlikely. The narrator also calls it a "formal battle" at one point.
In any case, I don't think you can ascribe much of their bow-and-arrow tactics to base instincts.
> 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.
“The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed.”
― William Gibson
Watching that battle, my mind went immediately to Dodge Ball. Play that simulates perhaps our most natural type of group fighting.
Our most natural type of group fighting is a bunch of guys raiding a rival settlement while everyone is asleep and killing them in their beds.
Fighting always works better when only your side is doing it.
War before mechanized killing. This is probably excatly like the "star wars" for the mayan culture.
> 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-...
My mother isn't mentioned in that article, but the "Allan Mason" it mentions is her husband
It's ongoing in both PNG and the Northern Territory (Australia).
~ (Sept 2026) https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-09-07/nt-14yo-boy-speared-i...
~ (today) 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
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.
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.
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.
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+...
> Google "language isolates in papua new guinea".
My preferred source for these things is Palmer’s Language families of the New Guinea Area [0] (part of the extremely comprehensive book, The Languages and Linguistics of the New Guinea Area). Page 10 has a nice map of language families and isolates.
[0] https://www.academia.edu/86071361/The_languages_and_linguist...
Not an expert view, but I have also heard this explanation for the many hundreds of languages in Africa and India.
Jared Diamond (not sure which book - perhaps Guns, Germs and Steel) makes the claim that it was because areas were productive enough that people didn't need to move and also heavily protected from other incursion from other tribes - travelling outside your groups territory or meeting a group of people you didn't know was effectively suicide. So although there was occasional trade - no people or knowledge was transferred - which explains why there's over 1000 (very different) languages.
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
Carved open whole mountains: 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 ).
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/
I hear 'The Act of Killing' is an amazing film. But I am not sure if I can bring myself to watch it.
> netsharc 51 minute ago
> This video is no longer available because the YouTube account associated with this video has been terminated.
Someone's quick on the draw this morning
Oops. Admittedly I copy/pasted the 2nd half of my comment.
This one works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKoP2PnU60s
The link is down. Did anyone from here report the movie?
This one works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKoP2PnU60s
Sorry, I copy/pasted half my reply from an old comment.
Still doesn’t work
A book 'The Jakarta Method' by Vincent Bevis is a great exploration of those events and similar cases of deliberate destruction of the independent third world.
> The resistance is ongoing and most of West Papua
I'm unsure if that's an accurate description. I would say it is more accurate to say that West Papua is being genocided. Indigenous West Papuans are being genocided by settlers from Java. More than 500,000 West Papuans have been killed according to estimates by indigenous groups. It is hard to verify since Javanese settlers (Prabowo is Javanese) control the army and no media or journalists, and not even Indonesians are allowed to enter West Papua. This year, thousands of excavators were shipped on barges into West Papua. Western corporations like Freeport McMoran are complicit. It is horrific to see videos that have come out. There is one which I saw, I still get nightmares. It is an indigenous Papuan man being skinned alive in a drum of water. The name that was spread was Defianus Kogoya. It is so sad... West Papua was one of the most beautiful places on this planet with inland seawater lakes that had non-venomous jellyfish in Misool. Cave systems with handprints said to pre-date the Toba erruption. All of this being destroyed.
> I would say it is more accurate to say that West Papua is being genocided
I can just add it has been going on for a while in recent history and noone talks about it.
Gives you opportunity to think how deeply flawed our media is.
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.
Malnutrition after 3 weeks? I mean, pack 21 multivitamins.
I had ridges in my nails after an exceptionally bad bout of flu. It's not obscure or complex.
Indeed. Given average western diet, 3 weeks of malnutrition can only do good.
She’ll probably do that on her next 3 week trip.
> 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.
F is for respect, X is for doubt.
Touche. F, even.
if she was eating sweet potatoes how can that be ? unless she wasn't eating the sweet potatoes at all ?
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
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
Very nice music. It has the same song three times?
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!" :)
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.
Western-ish tuning and harmony with some independence in the lines. I'd guess hymns influenced this at some point.
It would have been really interesting to hear original pre-contact music.
My ethnomusicology teacher (Charles Keil) ( I didn't really ever study that, though) has a good friend (Steven Feld) who was doing stuff with some people who were more remote. https://folkways.si.edu/voices-of-the-rainforest/world/music...
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.
Off topic: 1991 Future Sound of London, great song!
I used to watch https://www.youtube.com/@MissionaryBushPilot deliver stuff around PNG in a Kodiak. If you're into aviation, the videos are golden
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.
> 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.
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
Are they actually forcing anyone though, like Russians did in Siberia etc?
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.
Congratulations on your opinion?
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...
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.
> 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.
Why don't you read through the article before you comment on how incomplete or not it is? It's literally not about missionaries but about something else, the first contact with those tribes, which wasn't missionaries at all, but seemingly gold prospectors, if I skimmed correctly.
I read the article and I comprehend the English language. The article puts a specific emphasis on foreigners "discovering" that the rural interior of the country was populated, and foreigners going up into the highlands and contacting the local people. A great many of those foreigners were (and still are) missionaries.
It's a well documented historical fact that a great deal of the "exploration" of the interior of PNG was by Christian missionaries.
> A great many of those foreigners were (and still are) missionaries.
Sure, but not in this case, that the article we're supposed to be discussing, is about! Does every article about PNG need to include that Christian missionaries at one point were there, even if the events the article discusses isn't about Christian missionaries? Like some sort of legally enforced disclaimer in the footer or whatever? Why the crusade here, against some random article about something else??
To be clear I don't have a beef with the author of the article, but the missionaries themselves. I just thought it was odd to write an article about foreigners going up into the PNG highlands and not mention missionaries at all.
Not sure whether it's intentional in the context, but interesting Freudian slip type use of the word "crusade", you might want to consider its etymology and origins.
Very much intentional, because just like the crusades, you're fighting against some imaginary enemy in a very misplaced location. The article is about different set of foreigners going to the highlands, the first ones, which weren't missionaries, so of course the article doesn't talk about the missionaries...
I mean we shouldn't hear the end of it. Humanity is theoretically capable of learning. I have my doubts but the liberals assure me
> 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.
Call me apologist, but I can see no real problem with that. They are willing to take risks and have enough motivation to spend resources. Whatever I think about their belief system in my opinion they are free to do that.
It's not 1800s, if the given population doesn't like missionaries, as far as I'm aware it's equally free not to listen to them. Or to throw them out.
Cargo culting is still a thing, the power imbalance is still real here. Kicking people out is generally much trickier than letting them in, these aren't simple things. Remote populations aren't global idea consumers at the internet-accessible global ideas mart.
> Remote populations aren't global idea consumers at the internet-accessible global ideas mart.
Why not?
At the risk of taking the bait, what percentage of PNG highland villagers living in grass thatched huts do you think have 24x7 electricity and broadband Internet and intermediate to advanced level literacy in one of the Internet's major languages?
It’s not bait. I don’t think the OP that I responded to was speaking about the mechanics of introducing these populations to the Internet (they’re welcome to correct me) but that they shouldn’t be introduced to such things or that the introduction would be tantamount to exploitation of some sort.
I read it more as that a remote highlands PNG villager is not "innoculated" against the concept of, and is not aware of the methodologies that will be used by odd foreigners who have a well thought out plan to convert people to their specific ideology.
Like, if you're out shopping and some person starts up a weirdly friendly conversation with you that leads to a MLM sales pitch, you already know that's a thing which exists and why you're almost certainly not interested in participating even before the pitch arrives.
I see- your interpretation may be the correct one.
As someone who knows exactly nothing about PNG, I got curious and had an AI retrieve some numbers:
IFPRI's 2023 survey of ~2,700 rural PNG households (~900 in highland strata) found 57–70% of highland homes thatched; across those same strata, 8–12% were on-grid, 41–68% had solar, and 5–14% had no electricity. This nonrepresentative sample excluded communities more than two hours from motorable road or river access and "areas with known security risks".
The same study found adult literacy of 40–54% (27% for seasonal-highlands women), assessed using Tok Pisin (not English) sentences—directly for household heads and by household-head proxy for other members—and secondary/vocational completion of 4–8% [1].
Phones: the 2016–18 DHS put mobile-phone ownership at 34% of people aged 15–49 nationally [2]; a 2018 rural (lowlands, not highlands) IFPRI survey found just over half of households had no phone-owning member, and only about a quarter of the poorest quintile owned a phone [3]. Cellular connections—distinct from unique owners—subsequently rose from ~2.7M in 2019 [3] to 5.03M in early 2025 [4]; there were 2.57M internet users (24.1% of the population) in early 2025 [4].
[1] https://cgspace.cgiar.org/items/05f7b268-cfd9-4b35-aba6-71c8... (Tables 2.4, 2.7, 2.8)
[2] https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/impactevaluations/improved-ta...
[3] https://cgspace.cgiar.org/items/fd5ac6eb-5268-4db7-ac96-bf01...
[4] https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2025-papua-new-guin...
I don't think they even have electricity, let alone the internet.
> It's not 1800s, if the given population doesn't like missionaries, as far as I'm aware it's equally free not to listen to them. Or to throw them out.
The given population doesn't know that though...
You claim they think they have to listen to missionaries?
Know what? They don't know that they can not listen to people? I don't believe that at all.
>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
That is, pretty famously, the "great commission" given by the founder of the faith.
>Christian missionaries who treat the population of PNG as some sort of religious terra nullus
Apparently it's not a religious terra nullus, since PNG's parliament recently voted 80-4 to identify themselves as a Christian nation.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/pacific/544665/papua-new-guinea-d...
> 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
The contemporary role of missionaries is complicated. My mother is a (now retired) doctor, who formerly (>10 years ago) worked for a Seventh Day Adventist church mission in the Solomon Islands (I also mentioned in another comment she worked in the PNG, that was with Australian Doctors International, a secular charity–although even part of that work involved working with a French doctor who happened to be a Catholic nun). My mother isn't a Seventh Day Adventist, she isn't even particularly religious (lapsed Catholic) – her personal motivations weren't about religion, it was about charity, and also the professional and personal experience. She just somehow (I think through some work colleagues who happened to be Seventh Day Adventists) became aware of the mission and ended up working for it–it was essentially volunteering, they may have reimbursed some of her expenses, but whatever she was paid was a fraction of what she'd get working as a doctor in Australia. 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. I guess coming from a Catholic background gave her some personal tolerance for the religious aspect, even if it was never her motivation.
Why is this downvoted? This is high quality post sharing personal experience. This is one of the best reasons to read HN.
This is what Columbus saw:
"The captive women told the Spaniards that Carib men traveled by canoe to neighboring islands, killed or captured men and carried away young women. Chanca says the women were kept as servants and concubines. They further alleged that children born to these captive women by Carib men were eaten, whereas children born to Carib women were raised."
IMHO People had it rough before missions. These particular natives left right there and were ready to sign up!
Columbus and the Conquistadores and slavers did exactly the same things, at scale. (Apart from the cannibalism, so far as we know.)
Being able to write and use technology stops no one from being a savage, if they're that way inclined.
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
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...
The mentioned book "First Contact" at the Internet Archive:
https://archive.org/details/firstcontact00conn
The documentary movie related to that book:
https://archive.org/details/firstcontact_201602
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Contact_(1983_film)
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.
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.
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.
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.
PNG is in the commonwealth. It was also part of Australia for a bit.
Not that strange, actually, once you understand the geography and ethnography. First of all (although not that significant), straight line distance between the population centres of AU and PNG is further than that of AU and NZ: Sydney to Port Moresby ~4 hours by direct flight, Sydney to Auckland ~3 hours. More significantly, the whole ~1000km length of Cape York Peninsula is one hell of a barrier: virtually uninhabited, no sealed roads most of the way, and extremely inhospitable (cyclones and mass flooding for several months every year, killer crocodiles / jellyfish everywhere, prevalence of dengue fever / malaria).
The Torres Strait Islanders are genetically and culturally part of the peoples of New Guinea, which is why here in Australia we refer to "Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples", why the TSIs have their own flag that's different to the Aboriginal flag, etc. We non-indigenous people of Australia and New Zealand share the same predominantly British ancestry, a very similar (and intertwined) colonial / post-colonial history, etc.
Are you aware of the Australian indigeneous ethnic group called the Torres Strait Islanders? They are considered ethnically distinct from Aboriginal peoples in the rest of Australia. There are about 100,000 of them. They reside on the islands between the north tip of Australia and the south coast of Papua New Guinea. Thus, I would qualify your post by saying: The vast majority of Australians have little contact with PNG, but the Torres Strait Islanders have had contact with PNG peoples for thousands of years.
You can learn more about them here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torres_Strait_Islanders
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.
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-Enc...
My first exposure to this was reading 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).
Nitpicking here, but Finnish and Hungarian both arrived to Europe after PIE language family.
>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-199...
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...
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 ) or even something with voice of a PNG artist, eg:
Tabaran : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdvNFKL8h2U
They sampled a few of the sounds from a nature documentary on PNG.
> 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.
Never going to be able to see “PNG” written again without secretly thinking “Papua New Guinea” in my mind.
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
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.
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.
Any cool facts to share about Timor Leste? My usual go to - wikipedia - does paint a rather mundane picture of it.
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.
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-timo...
(More on those scam factories: 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)
I actually visited abandoned scam centers a couple weeks ago in Bavet, Cambodia. It’s really eery now.
All the units had air conditioning units, which I thought was sweet, considering many Cambodians don’t have that. But the prison bars on the windows and barbed wire surrounding the complex was a bit uncomfortable to see.
Wtf. How come you ended up in such a compound?
I wish I could share photos. Food is insanely cheap. I had street fried chicken, rice, and I think two sides for literally one US dollar.
Their primary currency usd.
They have all the child labor problems that other countries in the region have.
Everybody seems to know each other.
Unlike French colonialized countries, Vietnam, Timor Leste is proudly and vibrantly Portuguese. Similar to Macau but not as wealthy.
The public transit system is basically a tiny van that just drives around in loops around the city. You wave the driver down, jump in, and then tap your money against the metal framing when you’re ready to get off (there are no bus stops). I don’t know if you’ve been to Kenya, but it was like very similar to the vans in Kenya, except even smaller.
I tend to fly cheaply with multiple transfers/layovers. What I figured out recently is that it is nice to combine the flights in such a way that one of the layovers is _longer_.
When the airport has a good connection to a major city then 12 hours during the day are enough, but I'm happy to bump it to 2-3 days.
I have managed to visit some Chinese and Canadian cities this way and it was both more interesting and much cheaper than taking a direct flight.
Some travel tools allow you to search for 18+ hour connections.
I visited Japan, Taiwan, Australia, Hawaii, and Turkey at almost no extra dollar cost. If I like the city I go back.
It seems astonishing to me that a "relatively complex" intercontinental trip these days means "have to spend a whole night waiting for the next flight".
the additional complexity is visas and immigration for that country.
I’m American, so I have to pay $35 every time I enter Indonesia and I’m limited to the number times per year I can enter the country.
Australia is easier. Just need to fill out ETA for a $20AUD fee.
The extra night also eats into your limited vacation time. 18 hours in addition to the 20 hours flying means you’re losing almost 4 days of your trip just transiting.
Also, my flights aren’t intercontinental. I did this monkey dance going from tp hcmc to Timor Leste.
That is funny. I am Turkish and my government charges me about 30 usd every time I leave the country
I read about a Japanese flying to Indonesia in 1959 (the president of the country was courting her). She flew from Tokyo to Hong Kong, then to Bangkok, then to Singapore before making the last hop to Jakarta.
That would have been right around the time that airlines were transitioning to jet aircraft. Back before jet travel it could take a whole week to reach the far east.
It’s not a place for most visitors to go off-piste, unless you’re like MacAffee or that British lad Mike who does a hitch-hikers YT travel channel. They both were/are quite a-tuned to where they are think on their feet and are adept at escaping tough situations. Most people ate not like them.
This is interesting also (and very sad) https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/08/24/the-scientist-...
That was a great read !
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
Really well written
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
that's a pretty bad take away
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.
> 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.
This is those articles that I would just skip but I didn't...very interesting
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
Geographic Determinism
https://www.litcharts.com/lit/guns-germs-and-steel/themes/ge...
this is peak rabbithole material
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
Black Harvest (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103817/) is an incredible documentary; everyone should see it.
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.
why is there so much gps blocking on inland PNG, does anyone know?
Mountainous jungle terrain?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Apparently cannibalism after sea disasters was considered acceptable, as long as there was a fair lottery!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannibalism_at_sea
President Bush (snr) was nearly eaten by Japanese soldiers:
https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoryMemes/comments/qr1zth/in_sep...
(before he was president!)
Servers for mining companies?
Just curious if the hospital still exists there. Do you know?
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?
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.
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-sci...
> They were having bow and arrow battles as late as 1963
They still do this, in fact.
lol don't go there it's a trap. Civilization, despite all these people, is good.
There was a discussion on it here yesterday: https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1wfdnus/why...
What a useless title
> 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.
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."