My father lived in the PNG Highlands for a year in 1960 when he was 19, joining a mission station in Simbai (that had only been visited by the white man maybe 5 years earlier) and had an incredible time. He hatched an idea to help the manpower challenge of trekking supplies between the highland villages, by bringing donkeys to the highlands. He bought 5 donkeys left behind by the Japanese in WW2 in Lae, and together with two boys from the village (Wengi and Kanimnep), who’d never Simbai before, brought them by sea and plane to Aiome, where a gruelling and dangerous trek eventually got man and beast successfully back to Simbai - 4 months later. Crazy adventure, can you imagine what the boys thought of flying in a plane, seeing the ocean and becoming donkey husbandry experts (my father could only explain they were like ‘big pigs’ - nothing similar at all in the highlands)
50 years or so later I found there was a Cultural Festival in Simbai where about 20 tourists would go each year, and went out with some mates, along with prints of my dads slides. What followed was a trip I’ll never forget, as I was welcomed with a warmth and strength unlike I’d ever experienced, from the whole village and particularly from Wengi’s son Steven (his father had sadly died a few years previously). Whilst the donkeys had not transformed travel in a Simbai, and never bred, they were fondly recalled and had shaped the lives of both Wengi (forever known by others as Donkey) and Kanimnep. It was particularly joyous to be able to hand out pictures of peoples parents or family, who never had any photo of them or had any idea one could even exist, before some random person turned up one day
I left convinced that my father needed to return, and we did so four years later with me and my mother, which was a mind boggling trip - and another story.
It’s an extraordinary country, and incredible to have this documentation of first contact with tribes that had no idea the outside world existed. Highly recommend the First Contact book and film
So I returned with my father and mother (who'd never been to PNG), 57 years after my dad left.
We were welcomed in Simbai by many friends old and new. Steven and Aiden, eldest sons of Wengi and Kanimnep, were first to greet us at the airstrip, and Wengi’s daughters gave us a traditional sing sing escort to our guest house. It was a day of greetings, sing sings and smiles, and a hint at what was to come - the Wengis had planned a day of welcome activities the following day, with a ribbon cutting of a new guest house on a ‘donkey trek’, of which we only knew a few snatches. We also met Lyn, a priest from Norfolk UK who has settled in Simbai with her husband Tony for the last year working tirelessly to help the village and its people in every way imaginable. Sadly Tony was in Mt Hagen but Lyn greeted us so warmly and spent days with us with such joy, generosity and kindness.
I was expecting a memorable welcome, but nothing could have prepared us for what followed the next day.
We walked into town from the guest house with a number of escorts, and were greeted by a traditional sing sing, beckoning us up the hill, with seemingly the rest of the village there to watch and welcome. This was not like any sing sing I’d seen before however, as the songs called my name and my father’s, and we learnt that new songs had been written specifically to welcome us. They sang of how we were walking in the footsteps of my father and of the donkeys; we were enveloped by the singers, circling us and moving us up the hill, like dolphins moving a shoal of fish.
We passed under arches made of leaves and flowers, and arrived at the bottom of a hill. A path has been freshly cut into it, and at the bottom was a screen made of banana leaves, with a sign - ‘Welcome to Courage family’, and drawing of a donkey above the word ‘track’. This is their plan - to open a new trek for tourists, that follows in reverse the route my father, Wengi, Kanimnep and 4 donkeys took between Simbai and Aimone. At the top of the hill is a new guest house, literally just finished, the result of the hard work of many hands in the community. This day was the ribbon cutting, and a major celebration.
The sing sing group had progressed to the top of the hill, and were working their way down as we went up, still singing and drumming. My father had to break down the plant screen, behind which was Wengi’s wife and many hugs. We were given flower garlands, and at the top of the hill was a beautifully constructed guest house, with flowers pushed into the matted walls, as well as another traditional building and a room for eating, all with amazing views over the village and highlands.
A huge amount of people were sitting up on the hill, and we were sat as guests of honour opposite a screened podium, from where speeches are given by many in Simbai, including the priest and Steven, and then by my father, myself and my mother. The themes were consistent - of the joy of families, of coming together in communities and across borders and cultures, and the impact of friendship.
We visit the wonderful guest house, my father cutting the garland ribbon, and the celebrations continue with the killing and cooking of pigs, and feasts for all. I slept in the new guest house, my brain buzzing with the echoes of song and dance, handshakes and hugs. I felt like I really understood what ‘mindblowing’ truly means – the magic of the day was almost too much to process, me and my family being the focus of such extraordinary friendship and celebration, it was overwhelming. A day that showed the just how strongly friendships and bonds can be formed out here, it was extraordinarily uplifting.
Lyn told us that she has seen many incredible welcomes in her year here, but none that were like this. It can be hard for volunteers to know what impact their hard work and difficult times leave behind, but this clearly showed the long standing impact my father’s friendship made.
PNG is still a very young country, with many rough edges, but it has something that we have lost - the true spirit of community, of families truly living together, and many families coming together to work and play as a community.
No, that was strictly funerary cannibalism and not a source of nutrition. What the OP means is that wild pigs were available without the need for breeding or domestication.
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]).
From the description it sounds like it is talking about the war the Dani people in the Baliem Valley fought in that region. They did not keep written records but archaeological and anthropological evidence suggests it could have been going on for thousands of years.
Basically, two tribes were separated by a river. If someone was caught alone near the river by the other tribe they would often be killed, and there were also occasional cross border raids that might kill a couple people.
In their culture they believed this created a spiritual imbalance. To satisfy the ghosts of the people killed the two tribes would schedule a formal massive fight on the border.
They would shout insults and throw spears and shoot unfeathered arrows (they had not discovered feathered arrows). You can't really aim an unfeathered arrows and they weren't all that good at spears at that distance either so casualties were random and rare, and usually only people who didn't pay enough attention and failed to dodge.
They would usually end as soon as someone got serious injured, or if it rained or got dark. They weren't really trying to actually kill each other, they were just satisfying their obligations to the ghosts.
In the early '60s the Dutch and then Indonesia forcefully put an end to it, and Christian missionaries arrived and managed to convert the population, and the spirit-and-revenge system that required appeasing ghosts through ritual warfare went away.
That Dani are now part of the modern world, but they have an annual Baliem Valley Cultural Festival where they dress in traditional tribal clothes and recreate the ritual arrow and spear battles (safely, I presume!) to preserve their history and to attract tourists.
I grew up in a small-ish town and when there was a construction site there was inevitably a large pile of dirt somewhere nearby. Often 10 or more feet tall. If construction wasn't occurring it would be occupied by neighborhood kids digging, building dirt bike tracks and most importantly building walls / battlements.
Various neighborhood kids would take the dirt fort and try to hold it against the other neighborhood kids who came and ... everyone threw "dirt clods" at each other. A few rules like "no rocks" were understood.
Otherwise the battle resumed every day the workers weren't working on the dirt pile... it was glorious. Win or lose you returned home each day dirty as could be, and very happy you did your duty that day alongside your friends from the neighborhood.
That is a long way of saying that sometimes I see some strange "tribal" stuff that seems weird to me, and actually no I kinda get it.
Intra-species dominance is very different from group raiding. Chimps team up to slaughter other chimps all the time. Raid style warfare was the norm for humans
No it isn't, and I invite you to read the book to find out why. Murderous raids are the exception when the more widespread norm of ritual combat or tit-for-tat kidnappings with limited casualties had broken down.
Sure, you can go in to kill everyone, and sometimes they did, but only when they were OK with almost as many of their own group dying as the enemy. There's no big technological or tactical advantage to be had in the stone age. Maybe, if you're really lucky, only one of you die for every two of theirs?
(Attacking them in their beds, pah, don't you think maybe the neighboring tribe thought about that and had someone on watch?)
"The Cutting-Off Way: Indigenous Warfare in Eastern North America, 1500-1800" by Wayne Lee is a good read that describes a similar kind of warfare. It doesn't necessarily prove (nor does it set out to prove) that all non-industrial warfare followed this model but it does provide decent evidence for population-limited societies generally preferring deadly ambush to pitched battle.
When running away is a big part of the tactic, it's not a "kill everyone" tactic. You don't have the advantage for long. And even if you did succeed, the next tribe over could just as easily do the same to you (and they probably would, seeing what you're like), so there's a strong reason to develop norms, rules of engagement limiting this sort of thing.
If you're talking cattle, you're talking a different time of history entirely. That allowed collecting and concentrating enough wealth that some could engage in that sort of thing without worrying about immediately falling victim to it themselves. In the paleolithic, that wasn't possible.
I think this makes the common mistake that all "primitive" cultures have the exact same behavior -- I suppose you're not speaking from PNG right? (although likewise I have no such specific knowledge) As the article cites, in this specific place (and in many other similar cultures), I don't think there's motive to wage large scale wars or take large amounts of territory, that would justify something like raiding and wiping out other groups. I suppose that could happen in the huge number of other cultures, ones that had more centralized leadership or competing more unified cultures. The conflicts in the case of PNG might have been localized dispute over borders and such.
In nonhuman animals, even in fierce disputes over territory and mating, killing is rare, because it's quite costly: you eliminate completely a healthy individual, and usually would run the risk of serious injury yourself, making both dying likely. Usually they e.g. resolve mating with displays of beauty/fitness, and territory with displays of force (chimpanzees for example have lots of display of force rituals, specially around selecting leadership, I believe) and sometimes non-lethal conflict (some species evolve apparatus just for this kind of conflict, e.g. antlers, so they can engage in conflict with low chance of injury).
Since we're referring to human cultures, something distinct we have is memory and communication -- information can get out on reputation, behavior, etc. of a group. I think if a group just goes out and murders another in their sleep (which TBF is not so easy), then I imagine for example word would also go out of their actions and may get into trouble with other groups, I'm sure spiritual traditions would also have a say about it, in favor of some sort of "spiritual revenge". But I suppose it's difficult to generalize.
I do think it's interesting to consider some forms of morality, or just metaphysical and logical understanding around ethics, as a kind of technology that enables people to live longer and enable more secure conditions, including preventing large scale conflict that can bring destruction on an industrial scale to entire societies (although misguided moral arguments ironically are also misused sometimes to enact destruction). Although I guess morality alone is not enough (because not everyone seems to internalize it well), and other mechanisms are also helpful to achieve more social stability.
(Also of note is that there can be such thing as too much stability -- for example, for some new more interesting and maybe more worthwhile forms of culture to emerge, old ones have to be replaced, so stability should be balanced with cautious openness to new ideas, technologies, methods, peoples (ethnicity), cultures, ..., and worldviews -- of course, as long as change is in the direction of improving our lives collectively. For example in some cases religious fundamentalism advocates for an absolutist cultural stagnation; we just shouldn't need one group to murder another to spread about new things)
Different cultures of course have different norms. There were even hunter-gatherer societies that practiced extreme forms of pacifism - Moriori would be one example (and their eventual fate shows why this isn't more common).
In general, though, pre-agricultural societies tend to have very high mortality rates from armed conflict with outgroups. In PNG in particular, as I recall, it gets to the point where >20% of all males die from enemy action. Similarly, pre-agricultural societies rarely take prisoners, and often target what we would consider non-combatants (i.e. there's no separation between "enemy warrior" and "enemy civilian", even in principle).
And this makes a lot of sense when you consider what motivates this warfare. Pre-agricultural societies are bounded by the output of the wildland that they forage on, and a single human requires a lot of land to live off in this manner. This is why those bands tend to be small - very few biomes can sustain a foraging band of even few hundred. But conversely it means that any other band of humans foraging off the same land is literally starving you out. It doesn't matter if they are otherwise hostile or not, and there's no potential compromise to be achieved even in theory if you have a plot of land that can sustain, say, 100 people, but now it has 150 feeding off it. The only way for one group to survive is to either kill or drive off the entirety of the remaining group, so it doesn't matter if it's women or children that you're killing. The point is to convince the other group that they are more likely to survive by going elsewhere by making it so precarious for them to remain, or if that is not possible, then to wipe them all entirely. Raids do exactly that.
This is also why prisoners are rarely taken and often ritually killed right away - every prisoner you take is an extra mouth to feed. In an agricultural society, an extra mouth can feed itself because it requires comparatively little land to do so, but for pre-agriculturalists an extra pair of working hands is worthless if the land is already at capacity wrt what can be extracted from it (which is usually the case since populations grow until they reach that point).
Stuff like ethics of warfare, spiritual tradition, reputation etc is derived from all this. Cultures that practice this kind of raid warfare generally glorify it. A war leader who leads a successful raid to massacre an unprotected enemy village is a hero, not just to his own people, but more broadly as a model for other aspiring warriors in the larger culture. So things that we might consider as "disreputable" are not necessarily seen as such there.
>Most intra-species fighting is not designed to end in murder
That depends a lot on scarcity. If you are a male and you only get one chance at mating, you will probably fight to the death. If you will get plenty of other chances, then you might accept the results of a ritualised non-lethal combat (e.g. giraffes headbutting each other, rather than kicking). Its just evolution + game theory.
I read it in an article that was talking about the application of game theory to biology/evolution and I believe it is well supported by evidence. But I can't remember the source.
What animal species often offers males only one chance of mating ?!
It's common among animal species for males to fight over females, but it's highly uncommon for them to fight to the death, because that is not evolutionary adaptive - it risks the individual as well as the genetic diversity of the group/species (and evolution is selecting for survival of the species, not the individual).
> evolution is selecting for survival of the species, not the individual
This is very wrong. Evolution is selecting for the total reproductive fitness of genes, and to a slightly lesser extent, individuals. There’s no mechanism that helps the process of evolution select for the survival or reproduction of the species. See any recent textbook on evolutionary biology, or read Dawkins, or even Darwin. I don’t know where you got this idea but it’s exactly wrong.
> There’s no mechanism that helps the process of evolution select for the survival or reproduction of the species
The "mechanism" is just the process of evolution itself, and how it plays out in practice, e.g. via punctuated equilibrium.
Over shorter timespans the gene pool of a breeding population incrementally drifts according to the success of individual genetics, but then once in a while, over multiple generations, something in the environment (disease, food, competition, etc) may change quickly and the gene pool as a whole, not just that of individuals, is thereby tested, with accumulations of previously benign changes sometimes suddenly becoming critical. In this way evolution is acting on the entire gene pool - of the species or more correctly of that interbreeding sub-population.
Success in evolution, the ability of the species as a whole to adapt and compete, also requires genetic diversity, not only to avoid inbreeding, but also to provide species level resilience, and species level ability to quickly adapt. e.g. It seems that the success of sexual reproduction is because it is a way to "game the game" by increasing genetic diversity and therefore improve along these axis of resilience and fast adaptation.
There are also social species, such as ourselves, where the social group becomes port of the individuals environment, and genetics best-fitted-to-the-environment becomes a group dynamic.
Nothing about evolution feels sensible or right: and the vast majority of people have severe misunderstandings about how it works (for example the Darwin awards are highly misleading). Even science reporting is often highly misleading[0]. Intuition is not trustworthy for this topic, and neither is our ambient knowledge.
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[1] that protects against it, one of the fastest cases of natural selection ever documented in humans
* there is one ancestor with a gene that protects against kuru.
* children and mothers without that ancestor often die from kuru
* children of that ancestor have a much higher chance of survival
* eventually everyone is a child of that ancestor
* any children of that ancestor that didn't get the protective gene also eventually die out
The gene is selected for. There are no population effects.
The key part in the paper is where they mention adult men with the gene, because they are measuring the counterfactual of the many males that died because they didn't have that gene (males that ate brains as young kids but then died because they didn't have the gene from that ancestor).
The paper is hard to understand in part because of the confounding effects of males not eating the brains. Plus the confounder of stopping cannibalism in 1960.
The idea of "Group selection" is fundamentally wrong - regardless of how sensible the belief feels. Anybody using the words "group selection" is indicating their belief system, and they usually then have biased narratives to 'support' their belief.
[0] horrifically incorrect sciencedaily link in Wikipedia.
Fundamentally evolution is selecting for genes, not individuals, and there is no 1:1 relationship between genes and individuals.
Let's say that everyone has a skin color gene that makes them either red or blue. And a new predator turns up that only eats blue things. To you this is a tale about individuals, while it seems that an equally valid, and frankly preferable, view is this this isn't about individuals - it's about being red or blue and is a species level effect.
I suspect the underlying issue is that we are all terrible at unthreading cause from effect.
Words matter. Talking about "species level" is misleading because talking about an effect (blue phenotype) distracts us from the cause (a gene for blue).
And evolution is confusingly another step removed: the red survives because the blue did not.
Most of us struggle to see the counterfactual absence of a something.
The blue "species" never exists - our brains want to find groups and patterns. Our words mislead us.
The same thing is alluded to in the paper: the deaths of people without the gene is what is driving the gene to spread (through reproductive success of those that didn't die).
Reproduction is what matters (which death or sickness may interfere with).
Even the paper is confusing because it talks about 50 year old women (measuring survival bias; not whether they are expected to pass on genes at 50).
Not even close. Evolutionary selection pressures don't usually act directly on genetics. Perhaps you are incorrectly attempting to rely on intuition, and over-simplistic phrases like selection pressures. Intuition is incredibly misleading with evolution.
Your pink and blue example is actually a great model to work from. Think about the genes and the expression of those genes, and then think about what is being selected if all the blue animals are eaten.
Or think about what would happen if there was a mountain range, and pink animals were eaten on one side and blue ones were eaten on the other side.
Or think about what if one of the blue fathers has pink polka dots that gave it a 10% better chance of survival.
Always concentrate on watching that genes are passed on by reproduction - getting eaten doesn't have to be a problem if reproduction has already occurred (unless parental investment is needed or you get complicated like kin selection).
I am not a biologist. But 'The Selfish Gene' is one of my favourite books because of the concepts within. Unfortunately I think Dawkins went off the deep end later (with what I thought was religious zeal). The Extended Phenotype is even harder to read, but also worthwhile.
It is a fun topic because many phrases about evolution seem misleadingly about death rather than reproduction. And the meaning of the word evolution is absolutely twisted in everyday conversation. Ignoring the troubles with bible bashers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survival_of_the_fittest - "fittest" has an unobvious meaning.
>evolution is selecting for survival of the species, not the individual
I believe that is wrong. Selection works on the level of the individual and their genes. Dawkins covered this extensively in at least one of his books. Any professional biologists care to comment?
Selection works on the level of the genes. Dying without procreating can still be advantageous if doing so means that enough of your relatives survive, for example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kin_selection
I think it's most accurate to say that selection works at the level of genes (or combinations of genes), not of individuals, and of course many individuals of a species will share some/most of their genetics.
You can tell it as a story (easier to teach) of individual success in surviving and having children, which isn't wrong, but it's also not the big picture.
Fighting to the death and mating are not the same!
There are a number of species where the female eats the male after mating - examples such as praying mantis and octopus. Both octopus males and females die after mating, the female after having protected the eggs, so it makes sense that she sometimes eats the male too (who is going to die anyway). But, examples like this are relatively rare, and for species specific reasons.
Even more striking there were some bow and arrow fights again just a few months ago. I would presume they have never stopped, just rarely make the news.
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.
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.
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. Almost every male participates and they specifically avoid high intensity warfare because the cost could effectively kill a tribe’s agricultural output.
Note though that even in the Mediterranean, routes where most of the enemy was killed were relatively rare.
Sometimes this sort of ritualised combat is a way for young men to show off their bravery without too much chance getting killed. Probably also helps with tribal cohesion. And I assume reduce the chance of full-on, lets kill everyone in the tribe, violence between groups.
"They had had a long battle with what looks to be hundreds of participants and there were a few wounded, but nobody died."
Observe the weapons. Most of them are sharpened sticks and they had a limited supply. Less deadly than swords and no mass manufacturing of weapons either.
The spears would be lucky to penetrate the ribcage. But they could go through the gut or throat, and if they were embedded in a thigh, they could easily cause sepsis.
In the battle footage there is little or no hand to hand conflict, and the spears are thrown by hand (from what I remember): no catapults or sheathes to launch them from. At one point, someone removes a spear from his leg, and while it does look nasty, it doesn't look like a fatal injury unless sepsis etc gets in. I'm sure they did have battle clubs, but those aren't used much in this battle. (This may be partly because the battle is in rough/hilly terrain and it is easier to launch spears at people from a distance than run over to them.)
Guns began to enter the region in the 70s and 80s in large numbers, which apparently changed the dynamic. Today's Port Moresby, the most modern part of the island, is apparently much more dangerous than these areas were.
You’d have to catch them first. If you watch the video there almost zero hand to hand combat. Their arrows don’t seem to have stabilizers either.
Obviously if this was filmed on video someone could have given one side a machine gun. Would’ve they used it or would have they still opted to maintain the tradition and fight the old way. The battle may have other reasons besides 100% dominating or wiping out the opponent.
Sadly, guns have entered these conflicts since that film was recorded, and there have been far more fatalities. They've changed the dynamic and not for the better. Central government doesn't seem to have much control over big portions of PNG. Language and remoteness are two major barriers to that.
To be fair, I wish the whole world was much "worse" at warfare in the same way as they are. We'd probably be a much happier world overall. Or at the very least less destructive.
I'm pretty sure Julian Jaynes' work is entirely hypothetical and is thought if as just an interesting idea rather than actually having any semblance of truth to it... unless you actually believe the Greeks were amongst the first humans to truly emerge with consciousness which seems farfetched to me
> unless you actually believe the Greeks were amongst the first humans to truly emerge with consciousness which seems farfetched to me
To the extent that human consciousness can be described from within itself as something distinct from a pan-consciousness of all things, is it farfetched to consider it as not existing until it did emerge? In what artifacts could someone discern the threshold at which consciousness arose?
The meat of the book is the references, not the extreme interpretation that catches most peoples' attention. No hallucinations please unless something like substances were involved.
The plasticity of the brain whether damaged or not is emphasized, and uneven recovery of language skills gives some clues.
Monkey see, monkey do was certainly a thing before humans arrived and it's not been left behind very completely at all.
In a world where almost everybody starts out in early childhood learning to read & write at the same time, and it is structurally taught largely to right-handed kids from right-handed examples, and this has been going on since like "written history"[0], this can not help but provide an overwhelming mainstream norm about what side of the brain is for what. Especially when it comes to language. You could almost think of it as a force acting to confine language, or more so the writing part of literacy to one side of the brain more so than the other. The bulk of the highest-educated and most respected vocabularies have been largely built through literacy rather than orally for quite some time, it wasn't always like that even with equivalent vocabularies, and that part lasted longer than the part since literacy got popular.
For those where it doesn't perfectly apply, like left-handed people, those who don't read and/or write, those who learned from left-handed people, those that taught themselves, etc, that all adds up to a small minority and of course there is great pressure to conform. But that doesn't mean the same language ends up in the same parts of the brain as the "normal" specimen in the jar.
The most recent development is the way more early writing is accomplished using both hands on a keyboard like never before when it was traditionally penmanship for generations back.
Now some people actually "think" in language more so than others, some not at all, plus often bilingual works too.
I'll go ahead and say it, if you were up there in the highlands where Dolly Parton was born back in the 19th century before they really got to building schools, you could find an "illiterate" culture often having a wider vocabulary than those in places like Boston where they had schools continuously since arriving on the continent. Unlike PNG the hillbillies of the Smokies descended directly from a literate culture, they just didn't bring many books that far up the mountains, and odds are they would be lost to mildew by the mid 1700s.
Sometimes you also get the idea that when they were feuding, they just didn't understand each other and everything was fine among the disagreeable factions as long as everyone stayed on their own mountain. People had lost the ability to read, and when they only had one book that was probably the Bible but they couldn't literally decipher it any more. It was still holy though for the faithful who would pretend to read from it while more or less "lip-syncing" the scriptural quotes that had been passed down orally ever since.
Maybe that's where the saying comes from; "If I had half a brain I'd <obviously do what the mainstream would do>." From those who have no history of using less than both halves even for language, so they naturally don't do what the mainstream does? While simultaneously recognizing that they don't even have the same first half that the formally educated (whom they often respect so highly) do possess.
With PNG you've got to figure all the highlanders have language and stuff well-imprinted in their brains like anybody else, "just" not with the pattern recognized as most common to outsiders.
That doesn't mean their superstitions were based on hallucinations of any kind, among different cultures you can expect different parts of different halves of the brain to be doing some of the same things differently. Especially when they have always been isolated from each other.
There might even be a tendency going far back into "modern" literate culture, where the "literate" half of the brain is generally respected most when it is brilliant enough to get by on its own, and that ends up predominating.
Anyone who comes along and has always used all their brain may still have an orthogonal advantage. That could be why professor Diamond attributed the PNG highlanders as perhaps more intelligent than most in general. Or with a cool million of them there's got to be an Einstein or two. What would an Einstein casually having twice as much brainpower than previously imagined be like?
[0] Recent written history, the kind that means the most to a literate culture. Note the way with some traditionally illiterate groups how oral history can easily go back many generations further.
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 .
I disagree with the (2). The laws of war are and have been evolving, and there's plenty of evidence in recorded history. The first records we have come from Ancient Babylon and they have been modified and amended multiple times since. Another aspect of this development is the existence of international arbitrage with laws that also keep evolving, something that minimizes the need to go to war.
And there's more: the relationship between the state and its army changed a lot. The role, the rights and the duties of individual soldiers changed a lot. Just to give you some examples: the Lieber Code is the one created during the US Civil War -- it's perhaps the first to mention the concept of unlawful orders, exonerating the soldiers who wouldn't follow such orders. Traditionally, St. Maximilianus is described as the first conscientious objector to draft, a concept that, too, went through multiple iterations... And, really, we didn't even scratch the surface mentioning these. Military history is probably the most eventful and rich sub-field of history.
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.
Great filters are how genetics change. When you have two societies, one that kills itself and one that doesn't, that is how the world genetics shift more towards avoiding societal self-killing.
Possibly, but look at modern times. It takes years to build social constructs that might guide us towards cooperation and non-violence. Yet, those can be overturned in an instant by a slick turn of phrase that appeals to our base instincts/caveman brain, which i believe we all have.
I have given this more thought, but too late to edit. I would like to add a very important specific fact of the modern day.
Thanks to the Balkanization of our media landscape, and social media targetting: "a slick turn of phrase that appeals to our base instincts/caveman brain" can be tailored just for you. It has never been easier to make us behave in crazy ways.
I genuinely believe that the existing incarnation of "social media" could lead to the death of billions of humans.
Yes, I think you're overall right on your description of what is happening, but I disagree somehow with your analysis. My reading of that is that social media 'accelerate' culture, and some of it is towards hateful, violent way. It's not that we come 'back' to animal instincts, it's that some new, emergent cultures push towards violence.
To your other point, I have a friend who thinks social media and online porn drive fetishism, and that fetishism drive a lot of the new 'illiterate' political movements. I don't think I totally agree with him on the illiterate part (I mean, Renaud Camus certainly managed to read Maurras before paraphrasing him, in an objectively worse way, sure, but still), but I have trouble arguing against his other points. He also thinks that this fetishism taken too far will push people towards a death cult, and kill millions
They are only modified if there is some form of selection though, like for example some people say of the Dutch and their height.
In modern times it is more likely that culture and education augments genetics such that your violent tendencies are repressed, you are brought up leading a soft and comfortable life, taught to be polite and kind, etc. Contrast to maybe someone brought up in a warzone or some other place.
I mean post apocalyptic shows like the walking dead express this quite well (at least the first few seasons) where once society falls it's just a free for all and back to our roots again.
Yeah, i'm pretty sure observational studies after natural disasters (those who followed up Katerina especially) showed that it wasn't really the case. Yes, you have looters everywhere (Even in Japan), but most people help their neighbours (or even strangers if those looks non-threatening). Only when you have a central authority figure present and a lot of people you see riot and aggression, hence the reason why in most countries that need help, aid distribution is as decentralized as possible nowadays (centralized distribution is a _really_ good way of having people killed in the mass anyway).
And we are not the ones that live in the future...
This two pre-bronze age tribes live in it, the future we all will experience with collapse of our natural world and our civilization.
Probably, actually. “Primitive” societies survived the ice age. Modern societies depend on a relatively fragile system of infrastructure and many of the individuals in modern society are utterly dependent on it. Technology only works within its rightful context, and 99% of it is completely useless after infrastructural collapse.
Meanwhile, premodern societies depend on the ecosystem as a whole which tends to adapt over time; the individuals in such societies are more self sufficient in terms of ability to survive the elements.
So it’s just as likely those not dependent on modern technology will do fine against the vicissitudes of climate change as much as those who are dependent on it. At least in terms of ability to survive. At least, their expectations of survival baseline won’t change nearly as much in the face of natural disaster.
Yeah but because we have so much ressources and people we also have all in all quite some survival nerds, who could learn from all the tribes in the world and have the starting bonus of high tech. Things wpuld be fough with a society collapse, but the knowledge is out and will survive, except mass nuclear holocaust that totally amd drastically changes the climate. But then those tribes would struggle, too, if their sweet potato does not grow anymore.
I watched a few documentaries about the North Sentinelese and uncontacted Amazonian tribes, and it's terrifying how violent they are compared to modern standards. They kill and ask questions later.
It makes sense because the downside is very high (the stranger wants to kill you) but the upside is not (the stranger has something cool to show you or trade with you). It's not like you'd go to prison for murder either.
For what it's worth, cops in America in certain scenarios act the same way, faced with similar upside/downside risks.
There's a pretty heavy survivorship bias on that, so you probably shouldn't extrapolate to all pre-civilization humans. For a group to remain largely uncontacted, it means they have to be remarkably insular, living somewhere other people don't want to be particularly bad (implying resource scarcity), and it definitely helps if they respond to attempts at contact with extreme violence.
Only partly, they also live in extremely remote areas that don't have a lot to offer. It's not like all the other indigenous populations were pacifists, they fought wars, murdered, raided, etc. but they were living in areas that were much more desirable for conquest.
I think there's no other way it could be. If you're not violent you get wrecked by modern pathogens and die, or become integrated somewhat into modern society and can no longer be considered "uncontacted".
In fact there could be a direct link - the less reactive cultures were quickly subjugated by the colonialist cultures with advanced tech. Or the cultures that learned to strike back hard rather than welcome/integrate foreigners (see the lost American settler towns) are the ones that survived independently for longer.
> and it's terrifying how violent they are compared to modern standards
Not really, we just got better at it. Combat in the Ancient Near East consisted of bludgeoning your opponent with maces, clubs, and other blunt instruments. It took awhile to kill someone. We seem to equate "violence" with the duration spent killing someone (as though "dragging it out" is worse), but the end result between the millennia is the same: person A kills person B. We can just do it now in seconds with a single well-placed bullet instead of multiple minutes of agonized bludgeoning.
The alternative is to be potentially oppressed, subjugated, and colonized. A good example is the British Raj. Being peaceful is fine as long as you're able to use overwhelming force and win against someone who might harm you.
Not even remotely similar. India had been trading with the rest of the world for millennia, was far more technologically developed than stone age tribes (in some ways ahead of pre-industrial revolution Britain) and was only conquered at all with the help of Indian allies, soldiers and even Indian financing. British people could not have conquered India alone.
In the case of the North Sentinelese, this incident in 1880 might have something to do with their hostility to the outside world.
> After several days, six Sentinelese—an elderly couple and four children—were taken to Port Blair. The colonial officer in charge of the operation wrote that the entire group "sickened rapidly, and the old man and his wife died, so the four children were sent back to their home with quantities of presents".
After the 2004 tsunami, indian government sent helicopters to see if they had survived and they started firing arrows at the helicopter. It's possible that they think the foreigners caused the tsunami.
Tribal warfare is often ritualized [1]. I remember reading that the tribes on what is now Canada's West Coast practiced real, brutal warfare compared to their eastern counterparts, due to the scarce resources.
In Burden of Dreams [2], the documentary about the making-of Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo, some of the tribal extras would occasionally go off in their motor boats for raids on neighbouring tribes. It's so interesting to me, tribal life would be fascinating to experience.
I didn't say "a grand time". It would also be fascinating to live through the Fall of Rome, the Pazzi conspiracy, the Black Death, or any number of other unpleasant things. I'm pretty on-edge about the interesting times I'm living in right now, but they are certainly interesting.
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.
Im fully on the spectrum, but my first thought when I hear about stuff like this is what would be the moral implication of "recreational gang war" experience. I.e you pay a lot of money, you get guns and armor, you go into gang territory, they shoot arrows at you, you defend yourself. Seems like you would have the right to use deadly force, but you would obviously be at a big advantage.
There is no moral or philosophical debate to be had here. It's morally wrong to do this and in my opinion that's clear as day. Putting yourself in a dangerous situation and provoking a "self-defense" scenario like that only serves as a thinly veiled excuse to murder people you consider inferior.
Do you often have violent power fantasies? Do you find yourself daydreaming about them regularly?
Spare me the psycho analysis please, its pretty cringe.
Explain to me how is this different from safari hunting trips where you can get attacked by a wild animal (often an agressive one thatvattacks villagers) and have to shoot it to defend yourself? And the argument of them being human versus safari trip featuring an animal is not something that is given, you have to show that their lives are worth more than the animal life
There being a market for something doesn't make it morally right, but it highlights the demand aspect where someone is willing to pay money, which means that there is some level of it not being universally bad.
In the case of a Safari, there is this moral middle ground - according to the countries policy, if an animal attacks a human, it generally is a candidate for being put down because of perceived danger to humans in the area, but on the flip side, its also morally wrong to kill an animal just because it does that.
In the case of the gang warfare, you are doing a service by reducing the number of gang members and crime, but its also morally wrong to take someones life in offense for personal entertainment? (If its not clear, the difference in doing that in PNG versus any other country is because specifically of the lack of law enforcement that is the way of life there)
Another hypothetical scenario - say you have a country where age of consent is low, and certain type of porn that is highly illegal in the rest of the world is freely available (which is not far from reality, scarily). You can't stop the creation or distribution of that porn without basically invading the country and changing its law. However, what if you used said porn and supplied to convicted pdf files in your home country so that they are less likely to exploit young kids irl? Is that morally wrong, or is it morally justified?
Did you know there have been literal slave markets in the past? And they still exist today (e.g. in Lybia). Please explain how this is "not universally bad". Actually don't. Spare us your disgusting mental gymnastics that you shamelessly try to disguise as autism.
>Please explain how this is "not universally bad".
Lets say that you have a country where slavery is legal. The slaves of course don't like it. But lets say that the populace is largely in favor of it, because slave labor keeps the barebones economy going and people can trade and have food to eat. Most people don't actively capture slaves, they just buy them at the market.
If you had the power to eliminate slavery in that country, you would free the slaves, but you would basically condem a lot of the people to die from starvation.
So whats the "correct" moral stance? Real world isn't black and white like you would want it to be.
I am holding my finger on the nuclear bomb button and I say if you don't murder everyone except me and you, I will press the button and it will murder everyone including me and you. So what's the "correct" moral stance?
Not at all. But the world we live in is pretty fucked up from that perspective. There are ex military contractor guys on youtube talking about their weapons and how they used a certain rifle to fight off invaders in the middle east. Nobody seems to care that the people on the other end of those bullets may have families.
My interest in this is purely philosophical. If you have a what is effectively a lawless country, where native populace has the desire to kill you, to what extent could you engage with that in a moral framework?
Not that you've explicitly claimed it's authentic, but the very idea of a pirate hunting tour is a hoax that resurfaces across the Internet every so often in different forms:
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
> 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 obviously think this is an oversimplification but I've also slowly come to believe this is basically accurate. Reading the history of the Guatemala coup that the US did and the role the NYTimes played in it is very convincing evidence for this view
A few years ago I got to accompany a small group of friends to an isolated tiny village on the southern coast of SW Papua, and I swam with the jellyfish in one of the inland saltwater lakes you’re describing! That trip still remains the coolest place I’ve ever been.
> and no media or journalists, and not even Indonesians are allowed to enter West Papua.
Uh, no? There's an active tourism industry particularly around the Baliem Valley and the Raja Ampat islands. You can fly into any of the larger cities without a permit, and while travel in the interior does require permits (surat jalan), these are usually readily granted.
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.
> I am shocked it’s not reported about in Western media.
Average american already has their hands full (slash "their brain full") with local matters - family, friends, community. It's hard enough to get attention to spare to turn to national matters, much less stuff that happens on the other side of the world in non-allied poor countries.
western media has a habit of not reporting on atrocities they are complicit in. When the genocide in Indonesia happened (where as many as 2 million were killed) they presented it as liberation from communist sympathizers. Union workers, and people of certain ethnicities or religions that were seen as sympathetic to communism were all put to death. Goodyear Tire company, just 2 decades after the Holocaust, was using labor from death camps for its rubber manufacturing. US corporations in general had a lot to gain from the genocide
There are lots of atrocities all over the world that western media just ignores flat out. But they do hyper focus on one or two specific cases for their political agenda.
Hell, then love self flagellating about how they themselves (the west) are the worst people on earth, which is also a political agenda and is only convincing if you ignore pretty much all of human history and large parts of the current day reality elsewhere in the world.
Paradise Broadcasting also made an incredible documentary[0] on the bombing of OPM by the Indonesian government. The follow up videos are great as well.
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.
Sorry YouTube regional-based DRM (presumably) is fucking you. Director's name and documentary title is available, you're going to need to search it for yourself.
Suharto was responsible for his own rise. He took money and intel from wherever he liked and was basically an independent & ruthless strongman. Neither he nor other Indonesians need to be infantilized by lazy neocolonial narratives.
The coup was literally armed and equipped by the US. The US provided intelligence, made the plan, did the homework. They even gave them list of targets. Wherever you wanna draw the line, no one would seriously deny that he could've gained power without the US.
The US' strategy to use a proxy to commit heinous crimes against humanity is named after this event. It's called the Jakarta Method.
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 know someone who worked there maybe 10 years ago in an embassy, and it was wild in a very bad way.
- they had a meeting with some locals and the locals discussed the need for retaliation for something, and their plan was to rape someone's daughter
- a kid bought a mini packet of chips on credit from a general store, the debt wasn't repaid and the end result was the general store getting burned down
- a fellow employee forgot to lock their car doors (everyone gets told to do this) and was car-jacked, but he got his car back because the car-jacker couldn't drive a manual car
- the embassy had high fences and security, but just in case, each house within the embassy compound had a central panic room in case the outer wall is breached
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.
It's a reasonable guess but wrong. My dad is a carpenter and my mum is an artist. Dad was helping build houses up there for one of the government building contractors. Mum was along for the ride.
Edit: And not that it really matters, but neither of my folks are religious.
It is a pity you are being downvoted. I do linguistic fieldwork in a similarly remote region and, yeah, you learn pretty quickly visitors fall into about those three types.
I worked in two way geostationary satellite for years and learned pretty quickly what sort of groups of people needed to pay money for Internet in truly the most off the grid locations. The other major users not so relevant for PNG which I intentionally didn't mention are military/government. I guess if it's not "mining" in some places you've also got "oil/gas", which basically falls into the same category of resource extraction. Sometimes forestry/logging.
By the way, your discontent about missionaries shouldn't be centered just around "gospel" groups. Multiple denominations of Islam have pretty far-reaching missionary networks into seemingly faraway places.
Yep, absolutely agreed. There's even Islamic parallels in the kinda-fundamentalist-Sunni world to weird USA TV Christian evangelists if you know who people like Zakir Naik are.
Let me tell of a missionary school and it has left me totally jaded about the cultural wipe-out that is practiced methodically. All the cultural icons are appropriated and a cross plastered on everything, from didgeridoo to the boomerang and placed alongside the holy book. Indigenous knowledge production is low because there frankly it requires audience and artist needs to be rewarded and paid, but this can be taken advantage of by well endowed people. If you search results for that local language on Youtube, all the main results you get are from Christian missions who have translated hymns and set it to indigenous rhythms. It is like you learn keys of the castle from somebody without telling them the end purpose you have in mind from the very beginning, take their knowledge and re-package it. Within the next gen you have new converts actively forgetting what their own parents are teaching them, and think this all is gift of missionaries.
You are not alone, its pretty obvious what force of evil overall (even if some local good was done here and there) missionaries have been. And I don't mean just some 16th and 17th centuries horror stories, I mean even recent times.
The idea that christianity is somehow above all other religions, while covering at best around 1/3 of world population... lets say I don't enjoy talking to irrational, highly emotional people on such topics. Where facts become irrelevant so does my presence in discussion.
> This was fuelled by what is known as moka, a system of competitive gift giving, where you give someone in your tribe goods like a pile of pigs and shells, and they are then obligated to give you back more later, and you them more again after that. Whoever gives the most, publicly, becomes the big man.
This reminds me of the Reciprocity and Re-Distribution system in the Inca Empire. There wasn't a system of currency or markets. But there was an Ayni (mutual aid) and Minka (collective work) system, paired with a Mita system: work done for the Sapa Inca which was in return "paid" by the Sapa Inca in feasts, food and goods/gifts. This was all glued together by the concept of Ayllu (family), where these obligations were established through family connections and of course the Sapa Inca had marriage connections with subordinate chiefs.
I myself can't stop thinking about the Inca Empire Economy and how it shows in reality that currency is not about the paper nor number nor symbols, and more about the "I owe you"s that move in the economy.
I’d recommend reading the late David Graeber’s “Debt” which does a good job illustrating exactly what you described, which is how currency is at its core an IOU
To expand the sibling comment. In principle the money would reflect IOUs the general public owes them. But also following this logic the way I see it is they accumulated their money was by getting more IOUs through: people employment (being able to command a big pool of work and get a cut of IOUs from it), arbitrage (exchanging lower value IOUs with higher value IOUs), or simply stealing (eg. siphoning government resources).
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.
It's safe to say they're both highly watched in PNG, Origin is just more of an event (a three game series, compared to the NRL which is a full season + playoffs). It's the same two sides every game, you're maroon or you're blue. Meanwhile there's 17 clubs in the NRL, I assume people from abroad pick one arbitrarily, of which only two clubs are going to make the grand final every year.
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.
Sure, losing weight is of benefit. But malnutrition is defined as a "serious deficiency" in the intake of energy and nutrients. Healthy weight loss is not malnutrition, and you can quite definitely be missing essential vitamins and be malnourished without losing weight.
Heck, some of the worst western diets are both poor in vitamins/minerals and also still rich in calories.
> 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.
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.
I am the furthest possible thing from a linguist but looking at a hastily searched language map of PNG, my first thought is "wow, that's a lot. And some of those aren't even in the same family of language?"
> wow, that's a lot. And some of those aren't even in the same family of language?
Indeed! Palmer counts ‘862 languages comprising 43 distinct families […] and 37 isolates’, (where an isolate is a language with no known relationship to any other family). I should add that the map you linked shows the branches of only a single language family, namely Trans–New Guinea — most of the other 42 families are in the grey areas. (Though due to uncertainties in historical linguistics, that map includes some groups as part of Trans–New Guinea which Palmer considers separate families, for instance Timor—Alor–Pantar [there part of ‘West Trans–New Guinea’] and South Bird’s Head.)
> my first thought is "wow, that's a lot. And some of those aren't even in the same family of language?"
The meaning of the historical linguistics term "family" doesn't map directly to our common usage.
A language family is a collection of languages for a which we can identify a significant number of shared core historical grammatical and lexical features.
Just because languages belong to different families doesn't mean they don't have a shared ancestry, just that we can't see it in the modern languages.
If anything, in PNG population genetics identifies the highland populations as closely genetically related, but their languages have diverged to the point that signs their shared ancestry have been lost.
There is an theory that the linguistic diversity PNG represents the state of human societies in Southwestern Asia just before the emergence of agriculture - possibly explaining why many ancient attested languages like Sumerian, Elamite, and Assyrian which were in close proximity appear to be entirely unrelated to each other.
If it helps, he's saying those two reasons are the evidence that the highlands were completely cut off, not that those are the cause of the highlands being cut off. As opposed to an alternate history where there was significant trade or interaction between the highlands and coastal peoples.
> The reasons why I believe that ... the highlands were functionally cut off is ...
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.
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.
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
> 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.
Do you see diversity of cultures with different levels of development on the planet as a problem? Because as long as it exists there will be the imbalance
can you describe how such groups can coexist without isolation so that the more developed one helps the less developed one without a degree of influence and control in some shape or form?
ideally something not too far removed from how the world works today
only contacting each other via humanitarian aid is more isolation than coexistence.
Humanitarian aid also exerts influence, if anything by showing how advanced the more advanced group is. For someone whose religious practice involves traditional medicine or shamanism for treatment, western medicine seems like is obviously a religious influence and control. (It also has issues like alleged bartering treatment for sex or food supplies helping mostly the bad guys with guns)
and you're looking at locals like they are too dumb to reject a new religion. it's a condescending view. locals in Siberia did reject the new religion at first and paid the price in blood, it stopped when they learned to pretend to be Christian and keep their traditions under wraps. the situation seems completely different here.
> 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".
But...why? If they are just saying that, why is that indefensible? The villagers' are free to reject that message (or a more accurate version of it), as are you or anyone else.
Because they never "just say that." Christians aren't raised to believe that "no" is a valid answer - that means eternal damnation after all. Everyone must accept Christ, that's the message, and Christians must do whatever it takes to get that message across. Food, medicine and other elements of "civilization" are always used as leverage, a means of influence and control, to pacify and eventually convert. Inevitably another "pagan" culture is erased, its heritage and language forgotten, its children indoctrinated (perhaps by force as happened with American and Canadian indigenous people) and its people made subservient to Western interests.
All that has been true, but it was not always true, and it is only half the truth.
You've used "never" and "always" as if Christianity, Christian missions, and the cultures they try to reach are a monolith and the same everywhere. You've also insisted that any aide must only be to strengthen the power of the missionaries, and has nothing at all to do with the character of the very message itself.
You've also underestimated the agency of indigenous cultures and their ability to appropriate Christianity, so much so that some Tiwi Islanders (islands to the south of PNG) insist that they converted the Catholic church when it embraced them (https://researchportalplus.anu.edu.au/en/publications/going-...)
> underestimated the agency of indigenous cultures l
yeah thinking "we shouldn't influence poor locals because obviously we can do it so easily" is a little condescending.
I know people from the west who reject religion but pretend just enough to get some benefit from the church, why assume locals are too dumb to do it.
there were historic cases where native people rejected a religion and paid price in blood. THAT is a problem. if there is no forcing, there is no problem.
The character of the message is that "every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord."
Missionaries bring aid because they bring the Gospel. They wouldn't bring aid without bringing the Gospel. But like that idiot who tried to convert the Sentinelese, they would bring the Gospel without aid, if they felt so compelled. I don't think it's incorrect to say that everything else is a means to the common end. Christianity is an assimilationist religion. Jesuits may do it differently than Catholics who may do it differently than Baptists, but conversion is always the end goal.
>You've also underestimated the agency of indigenous cultures and their ability to appropriate Christianity, so much so that some Tiwi Islanders (islands to the south of PNG) insist that they converted the Catholic church when it embraced them.
I mean, they didn't, that isn't ever really how that works. Whatever Catholicism they appropriated will inevitably erase and obscure their culture and identity, as will the influence of Western culture. I couldn't read the article you posted unfortunately but I did find an article that basically seems to tell the story[0]. I also found an article written by someone of Tiwi descent that tells a less friendly, or at least more complicated story[1].
I'm more willing to believe the word of a native over a Christian missionary, all else being equal. It may not be fair but history demonstrates that the relationship between Christianity and indigenous peoples is one of exploitation, suffering and colonization more often than not.
The message is also "love your neighbour as yourself", and this "Lord" that people bow to is, according to the message, someone who died instead of taking that Lordship by force.
While it might be true that "Missionaries bring aid because they bring the Gospel" to some degree, it is also true that the Gospel brings aid. It is the message that generates the desire to help people.
Your accusations of "assimilation" are just too simplistic. Take, for example, bible translation. In Australia, Anglican missionaries did not put much effort into translating the bible into indigenous languages as the had essentially hooked their mission projects up to the assimilatory 'White Australia' policy of the government. BUT that was in stark contrast to their actions in the rest of the Pacific, where they put great effort into translating the bible into native languages.
> Whatever Catholicism they appropriated will inevitably erase and obscure their culture and identity
This again is just completely dismissing the agency of the converted people. Not to mention easily observed cultural particularities across the world. For example, I experienced a group of Solomon Islanders praying. In my Western culture, we would pray one at a time, but they all prayed out loud, all at the same time. Western values of a particular view of orderliness hadn't overridden their culture.
> I'm more willing to believe the word of a native over a Christian missionary, all else being equal.
Fair enough. I do not deny at all the paternalistic, violent, coercive and assimilationist past (and still present) actions of the church. It is shameful and inexcusable. But I don't for a minute admit that this is because the church was being faithful to it's mission and founder. It's because it wasn't being faithful to the message that it perpetrated these crimes.
But again, it is reductionist to say that this is the only experience. Australian Indigenous culture, Maori culture, traditional PNG cultures are still alive and well, and Christian members of these people groups still choose to be Christian. A simple appeal to "power imbalances", "assimilation", "indoctrination" etc. to explain why they remain so is to rob them of agency.
> everything you believe is wrong, here's our god, you must follow and believe in him or you're going to hell
"Democracy" and "human rights" is basically that but on steroids. Surely you're not a cultural relativist that simply going to allow uncontacted people to be racist and misogynist willy-nilly?
I personally know Benny Wenda and the Wenda family. Benny Wenda was the West Papuan President before his people were overthrown and violently ousted by the Indonesian government in part in order to gain full control of the largest gold mine in the world, Grasberg mine.
The family is still in exile in the UK, and are trying to raise awareness via the Free Papua Movement which aims to separate West Papua from Indonesia and create an independent state. If you care about injustice in the world, have a quick read up on the situation and maybe share the link if you feel.
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...
Actually your comment reminds me of this guy who travels to Vanuatu to try really strong kava. The village chief invites him to drink multiple bowls, which he can't refuse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BtP_B4TBWs
...basically this is the "take a few near-pre-contact villagers around the U.S. and show them how cool the rest of the world is" that the article talks about.
There was another show (might have been "Going Tribal(?)") which did the reverse, where a "modern man" tried to integrate into daily life tribal life, eg: setting fish traps, mauling taro root, trying not to scare away rabbits while hunting with bows and slings, etc.
Probably tobacco. The article mentions it was introduced to PNG in the last few hundred years, and the plant made its way into the highland tribes despite limited travel and trade.
This was an incredible video, and I feel so many complex emotions after watching it. I wonder where everyone in that video is now.
Sounds like there's some controversy about this video though. There was some accusations that it was staged, and / or that this was NOT the first contact this tribe had.
That was fascinating and endearing. I wonder whether anyone there is still alive, and how profound/impactful that meeting was on those and the generations that followed. Thanks for sharing
I love reading about that place, too, but I want to point out that
> They practice cannibalism, and Michael Rockefeller was likely eaten there
is kind of misleading. If you read Carl Hoffman's book Savage Heart you see that the tribe that are suspected to have eaten Michael Rockefeller probably gave up cannibalism for good not long afterward (i.e. the early 60s).
> If you read Carl Hoffman's book Savage Heart you see that the tribe that are suspected to have eaten Michael Rockefeller probably gave up cannibalism for good not long afterward (i.e. the early 60s).
TL;DR, one of the main scientists and Nobel Prize winners for his work on the Kuru disease and discovery of prions, Carleton Gajdusek, was also bringing home (essentially kidnapping) young boys from his expeditions, in theory to experiment with how well they could adapt to Western civilization, but in practice to sexually abuse them. And the NIH department that was funding him basically knew it and didn't care.
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.
That book is so garbage, psudoscientific, empirically wrong, sinophobic, and I'm probably forgetting a bunch.
Also lol to it's explanation for no beasts of burden in Africa. Sorry, folks have actually mostly domesticated the zebra. The explanations for why Zebra's were not domesticated after all this time are a massive cope. Even worse copes are the non recognition/misunderstandings of Elephant usage in large numbers for warfare / burden from Africa to India,
"It is possible that having evolved under pressure from the many large predators of Africa, including early humans, they became more aggressive, thus making domestication more difficult.[104] However, zebras have been trained throughout history. In Rome, zebras are recorded to have pulled chariots during amphitheatre games starting in the reign of Caracalla (198 to 217 AD).[105] In the late 19th century, the zoologist Walter Rothschild trained some zebras to draw a carriage in England, which he drove to Buckingham Palace to demonstrate that it can be done. However, he did not ride on them knowing that they were too small and aggressive.[106] In the early 20th century, German colonial officers in East Africa tried to use zebras for both driving and riding, with limited success."
Oh and also Africa had cattle and donkies and the donkey was actually domesticated in Africa.
West African empires like Mali, Songhai, and the Oyo Empire famously maintained massive cavalry units. They adapted horses to tropical conditions, using them for state-building and warfare long before the arrival of Europeans.
>Environmental Determinism is the ultimate racism.
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. Quite the opposite.
What if it's due to neither environmental nor genetic factors but ideas. Europe was backward until it re-absorbed classical learning and absorbed newer ideas from the Orient, which led to the renaissance and everything that followed. Did Europeans suddenly gain 40 IQ points in that time? No. Did their environment change? No.
For some reason a lot of people have a huge problem with this explanation, actually preferring either environmental determinism or racism. This is in spite of what seems to be a lot of historical evidence for it in the form of causal influence: ideas are introduced somewhere (inventions, methods, philosophies, languages, mathematics, literature, etc.) and large changes follow.
His entire section/epilogue on "Why China isn't actually a counter example to my whole thesis, tee-hee!!" AKA Chapter 13 literally goes into "well the emperor there had so much power and could unilaterally keep their technology levels down with stupid trade restrictions so that's why Europeans put them through the century of humiliation and eclipsed them!" and other nonsense is straight up massive Sinophobia and very racist.
Diamond makes broad genetic/intelligence claims about whole populations, rankes societies as "advanced/backward" constantly and describes conquest as inevitable
"in mental ability New Guineans are probably genetically superior to Westerners"
"modern "Stone Age" peoples are on the average probably more intelligent"
"some societies seem hopelessly conservative, inward looking, and hostile to change."
Actual quotes from this so called bastion of liberalism
"China’s connectedness eventually became a disadvantage" [because] "a decision by one despot could and repeatedly did halt innovation."
China = monolithic, obedient, centralized, despotic, stagnant; Europe = pluralistic, competitive, innovative.
Diamond turns "Chinese authoritarianism" into a transhistorical condition produced by the land itself. I'm all about the LVT and Georgism and all but this is doing too much service for land.
In other words, the old Orientalist story survives perfectly well after the race science has been supposedly removed from the chassis. Better still, Diamond treats Ming maritime policy, imperial bureaucracy, and Mao’s Cultural Revolution as variations on the same ancient geographical bug, as though two thousand years of Chinese politics were basically the Yangtze River repeatedly pressing the "authoritarianism" button with it's floods!!!
It's been more than a decade since I have read it, but I remember Diamond writing specifically about the relative lack of domesticable animals in sub-Saharan Africa. Mali, Songhai, and Oyo didn't "[adapt] horses to tropical conditions", they imported already domesticated animals from elsewhere (North Africa). It is telling that none of your examples are in Central or Southern Africa.
Also, domestication is the process of breeding animals over multiple generations to make them more pliable and is not the same as training individual animals to pull a carriage. The very first sentence of the paragraph that you quoted from the Wikipedia article on zebras is "Attempts to domesticate zebras were largely unsuccessful."
Go take a look at where Kenya is located on a map and where Donkey's were first domesticated and tell me that I didn't cover sub-Saharan africa again with a straight face.
That first sentence "attempts were largely unsuccessful" is a cope from wikipedia editors who are mad that it keeps being brought up by race realists who are using this blurb to justify their own racism. Consider that it was a literal Rothschild who did the most recent almost-domestication. 4chan is on this like fly's are on horses (but not Zebra's, or horses painted like Zebras - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-22333-7)
The part I quoted without the unnecessary pre-thinking done with that first sentence is all I need. It was quite possible to get most of the way there over short periods of time with money and effort.
> Environmental Determinism is the ultimate racism.
I don't see how this is true, even somewhat? Saying that the environment you're in shapes your culture, progress, and overall development as a society, makes perfect sense. Saying that the environment does not play a huge factor in this leaves open only the option of that development being genetic/hereditary, doesn't it? You'd be blaming the failure or shortcomings of civilizations, current and previous, on the genetic predisposition of their peoples. That feels far more racist to me than saying, "This area did not have X resources in available and sufficient quantities to allow them to develop Y improvement".
I understand that this was often used to justify colonialism, which I want it to be very clear I strongly disagree with. But, it would feel deeply wrong to say that all things are possible to progress in all areas. For example, we could NOT expect some hypothetical area with very poor soil health and little water to become a great improver of early agriculture. Likewise, areas with no easy access to copper, tin, iron, etc, would be unlikely to begin using those resources for farming implements. An area with all of this in abundance would have a much EASIER time developing these things.
I read Guns, Germs and Steel recently and loved it. After finishing it, I was wondering how well the theses had held up in the time since it was published and did some research, and seems like most (though not all) of the major points have held up pretty well or even been strengthened by recent evidence. However, the book seems to have attracted a surprising amount of hate, which this reminds me of! It feels to me like an instinctive hateful backlash to a remarkable achievement, like "crabs in a bucket syndrome" or the Einstein quote -
“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. The mediocre mind is incapable of understanding the man who refuses to bow blindly to conventional prejudices and chooses instead to express his opinions courageously and honestly.”
I think it got a lot of criticism because it was very wide ranging and some experts felt that Diamond was encroaching on their turf. Also it made a lot of sales, which probably provoked some envy. IIRC (some years since I read the book) Diamond made clear that a lot of the ideas were speculative.
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:
> the music has nothing musically or culturally to do with the country of Papua New Guinea. (https://www.instagram.com/reel/Dak3ViigS61/)The duo (Garry Cobain and Brian Dougans) actually chose the title purely for its mysterious, exotic, and atmospheric feel
You may be interested in Ongka's Big Maca (1974)[0]. It is a documentary that shows how the Big Man system and gift based economy work in PNG by following a specific Big Man's (Ongka) effort to put together a huge gift to increase his social status. It's a classic intro to anthropology film.
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.
> 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.
It’s rather pointless to speculate—I believe HN moderators can see who downvoted, but even they can only guess at why.
Sometimes people even downvote by accident when they mean to upvote—easy to do on your phone
Also, I find anything which says “conservative religion isn’t purely bad” tends to reliably attract some downvotes. A lot of people feel hurt or even traumatised by conservative religious groups (often not even the one under discussion), so I can understand why they do it.
> 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.
These missionaries don't come in with an army. Its more often small families or a couple of individual vs entire villages of natives and the "conversion" is done via talking, persistence and kindness rather than by force.
> Remote populations aren't global idea consumers at the internet-accessible global ideas mart.
Shouldn't that be a good thing according to your logic? Its not like the global ideas mart is less different from their own society than what the missionaries bring and it would be quite presumptuous to say that your beliefs or those that you consider "global ideas" are better for as yet untouched tribes than those of christian missionaries.
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.
It's also immoral to expose isolated populations to all manner of the modern world's vices, optimized to be maximally addictive and maximally extractive, for which they have zero defense or even knowledge of their dangers.
But they're not equipped to decide whether they want it or not. It's like offering drugs to children saying they can choose if they want it. Children simply aren't equipped to make that decision, neither are people in these populations. I don't think we should keep them isolated, but contact should be limited initially. The technology we introduce them should be limited, enough to increase their quality of life and eliminate disease and so on without being utterly disruptive. Over time more technology and information can be introduced.
No population should be kept living a life we would consider extreme poverty out of some noble ideal. But we also shouldn't completely disrupt their way of life out of a different noble ideal. Wealth as we understand it isn't the only thing of value. Human connection, meaning anchored in community and deep roots, a sense of belonging and so on, are what really matter. Introducing modernity to such populations will sweep all of that away in one motion. These people would be left adrift in an alien world devoid of personal meaning, their only solace whatever addiction appeals to them most.
> But they're not equipped to decide whether they want it or not.
Why can't you say that about, idk, folks on welfare in the United States? How are they in a position to decide whether buying pop on food stamps is what they want or not? Maybe a woman doesn't really have the tools she needs to decide whether she wants to keep a pregnancy until she's had some counseling and time to cool off?
Obviously I'm not comparing these situations directly, and frankly I'm not sure you're wrong, but the point of view you are expressing here leads us to all of those scenarios and I think we should reconcile that.
I agree the application of the logic doesn't end with isolated populations. The relevant difference is that those brought up in the modern world have/had the potential to engage with knowledge of addiction and other vices, and decide for themselves how to steer their lives in an informed way. We draw a somewhat arbitrary line for being responsible for oneself as the best way to structure society given the tradeoffs. There's just no sense in which these isolated populations as a whole can be sufficiently informed about the modern world to suitably navigate its complexities to lead to their prospering in it.
But on the other hand you are assuming the modern world is bad and so therefore exposure to it is a dangerous and negative thing. I'm here to tell you that having access to medicine and playing sports and whatever is pretty great too. It's not all bad. I think you're taking a little bit of this Star Trek version of "leave them alone to develop on their own" but if the shoe were reversed and there was an alien species out there that could come down and talk to us and share knowledge and potentially harmful things as well, I'd like to make that choice for myself.
It's certainly a complicated subject, but I'd just challenge you to think of the positive version as well, not just the negative (addiction/vices/&c). It seems you have a default negative view of the world, some of us have a default positive view of the world. Modern life is pretty awesome!
My concern isn't mainly about addiction and vices, its more about a loss of meaning and being adrift in an alien world. The addiction/vices are just what one falls into when your life becomes devoid of meaning. I think the mental health crisis that most of the western world seems to be engulfed by, despite living in an age of endless wonders, goes to show that there is something deeply wrong with our modern way of living. My caution is against introducing this "sickness" (for lack of a better term) into populations even less able to defend and preserve personal meaning against an onslaught of technology and ideas that would evaporate their personal sources of meaning in an instant. That is no gift to anyone.
I just think you are super focused on the negatives. My life is great, I don't have a mental health crisis, most of my friends are doing well and having kids and enjoying their lives, and more.
There might be something deeply wrong with the modern world (which by the way includes other countries ranging from, idk, Iran, to Vietnam, to Korea) but there are a lot of things deeply right about it: opportunity, human rights, women's rights, independence, opportunities to build rocket ships or sail the world. That seems like one hell of a gift that I wouldn't want to deny anyone. If anything, providing opportunities and giving human minds the chance to flourish and be creative seems less of a sickness and more of a cure.
The danger when making decisions on behalf of other people is in imagining yourself in their position, rather than imagining them in their position. So you have a happy fulfilled life, you have the kinds of human relationships that provide deep meaning to you, you have the right kind of curiosity and wonder to be fulfilled by witnessing burgeoning technological progress, etc etc. Yes, being deprived of all that would be very bad for you.
Now imagine someone psychologically very average whose source of meaning is in the familiar environment where they have an acceptable amount of status, broad community support and much social engagement. They have a peculiar culture and social practices which gives them deep personal meaning. Now imagine all of that is swept away; no social status, no familiar environment, cultural practices gone, extended family scattered to the wind. What value does the wonders of the modern world have to someone who has lost everything they value?
Consumerism, technological marvels, and endless entertainment are the modern world's answers to the waning sources of personal meaning in modern life. Turns out that it's all a very poor replacement.
One of the problems is the power dynamic westernized/developed societies have. The article talks about just that: Australians brought shells in and basically one-shotted a rich culture for their own gain via hyper inflation.
If a missionaries message was basically "Believe in God and you'll have limitless shells", and backed it up with a crate of shells, they would all be converts.
> 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.
That argument would necessitate treating them like children rather than adults who can think and choose for themselves. I don't think this is a healthy approach that would work out well 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.
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...
"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!
Converting people to a modern religion is a lot easier when their existing culture and beliefs are less developed. So there is a race of sorts, to convert as many less developed groups to your religion as possible before a rival religion gets to them.
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 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.
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 used to have a book about Papua and some westerner who had visited, that had a photo in it of a human head being cooked on a flat metal dish over a fire.
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.
One line that got me wondering: "...and one group ate their dead relatives’ brains at funerals so consistently that they gave themselves a mad cow type disease called kuru, which killed a large percentage of their population and then, within a few generations, evolved a genetic mutation that protects against it"
I had heard this before but my question now is, did they develop this tradition recently? If it were a historical thing wouldn't that genetic mutation have evolved a long time ago? One would expect that if they had this tradition for a long time the genetic mutation that happened so rapidly would have happened long ago, yet it did not. I'm curious as that thought struck me just now.
CJD develops in about 1/1,000,000 people per year globally, and the Fore people have a population of ~20,000. In theory, that suggests there should be an outbreak within 50 years of the society regularly consuming brain matter. Perhaps that number could be reduced somewhat by the infection rate, but the infection rate seems pretty high, to reach the level it did as fast as it did each person with Kuru needed to infect 1.6 people. Perhaps sporadic CJD isn't as sporadic as we assume, and it's tied to being in environments where others have had CJD? Another possibility is tied to the seeming link between genetics and the infection rate of Mad Cow Disease. Perhaps the population regularly went through boom-bust cycles, where everybody with 2 copies of the recessive gene that makes one more susceptible to transmission gets killed off, then the disease dies off for a long enough time for the carriers to re-introduce their recessive trait back into the gene pool.
At least according to this article[1], you're correct; the practice of eating brains that caused kuru to spread was a recent innovation. However, the article doesn't say how recent. I guess I'd need to go read the actual book, since I can't quickly find anything else on how long this was occurring.
Almost the entire tech crew who were working for Honeywell in Canberra seemed to be from a team that worked in Port Moresby in the late seventies to maybe the early eighties. Their stories were mostly a mix of late stage colonialism and machete terror.
Im kind of sad that tribes, who have never been exposed to the modern world, get exposed to the damaging effects of materialism. It reminds me of that film "The gods must be crazy" [0]
The moral of the story is that things, when they are coveted, can destroy our humanity. I feel like we are destroying ourselves with modernity and to bring that to a culture like this is dangerous.
Jared Diamond speaks of this in one of his book (I think "Collapse", but I may be wrong), and highlights how we romanticize the pre-modern world, but we have the clear example of people in PNG who are absolutely super happy to abandon it and join the modern one.
(the modern world has plenty of problems, of course)
This isnt romanticizing premodern world. Modern doesn't equal better, but I understand the knee jerk reaction to calling out the serious problems with our current society that nobody wants to face.
Having actually travelled there, a lot of authors assumptions are invalid in a way that reveals our (euro-american) biases. There are no roads, but people travel by plane (both jets, our guide made a joke that there are two kinds of airlines in Papua, ones that crash into mountains and into the sea, or prop on grassy landing strips, you can look up videos from visiting remote villages, those pilots are super skilled) and on the coast - by boat.
Smartphones, solar panels, FC Barcelona t-shirts and catholic church made their way into the mountains and jungle before any other sort of infrastructure, and so did the tourists and fake attractions: fake cannibals, fake legends and fake customs (even BBC fell for some). Demand gives birth to supply.
One super interesting thing the author does not mention is that Papua is the last stand for betel nut chewing: you can try it if you're into light psychedelics. I can also shill my video essay here of anybody is interested in listening to pseudophilosophical/journey journal ramblings in heavy accent: https://youtu.be/0cCoZguizdg?is=o-5urE4E2GTolaDv
Not to that extent: it's against regulations in most cities from Singapore (obviously) to Saigon, and it's considered 'old people thing' in general. In Papua you see people with red teeth all the time, blood like stains on sidewalks accompanied by tiny zipper bags, which are very intriguing when you're out of context. I saw a mother giving betel to her 10 yo daughter on a boat ride - It is a bit calming, so...
The streets are littered with beetlenut in Shenzhen, especially Huaqiangbei. Also Chunking Mansion, HK (take the stairs). Would not recommend if you have elevated blood pressure.
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).
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.
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 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.
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’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.
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 live in Vietnam. Bavet is a popular border for visa runs for expats. Normally, you don’t actually leave the Cambodia border building or you just take a bus all the way to Phnom Penh to wait for a visa was approved.
I was curious about the town, because it’s famous for casinos, scam centers, and Chinese manufacturers.
Interesting, did you take pics? Most living quarters (小区）in China have electrical fences and most windows have been barred. Left over from the 80’s when crime was high. Nowadays the bars prevent pets and children from falling out of the window (plus the cage like construction allows for some extra storage space)
I wrote a quick blog post about my experience and included the photos that I took. I was traveling alone and I knew the area was not safe, so I really didn't take enough photos, but the best one is at the end.
Thank you so much, what a great write up (did you submit it here?). Surprised you took any pictures to be honest. Some great observations! Those barred windows def look familiar. Correction:on a second look, these do not look like the typical chinese square tubing bars!
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.
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.
I was a volunteer in PNG at the PNG Institute of Medical Research, which at that time was run by Michael Alpers, the guy who did the initial scientific investigation into Kuru - the disease mentioned in the article. Fascinating stuff.
I lived for just over half a year in Goroka the highlands, then a further year in Madang on the north coast. That was 25 years ago now but I will never forget it.
> 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.
This is super interesting given that I had just watched an episode of survivorman where Les Stroud was given the "sing sing" ceremony by the villagers in the mountains, and also was wondering how they learned English that far up in the mountains.
I lived in Igam Barracks in Lae for 2 years when my father was posted there from the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF). His name is William Fiedler.
The trappings of colonialism were still all around when we stayed there in the mid 80s.
We had a house Mary who came over from a nearby village and worked for us, Mrs C. There was a hut behind each house for the house Mary or house man. Pidgin English was spoken. Betel nut stains covered the sidewalks in Lae.
Still it was an incredible experience for a 10 year old I'd like to go back one day, but it's unlikely I'll ever get the chance.
Why is it unlikely? Seems like quite the adventure to pursue at some point in your life as a small goal. You should pursue it before your body decides for you.
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
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.
The juxtaposition of someone's instinct to be thinking of bitcoin when reading about indigenous trade is at the best a bit funny, and at the worst small-minded when you consider the havoc those Australians brought onto their culture. Basically wiped out a foundational part of their way of life in an instant for their own gain. It's sad. That was my takeaway.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 is perhaps a blessing that the climate of the Papua lowlands makes the potato impossible to grow. While the potato would grow in the cooler highlands, this village to village transmission mechanism would not get the potato past the hot lowlands where plants would rot in the ground. The potato yields a lot more calories per hectare than the sweet potato, and when introduced to New Zealand, fueled massive wars.
This is fascinating, and there's a key inconsistency in the article that points to an unresolved mystery.
The author posits that sweet potatoes and tobacco moved into the highlands through intermarriage. Yet he later acknowledges that genetic evidence suggests no mixing of the highland people with the coastal people. So to me the mystery remains of how those crops got there.
"So the plants crossed over and started moving east along the coast and up into the interior. Beyond that point, there were no merchants. But when a woman married into the next clan over, she took cuttings from her family’s garden with her."
The key phrase is "Beyond that point", where that point is up into the interior where there were no merchants. That's when marriage took over.
It seems like Alzheimer’s and prion diseases like Kuru share a core molecular mechanism with misfolded proteins propagating and causing brain lesions. I find it really interesting that the gene protecting against Kuru has evolved naturally when according to Wikipedia, prion diseases don’t seem to have any effective treatments.
Cells have machinery for removing worn out proteins (tag em with ubiquitin and send them to incinerator [lysomes]). Doesn't surprise me too much a useful mutation (this folding is wrong detector) could work its way in.
I spent a summer in PNG in 2010, on the island of Karkar. It was wild.
One of my most formative memories was finding out that few of the people who live there, even those who are literate, had books and some DVDs, were high school students, even had occasional access to computers with internet, knew that humanity had landed on the moon!
> What I find so fascinating about all of this is just how separated this group was from the rest of history, and that there will never be a finding like this ever again. The world has effectively been explored, but as late as 1930 that wasn’t the case.
Great article but there's one bizarre statement that just kind of hangs without a clear connection to the rest of the piece. They describe how bird skins are exported without feet.. yet nowhere do they claim that the yighlanders prized feet ... they prized seashells.
There's a book called Kuru by an Australian doctor who worked in PNG and studied the disease. IIRC, it's by Michael Alpers. It's a fascinating book, and it's a mixture of adventure, medicine, and anthropology. I highly recommend it if you can find it.
I took a sociology class at Ball State in 2000 and the one thing that stuck with me is that some PNG groups would eat their neighboring tribesmen in an attempt to absorb their spiritual power. Pretty metal. Wouldn't want to be their neighbor.
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
If you enjoy the story and history of PNG, be sure to delve into Bougainville - there is a great documentary called 'The Coconut Revolution' if you can find it somewhere.
A lot of this appears to be sensationalist and racist and it completely ignores the fact that half of the island (West Papua) is under illegal Indonesian occupation and suffering a genocide in which over 500,000 Indigenous people have been killed. https://www.survivalinternational.org/peoples/papuan
In 2005, I took an ethnography class at my university. There were about 10 students (it was an advanced course - Rhetoric and an introductory Anthropology course were pre-requisites). I didn't travel abroad (although some did), and did a book report on Dr. Robert Klitzman: Wrote The Trembling Mountain: A Personal Account of Kuru, Cannibals, and Mad Cow Disease (1998). At the time, I was majoring in microbiology- studying bacteria, although my coursework covered the basics of prions, which were a relatively new type of virus- a protein one. I was quite disgusted by the whole thing, but I researched it anyways out of a morbid curiousity.
I suppose it's good that some Papua New Guineans evolved immunity to it- I had not heard of such immunity at the time, or at least it wasn't prevalent enough that it was confirmed, but it still of course is an "unspeakable" practice..
Probably because living in PNG sucks and they would rather risk their lives at a chance of improving their condition. Same reason immigrants came from Germany to the US to live in mud dugout houses in the plains. Or immigrants go anywhere really.
"A Blank on the Map" is an incredible documentary about this sort of contact, though 40 years later. Here's an un-paywalled link: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xsynjb
> 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."
As opposed to us smarter people making cattle feed that contains cow brains, thereby propagating mad cow disease, then killing ourselves by eating them (Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease)!
Or for that matter killing ourselves in dozens of other ways due to lack of scientific knowledge, or ignoring it.
We didn't keep contracting mad cow disease until everyone who wasn't genetically immune to it died. I'm pretty sure we figured it out and killed loads of cattle to stop us getting it.
> 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.
The environment makes a very real difference to what outcomes are possible/likely. It is hard to create a complex society if there is little food surplus and no real way to store food long term.
or perhaps The Proper English has been adopted by LLMs, so now real people have to write like middle-schoolers to avoid being accused of publishing slop.
This virtue signalling where everything surrounding an indigenous people or other minority must be handled with the fluffiest epistemological gloves is really exhausting. Can the author describe his own personal wonder at discovering this factoid (maybe with the same wonder as when he learned about penicillin in fact) without being de facto labeled a racist?
The New Guinea highlanders were equally ignorant of the existence of the Australians, or most of the other peoples outside of the New Guinea highlands. But it wasn't one of the New Guinea highlanders who took the initiative to make the discovery, it was "some random Aussie". So I think it's fair to credit the discovery of New Guinea highlanders to the Australians, rather than the other way around.
A group of people find out another group of people exist and react with surprise. That's not a mindset, it's been happening since ever since there were people.
Jumping at every opportunity to apply a moral perspective just undermines its credibility.
> Coloniser's mindset much? Finding out people live in a place where is not the same as discovering Penicillin.
Well the people living there certainly weren't going to make themselves known to the rest of the world now were they? The importance of the discovery is debatable but it seems that whitey did legitimately make a discovery, sorry to disappoint you.
My father lived in the PNG Highlands for a year in 1960 when he was 19, joining a mission station in Simbai (that had only been visited by the white man maybe 5 years earlier) and had an incredible time. He hatched an idea to help the manpower challenge of trekking supplies between the highland villages, by bringing donkeys to the highlands. He bought 5 donkeys left behind by the Japanese in WW2 in Lae, and together with two boys from the village (Wengi and Kanimnep), who’d never Simbai before, brought them by sea and plane to Aiome, where a gruelling and dangerous trek eventually got man and beast successfully back to Simbai - 4 months later. Crazy adventure, can you imagine what the boys thought of flying in a plane, seeing the ocean and becoming donkey husbandry experts (my father could only explain they were like ‘big pigs’ - nothing similar at all in the highlands)
50 years or so later I found there was a Cultural Festival in Simbai where about 20 tourists would go each year, and went out with some mates, along with prints of my dads slides. What followed was a trip I’ll never forget, as I was welcomed with a warmth and strength unlike I’d ever experienced, from the whole village and particularly from Wengi’s son Steven (his father had sadly died a few years previously). Whilst the donkeys had not transformed travel in a Simbai, and never bred, they were fondly recalled and had shaped the lives of both Wengi (forever known by others as Donkey) and Kanimnep. It was particularly joyous to be able to hand out pictures of peoples parents or family, who never had any photo of them or had any idea one could even exist, before some random person turned up one day
I left convinced that my father needed to return, and we did so four years later with me and my mother, which was a mind boggling trip - and another story.
It’s an extraordinary country, and incredible to have this documentation of first contact with tribes that had no idea the outside world existed. Highly recommend the First Contact book and film
Would love to hear the second story!
So I returned with my father and mother (who'd never been to PNG), 57 years after my dad left.
We were welcomed in Simbai by many friends old and new. Steven and Aiden, eldest sons of Wengi and Kanimnep, were first to greet us at the airstrip, and Wengi’s daughters gave us a traditional sing sing escort to our guest house. It was a day of greetings, sing sings and smiles, and a hint at what was to come - the Wengis had planned a day of welcome activities the following day, with a ribbon cutting of a new guest house on a ‘donkey trek’, of which we only knew a few snatches. We also met Lyn, a priest from Norfolk UK who has settled in Simbai with her husband Tony for the last year working tirelessly to help the village and its people in every way imaginable. Sadly Tony was in Mt Hagen but Lyn greeted us so warmly and spent days with us with such joy, generosity and kindness.
I was expecting a memorable welcome, but nothing could have prepared us for what followed the next day.
We walked into town from the guest house with a number of escorts, and were greeted by a traditional sing sing, beckoning us up the hill, with seemingly the rest of the village there to watch and welcome. This was not like any sing sing I’d seen before however, as the songs called my name and my father’s, and we learnt that new songs had been written specifically to welcome us. They sang of how we were walking in the footsteps of my father and of the donkeys; we were enveloped by the singers, circling us and moving us up the hill, like dolphins moving a shoal of fish.
We passed under arches made of leaves and flowers, and arrived at the bottom of a hill. A path has been freshly cut into it, and at the bottom was a screen made of banana leaves, with a sign - ‘Welcome to Courage family’, and drawing of a donkey above the word ‘track’. This is their plan - to open a new trek for tourists, that follows in reverse the route my father, Wengi, Kanimnep and 4 donkeys took between Simbai and Aimone. At the top of the hill is a new guest house, literally just finished, the result of the hard work of many hands in the community. This day was the ribbon cutting, and a major celebration.
The sing sing group had progressed to the top of the hill, and were working their way down as we went up, still singing and drumming. My father had to break down the plant screen, behind which was Wengi’s wife and many hugs. We were given flower garlands, and at the top of the hill was a beautifully constructed guest house, with flowers pushed into the matted walls, as well as another traditional building and a room for eating, all with amazing views over the village and highlands.
A huge amount of people were sitting up on the hill, and we were sat as guests of honour opposite a screened podium, from where speeches are given by many in Simbai, including the priest and Steven, and then by my father, myself and my mother. The themes were consistent - of the joy of families, of coming together in communities and across borders and cultures, and the impact of friendship.
We visit the wonderful guest house, my father cutting the garland ribbon, and the celebrations continue with the killing and cooking of pigs, and feasts for all. I slept in the new guest house, my brain buzzing with the echoes of song and dance, handshakes and hugs. I felt like I really understood what ‘mindblowing’ truly means – the magic of the day was almost too much to process, me and my family being the focus of such extraordinary friendship and celebration, it was overwhelming. A day that showed the just how strongly friendships and bonds can be formed out here, it was extraordinarily uplifting.
Lyn told us that she has seen many incredible welcomes in her year here, but none that were like this. It can be hard for volunteers to know what impact their hard work and difficult times leave behind, but this clearly showed the long standing impact my father’s friendship made.
PNG is still a very young country, with many rough edges, but it has something that we have lost - the true spirit of community, of families truly living together, and many families coming together to work and play as a community.
I'd buy and read the book. Thank you for these two posts, they are absolutely amazing.
That was beautiful. I sincerely hope you are writing a book about your experiences.
Two wonderul stories, beautifully written. Thank you for sharing.
Thank you so much for sharing! And yes, I would read the book as well :)
Wow. Thank you for offering a portal to this other world through your beautiful writing.
Beautiful, thank you for sharing.
Thank you for sharing.
I hear the PNG Highlands are quite picturesque.
yes it's stunning. Here's a few pictures I took:
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/4itqdahyk467qmi5u6xnu/DSC0067...
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/p2mffw6r2zdgk45ycdtxa/IMG_077...
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/3czn9rs6sreu9ir1svjl4/DSC0065...
Gorgeous! You're an amazing photographer.
Wow, stunning shots!
That’s amazing. I hope you write about this in depth one day.
Amazing story, thanks for sharing Simon.
Thanks for sharing!
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No, that was strictly funerary cannibalism and not a source of nutrition. What the OP means is that wild pigs were available without the need for breeding or domestication.
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
From the description it sounds like it is talking about the war the Dani people in the Baliem Valley fought in that region. They did not keep written records but archaeological and anthropological evidence suggests it could have been going on for thousands of years.
Basically, two tribes were separated by a river. If someone was caught alone near the river by the other tribe they would often be killed, and there were also occasional cross border raids that might kill a couple people.
In their culture they believed this created a spiritual imbalance. To satisfy the ghosts of the people killed the two tribes would schedule a formal massive fight on the border.
They would shout insults and throw spears and shoot unfeathered arrows (they had not discovered feathered arrows). You can't really aim an unfeathered arrows and they weren't all that good at spears at that distance either so casualties were random and rare, and usually only people who didn't pay enough attention and failed to dodge.
They would usually end as soon as someone got serious injured, or if it rained or got dark. They weren't really trying to actually kill each other, they were just satisfying their obligations to the ghosts.
In the early '60s the Dutch and then Indonesia forcefully put an end to it, and Christian missionaries arrived and managed to convert the population, and the spirit-and-revenge system that required appeasing ghosts through ritual warfare went away.
That Dani are now part of the modern world, but they have an annual Baliem Valley Cultural Festival where they dress in traditional tribal clothes and recreate the ritual arrow and spear battles (safely, I presume!) to preserve their history and to attract tourists.
I just looked online, and paintball bow and arrows exist!
(kinda pricey though)
Watching that battle, my mind went immediately to Dodge Ball. Play that simulates perhaps our most natural type of group fighting.
I grew up in a small-ish town and when there was a construction site there was inevitably a large pile of dirt somewhere nearby. Often 10 or more feet tall. If construction wasn't occurring it would be occupied by neighborhood kids digging, building dirt bike tracks and most importantly building walls / battlements.
Various neighborhood kids would take the dirt fort and try to hold it against the other neighborhood kids who came and ... everyone threw "dirt clods" at each other. A few rules like "no rocks" were understood.
Otherwise the battle resumed every day the workers weren't working on the dirt pile... it was glorious. Win or lose you returned home each day dirty as could be, and very happy you did your duty that day alongside your friends from the neighborhood.
That is a long way of saying that sometimes I see some strange "tribal" stuff that seems weird to me, and actually no I kinda get it.
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.
Most intra-species fighting is not designed to end in murder, so this seems like a pretty bold claim. Got any research to back it up?
Intra-species dominance is very different from group raiding. Chimps team up to slaughter other chimps all the time. Raid style warfare was the norm for humans
It was not the norm, but rather a failure mode. This isn't to say it wasn't common, but not the norm.
A History of Warfare by John Keegan is a good introduction to military anthrolopogy, with an extensive bibliography.
It is the norm for pre-industrial societies.
No it isn't, and I invite you to read the book to find out why. Murderous raids are the exception when the more widespread norm of ritual combat or tit-for-tat kidnappings with limited casualties had broken down.
Sure, you can go in to kill everyone, and sometimes they did, but only when they were OK with almost as many of their own group dying as the enemy. There's no big technological or tactical advantage to be had in the stone age. Maybe, if you're really lucky, only one of you die for every two of theirs?
(Attacking them in their beds, pah, don't you think maybe the neighboring tribe thought about that and had someone on watch?)
Attack in beds was very common. Sneak in canoes, kill as many as you can before the enemy regroups, canoe away as the sun comes up.
"The Cutting-Off Way: Indigenous Warfare in Eastern North America, 1500-1800" by Wayne Lee is a good read that describes a similar kind of warfare. It doesn't necessarily prove (nor does it set out to prove) that all non-industrial warfare followed this model but it does provide decent evidence for population-limited societies generally preferring deadly ambush to pitched battle.
When running away is a big part of the tactic, it's not a "kill everyone" tactic. You don't have the advantage for long. And even if you did succeed, the next tribe over could just as easily do the same to you (and they probably would, seeing what you're like), so there's a strong reason to develop norms, rules of engagement limiting this sort of thing.
There are no "kill everyone" tactics. That's never a goal because it's extremely difficult to achieve. It may happen, but it's always a bonus.
The versions I've heard always included bringing back any cattle and/or women you could. That gives the raids a more demonstrable benefit.
If you're talking cattle, you're talking a different time of history entirely. That allowed collecting and concentrating enough wealth that some could engage in that sort of thing without worrying about immediately falling victim to it themselves. In the paleolithic, that wasn't possible.
Before humans had domesticated cattle, it was of course not possible to steal it. Not sure if that's what you're saying.
I have read stories about this happening in the current day Amazon.
I think this makes the common mistake that all "primitive" cultures have the exact same behavior -- I suppose you're not speaking from PNG right? (although likewise I have no such specific knowledge) As the article cites, in this specific place (and in many other similar cultures), I don't think there's motive to wage large scale wars or take large amounts of territory, that would justify something like raiding and wiping out other groups. I suppose that could happen in the huge number of other cultures, ones that had more centralized leadership or competing more unified cultures. The conflicts in the case of PNG might have been localized dispute over borders and such.
In nonhuman animals, even in fierce disputes over territory and mating, killing is rare, because it's quite costly: you eliminate completely a healthy individual, and usually would run the risk of serious injury yourself, making both dying likely. Usually they e.g. resolve mating with displays of beauty/fitness, and territory with displays of force (chimpanzees for example have lots of display of force rituals, specially around selecting leadership, I believe) and sometimes non-lethal conflict (some species evolve apparatus just for this kind of conflict, e.g. antlers, so they can engage in conflict with low chance of injury).
Since we're referring to human cultures, something distinct we have is memory and communication -- information can get out on reputation, behavior, etc. of a group. I think if a group just goes out and murders another in their sleep (which TBF is not so easy), then I imagine for example word would also go out of their actions and may get into trouble with other groups, I'm sure spiritual traditions would also have a say about it, in favor of some sort of "spiritual revenge". But I suppose it's difficult to generalize.
I do think it's interesting to consider some forms of morality, or just metaphysical and logical understanding around ethics, as a kind of technology that enables people to live longer and enable more secure conditions, including preventing large scale conflict that can bring destruction on an industrial scale to entire societies (although misguided moral arguments ironically are also misused sometimes to enact destruction). Although I guess morality alone is not enough (because not everyone seems to internalize it well), and other mechanisms are also helpful to achieve more social stability.
(Also of note is that there can be such thing as too much stability -- for example, for some new more interesting and maybe more worthwhile forms of culture to emerge, old ones have to be replaced, so stability should be balanced with cautious openness to new ideas, technologies, methods, peoples (ethnicity), cultures, ..., and worldviews -- of course, as long as change is in the direction of improving our lives collectively. For example in some cases religious fundamentalism advocates for an absolutist cultural stagnation; we just shouldn't need one group to murder another to spread about new things)
Different cultures of course have different norms. There were even hunter-gatherer societies that practiced extreme forms of pacifism - Moriori would be one example (and their eventual fate shows why this isn't more common).
In general, though, pre-agricultural societies tend to have very high mortality rates from armed conflict with outgroups. In PNG in particular, as I recall, it gets to the point where >20% of all males die from enemy action. Similarly, pre-agricultural societies rarely take prisoners, and often target what we would consider non-combatants (i.e. there's no separation between "enemy warrior" and "enemy civilian", even in principle).
And this makes a lot of sense when you consider what motivates this warfare. Pre-agricultural societies are bounded by the output of the wildland that they forage on, and a single human requires a lot of land to live off in this manner. This is why those bands tend to be small - very few biomes can sustain a foraging band of even few hundred. But conversely it means that any other band of humans foraging off the same land is literally starving you out. It doesn't matter if they are otherwise hostile or not, and there's no potential compromise to be achieved even in theory if you have a plot of land that can sustain, say, 100 people, but now it has 150 feeding off it. The only way for one group to survive is to either kill or drive off the entirety of the remaining group, so it doesn't matter if it's women or children that you're killing. The point is to convince the other group that they are more likely to survive by going elsewhere by making it so precarious for them to remain, or if that is not possible, then to wipe them all entirely. Raids do exactly that.
This is also why prisoners are rarely taken and often ritually killed right away - every prisoner you take is an extra mouth to feed. In an agricultural society, an extra mouth can feed itself because it requires comparatively little land to do so, but for pre-agriculturalists an extra pair of working hands is worthless if the land is already at capacity wrt what can be extracted from it (which is usually the case since populations grow until they reach that point).
Stuff like ethics of warfare, spiritual tradition, reputation etc is derived from all this. Cultures that practice this kind of raid warfare generally glorify it. A war leader who leads a successful raid to massacre an unprotected enemy village is a hero, not just to his own people, but more broadly as a model for other aspiring warriors in the larger culture. So things that we might consider as "disreputable" are not necessarily seen as such there.
>Most intra-species fighting is not designed to end in murder
That depends a lot on scarcity. If you are a male and you only get one chance at mating, you will probably fight to the death. If you will get plenty of other chances, then you might accept the results of a ritualised non-lethal combat (e.g. giraffes headbutting each other, rather than kicking). Its just evolution + game theory.
Is this backed by some anthropological real world examples, or are you just extrapolating theories?
I read it in an article that was talking about the application of game theory to biology/evolution and I believe it is well supported by evidence. But I can't remember the source.
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What animal species often offers males only one chance of mating ?!
It's common among animal species for males to fight over females, but it's highly uncommon for them to fight to the death, because that is not evolutionary adaptive - it risks the individual as well as the genetic diversity of the group/species (and evolution is selecting for survival of the species, not the individual).
> evolution is selecting for survival of the species, not the individual
This is very wrong. Evolution is selecting for the total reproductive fitness of genes, and to a slightly lesser extent, individuals. There’s no mechanism that helps the process of evolution select for the survival or reproduction of the species. See any recent textbook on evolutionary biology, or read Dawkins, or even Darwin. I don’t know where you got this idea but it’s exactly wrong.
> There’s no mechanism that helps the process of evolution select for the survival or reproduction of the species
The "mechanism" is just the process of evolution itself, and how it plays out in practice, e.g. via punctuated equilibrium.
Over shorter timespans the gene pool of a breeding population incrementally drifts according to the success of individual genetics, but then once in a while, over multiple generations, something in the environment (disease, food, competition, etc) may change quickly and the gene pool as a whole, not just that of individuals, is thereby tested, with accumulations of previously benign changes sometimes suddenly becoming critical. In this way evolution is acting on the entire gene pool - of the species or more correctly of that interbreeding sub-population.
Success in evolution, the ability of the species as a whole to adapt and compete, also requires genetic diversity, not only to avoid inbreeding, but also to provide species level resilience, and species level ability to quickly adapt. e.g. It seems that the success of sexual reproduction is because it is a way to "game the game" by increasing genetic diversity and therefore improve along these axis of resilience and fast adaptation.
There are also social species, such as ourselves, where the social group becomes port of the individuals environment, and genetics best-fitted-to-the-environment becomes a group dynamic.
Nothing about evolution feels sensible or right: and the vast majority of people have severe misunderstandings about how it works (for example the Darwin awards are highly misleading). Even science reporting is often highly misleading[0]. Intuition is not trustworthy for this topic, and neither is our ambient knowledge.
Referencing the Wikipedia article on kuru which references this paper: https://researchonline.lshtm.ac.uk/id/eprint/4514/1/nejmoa08...The suggested evolution is:
* there is one ancestor with a gene that protects against kuru.
* children and mothers without that ancestor often die from kuru
* children of that ancestor have a much higher chance of survival
* eventually everyone is a child of that ancestor
* any children of that ancestor that didn't get the protective gene also eventually die out
The gene is selected for. There are no population effects.
The key part in the paper is where they mention adult men with the gene, because they are measuring the counterfactual of the many males that died because they didn't have that gene (males that ate brains as young kids but then died because they didn't have the gene from that ancestor).
The paper is hard to understand in part because of the confounding effects of males not eating the brains. Plus the confounder of stopping cannibalism in 1960.
The idea of "Group selection" is fundamentally wrong - regardless of how sensible the belief feels. Anybody using the words "group selection" is indicating their belief system, and they usually then have biased narratives to 'support' their belief.
[0] horrifically incorrect sciencedaily link in Wikipedia.
[1] We don't fucking evolve genetic mutations
Fundamentally evolution is selecting for genes, not individuals, and there is no 1:1 relationship between genes and individuals.
Let's say that everyone has a skin color gene that makes them either red or blue. And a new predator turns up that only eats blue things. To you this is a tale about individuals, while it seems that an equally valid, and frankly preferable, view is this this isn't about individuals - it's about being red or blue and is a species level effect.
I suspect the underlying issue is that we are all terrible at unthreading cause from effect.
Words matter. Talking about "species level" is misleading because talking about an effect (blue phenotype) distracts us from the cause (a gene for blue).
And evolution is confusingly another step removed: the red survives because the blue did not.
Most of us struggle to see the counterfactual absence of a something.
The blue "species" never exists - our brains want to find groups and patterns. Our words mislead us.
The same thing is alluded to in the paper: the deaths of people without the gene is what is driving the gene to spread (through reproductive success of those that didn't die).
Reproduction is what matters (which death or sickness may interfere with).
Even the paper is confusing because it talks about 50 year old women (measuring survival bias; not whether they are expected to pass on genes at 50).
(reedits for clarity).
Also read this comment by a real biologist:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49734849
Have you studied evolution, or is this your own theory?
If individuals share some genetics, and evolutionary selection pressures act on genetics, then it follows, right ?
Not even close. Evolutionary selection pressures don't usually act directly on genetics. Perhaps you are incorrectly attempting to rely on intuition, and over-simplistic phrases like selection pressures. Intuition is incredibly misleading with evolution.
Your pink and blue example is actually a great model to work from. Think about the genes and the expression of those genes, and then think about what is being selected if all the blue animals are eaten.
Or think about what would happen if there was a mountain range, and pink animals were eaten on one side and blue ones were eaten on the other side.
Or think about what if one of the blue fathers has pink polka dots that gave it a 10% better chance of survival.
Always concentrate on watching that genes are passed on by reproduction - getting eaten doesn't have to be a problem if reproduction has already occurred (unless parental investment is needed or you get complicated like kin selection).
I am not a biologist. But 'The Selfish Gene' is one of my favourite books because of the concepts within. Unfortunately I think Dawkins went off the deep end later (with what I thought was religious zeal). The Extended Phenotype is even harder to read, but also worthwhile.
It is a fun topic because many phrases about evolution seem misleadingly about death rather than reproduction. And the meaning of the word evolution is absolutely twisted in everyday conversation. Ignoring the troubles with bible bashers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survival_of_the_fittest - "fittest" has an unobvious meaning.
I don't think so. But it isn't my area of expertise.
>evolution is selecting for survival of the species, not the individual
I believe that is wrong. Selection works on the level of the individual and their genes. Dawkins covered this extensively in at least one of his books. Any professional biologists care to comment?
Selection works on the level of the genes. Dying without procreating can still be advantageous if doing so means that enough of your relatives survive, for example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kin_selection
I think it's most accurate to say that selection works at the level of genes (or combinations of genes), not of individuals, and of course many individuals of a species will share some/most of their genetics.
You can tell it as a story (easier to teach) of individual success in surviving and having children, which isn't wrong, but it's also not the big picture.
obligate male death happens, but usually in things like spiders after mating, so there's a few examples for you
Fighting to the death and mating are not the same!
There are a number of species where the female eats the male after mating - examples such as praying mantis and octopus. Both octopus males and females die after mating, the female after having protected the eggs, so it makes sense that she sometimes eats the male too (who is going to die anyway). But, examples like this are relatively rare, and for species specific reasons.
"What animal species often offers males only one chance of mating ?!"
"Fighting to the death and mating are not the same!"
Your original question and your current statement are in confliction. Pick one.
> If you are a male and you only get one chance at mating, you will probably fight to the death
This is the comment I was responding to.
The question was about pre-mating death matches between males, not post-mating snacking behavior of females.
Yes, in the documentary The Walking Dead, when Rick's team attacked Negan's team while they were sleeping.
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You watched Apocalypto recently
Even more striking there were some bow and arrow fights again just a few months ago. I would presume they have never stopped, just rarely make the news.
https://youtube.com/shorts/91moJcyiS00?si=EYzspw-B7y_J77Os
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.
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.
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. Almost every male participates and they specifically avoid high intensity warfare because the cost could effectively kill a tribe’s agricultural output.
Note though that even in the Mediterranean, routes where most of the enemy was killed were relatively rare.
In battle yes. In sieges it was much more common, along with the murder/enslavement of all or the majority of the non fighting population.
Sometimes this sort of ritualised combat is a way for young men to show off their bravery without too much chance getting killed. Probably also helps with tribal cohesion. And I assume reduce the chance of full-on, lets kill everyone in the tribe, violence between groups.
"They had had a long battle with what looks to be hundreds of participants and there were a few wounded, but nobody died."
Observe the weapons. Most of them are sharpened sticks and they had a limited supply. Less deadly than swords and no mass manufacturing of weapons either.
The spears would be lucky to penetrate the ribcage. But they could go through the gut or throat, and if they were embedded in a thigh, they could easily cause sepsis.
You can easily kill someone with a fire-hardened pointed stick or a wooden club, if you really want to. I think it is just that they don't want to.
In the battle footage there is little or no hand to hand conflict, and the spears are thrown by hand (from what I remember): no catapults or sheathes to launch them from. At one point, someone removes a spear from his leg, and while it does look nasty, it doesn't look like a fatal injury unless sepsis etc gets in. I'm sure they did have battle clubs, but those aren't used much in this battle. (This may be partly because the battle is in rough/hilly terrain and it is easier to launch spears at people from a distance than run over to them.)
Guns began to enter the region in the 70s and 80s in large numbers, which apparently changed the dynamic. Today's Port Moresby, the most modern part of the island, is apparently much more dangerous than these areas were.
You’d have to catch them first. If you watch the video there almost zero hand to hand combat. Their arrows don’t seem to have stabilizers either.
Obviously if this was filmed on video someone could have given one side a machine gun. Would’ve they used it or would have they still opted to maintain the tradition and fight the old way. The battle may have other reasons besides 100% dominating or wiping out the opponent.
Sadly, guns have entered these conflicts since that film was recorded, and there have been far more fatalities. They've changed the dynamic and not for the better. Central government doesn't seem to have much control over big portions of PNG. Language and remoteness are two major barriers to that.
To be fair, I wish the whole world was much "worse" at warfare in the same way as they are. We'd probably be a much happier world overall. Or at the very least less destructive.
That's because very primitive humans still have a bicameral mind, i.e. things appear to them as auditory hallucinations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameral_mentality
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Consciousness_in...
"a bicameral mentality was the "normal and ubiquitous state" of the human mind as recently as 3,000 years ago, at the end of the Bronze Age"
I'm pretty sure Julian Jaynes' work is entirely hypothetical and is thought if as just an interesting idea rather than actually having any semblance of truth to it... unless you actually believe the Greeks were amongst the first humans to truly emerge with consciousness which seems farfetched to me
> unless you actually believe the Greeks were amongst the first humans to truly emerge with consciousness which seems farfetched to me
To the extent that human consciousness can be described from within itself as something distinct from a pan-consciousness of all things, is it farfetched to consider it as not existing until it did emerge? In what artifacts could someone discern the threshold at which consciousness arose?
You read Snow Crash and missed that it was fiction.
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You are aware that this is the theory of a single crank, and not supported by any modern scientific thought, yes?
not my downvote, my feelings were not hurt at all
The meat of the book is the references, not the extreme interpretation that catches most peoples' attention. No hallucinations please unless something like substances were involved.
The plasticity of the brain whether damaged or not is emphasized, and uneven recovery of language skills gives some clues.
Monkey see, monkey do was certainly a thing before humans arrived and it's not been left behind very completely at all.
In a world where almost everybody starts out in early childhood learning to read & write at the same time, and it is structurally taught largely to right-handed kids from right-handed examples, and this has been going on since like "written history"[0], this can not help but provide an overwhelming mainstream norm about what side of the brain is for what. Especially when it comes to language. You could almost think of it as a force acting to confine language, or more so the writing part of literacy to one side of the brain more so than the other. The bulk of the highest-educated and most respected vocabularies have been largely built through literacy rather than orally for quite some time, it wasn't always like that even with equivalent vocabularies, and that part lasted longer than the part since literacy got popular.
For those where it doesn't perfectly apply, like left-handed people, those who don't read and/or write, those who learned from left-handed people, those that taught themselves, etc, that all adds up to a small minority and of course there is great pressure to conform. But that doesn't mean the same language ends up in the same parts of the brain as the "normal" specimen in the jar.
The most recent development is the way more early writing is accomplished using both hands on a keyboard like never before when it was traditionally penmanship for generations back.
Now some people actually "think" in language more so than others, some not at all, plus often bilingual works too.
I'll go ahead and say it, if you were up there in the highlands where Dolly Parton was born back in the 19th century before they really got to building schools, you could find an "illiterate" culture often having a wider vocabulary than those in places like Boston where they had schools continuously since arriving on the continent. Unlike PNG the hillbillies of the Smokies descended directly from a literate culture, they just didn't bring many books that far up the mountains, and odds are they would be lost to mildew by the mid 1700s.
Sometimes you also get the idea that when they were feuding, they just didn't understand each other and everything was fine among the disagreeable factions as long as everyone stayed on their own mountain. People had lost the ability to read, and when they only had one book that was probably the Bible but they couldn't literally decipher it any more. It was still holy though for the faithful who would pretend to read from it while more or less "lip-syncing" the scriptural quotes that had been passed down orally ever since.
Maybe that's where the saying comes from; "If I had half a brain I'd <obviously do what the mainstream would do>." From those who have no history of using less than both halves even for language, so they naturally don't do what the mainstream does? While simultaneously recognizing that they don't even have the same first half that the formally educated (whom they often respect so highly) do possess.
With PNG you've got to figure all the highlanders have language and stuff well-imprinted in their brains like anybody else, "just" not with the pattern recognized as most common to outsiders.
That doesn't mean their superstitions were based on hallucinations of any kind, among different cultures you can expect different parts of different halves of the brain to be doing some of the same things differently. Especially when they have always been isolated from each other.
There might even be a tendency going far back into "modern" literate culture, where the "literate" half of the brain is generally respected most when it is brilliant enough to get by on its own, and that ends up predominating.
Anyone who comes along and has always used all their brain may still have an orthogonal advantage. That could be why professor Diamond attributed the PNG highlanders as perhaps more intelligent than most in general. Or with a cool million of them there's got to be an Einstein or two. What would an Einstein casually having twice as much brainpower than previously imagined be like?
[0] Recent written history, the kind that means the most to a literate culture. Note the way with some traditionally illiterate groups how oral history can easily go back many generations further.
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 .
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
Not even close.
I disagree with the (2). The laws of war are and have been evolving, and there's plenty of evidence in recorded history. The first records we have come from Ancient Babylon and they have been modified and amended multiple times since. Another aspect of this development is the existence of international arbitrage with laws that also keep evolving, something that minimizes the need to go to war.
And there's more: the relationship between the state and its army changed a lot. The role, the rights and the duties of individual soldiers changed a lot. Just to give you some examples: the Lieber Code is the one created during the US Civil War -- it's perhaps the first to mention the concept of unlawful orders, exonerating the soldiers who wouldn't follow such orders. Traditionally, St. Maximilianus is described as the first conscientious objector to draft, a concept that, too, went through multiple iterations... And, really, we didn't even scratch the surface mentioning these. Military history is probably the most eventful and rich sub-field of history.
>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.
Great filters are how genetics change. When you have two societies, one that kills itself and one that doesn't, that is how the world genetics shift more towards avoiding societal self-killing.
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. Yet, those can be overturned in an instant by a slick turn of phrase that appeals to our base instincts/caveman brain, which i believe we all have.
I have given this more thought, but too late to edit. I would like to add a very important specific fact of the modern day.
Thanks to the Balkanization of our media landscape, and social media targetting: "a slick turn of phrase that appeals to our base instincts/caveman brain" can be tailored just for you. It has never been easier to make us behave in crazy ways.
I genuinely believe that the existing incarnation of "social media" could lead to the death of billions of humans.
Yes, I think you're overall right on your description of what is happening, but I disagree somehow with your analysis. My reading of that is that social media 'accelerate' culture, and some of it is towards hateful, violent way. It's not that we come 'back' to animal instincts, it's that some new, emergent cultures push towards violence.
To your other point, I have a friend who thinks social media and online porn drive fetishism, and that fetishism drive a lot of the new 'illiterate' political movements. I don't think I totally agree with him on the illiterate part (I mean, Renaud Camus certainly managed to read Maurras before paraphrasing him, in an objectively worse way, sure, but still), but I have trouble arguing against his other points. He also thinks that this fetishism taken too far will push people towards a death cult, and kill millions
> 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 don't really need to go that far. Alimentation changes are enough to force genetic change. Or if you want to go the darwinist/anthropologic way: "https://www.scimex.org/newsfeed/yes-homo-mammals-keep-evolvi..."
They are only modified if there is some form of selection though, like for example some people say of the Dutch and their height.
In modern times it is more likely that culture and education augments genetics such that your violent tendencies are repressed, you are brought up leading a soft and comfortable life, taught to be polite and kind, etc. Contrast to maybe someone brought up in a warzone or some other place.
I mean post apocalyptic shows like the walking dead express this quite well (at least the first few seasons) where once society falls it's just a free for all and back to our roots again.
Yeah, i'm pretty sure observational studies after natural disasters (those who followed up Katerina especially) showed that it wasn't really the case. Yes, you have looters everywhere (Even in Japan), but most people help their neighbours (or even strangers if those looks non-threatening). Only when you have a central authority figure present and a lot of people you see riot and aggression, hence the reason why in most countries that need help, aid distribution is as decentralized as possible nowadays (centralized distribution is a _really_ good way of having people killed in the mass anyway).
Is it more or less scary of the filter event was the creation of plate tectonics and the phosphorous cycle?
You are however under no obligation to grant your instincts unrestricted access to the pilot seat.
> 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
And we are not the ones that live in the future... This two pre-bronze age tribes live in it, the future we all will experience with collapse of our natural world and our civilization.
Do you think they're more likely to survive global warming than a relatively technologically developed nation?
Probably, actually. “Primitive” societies survived the ice age. Modern societies depend on a relatively fragile system of infrastructure and many of the individuals in modern society are utterly dependent on it. Technology only works within its rightful context, and 99% of it is completely useless after infrastructural collapse.
Meanwhile, premodern societies depend on the ecosystem as a whole which tends to adapt over time; the individuals in such societies are more self sufficient in terms of ability to survive the elements.
So it’s just as likely those not dependent on modern technology will do fine against the vicissitudes of climate change as much as those who are dependent on it. At least in terms of ability to survive. At least, their expectations of survival baseline won’t change nearly as much in the face of natural disaster.
Yeah but because we have so much ressources and people we also have all in all quite some survival nerds, who could learn from all the tribes in the world and have the starting bonus of high tech. Things wpuld be fough with a society collapse, but the knowledge is out and will survive, except mass nuclear holocaust that totally amd drastically changes the climate. But then those tribes would struggle, too, if their sweet potato does not grow anymore.
War before mechanized killing. This is probably excatly like the "star wars" for the mayan culture.
I watched a few documentaries about the North Sentinelese and uncontacted Amazonian tribes, and it's terrifying how violent they are compared to modern standards. They kill and ask questions later.
It makes sense because the downside is very high (the stranger wants to kill you) but the upside is not (the stranger has something cool to show you or trade with you). It's not like you'd go to prison for murder either.
For what it's worth, cops in America in certain scenarios act the same way, faced with similar upside/downside risks.
That's the only reason they are uncontacted. If they welcomed visitors like the native Hawaiians did, they'd be speaking English today.
And “they” would arguably cease to exist.
Diversity and integration are good things
There's a pretty heavy survivorship bias on that, so you probably shouldn't extrapolate to all pre-civilization humans. For a group to remain largely uncontacted, it means they have to be remarkably insular, living somewhere other people don't want to be particularly bad (implying resource scarcity), and it definitely helps if they respond to attempts at contact with extreme violence.
Yeah this is selection bias. The remaining uncontacted tribes are uncontacted because they are very hostile to outsiders.
Only partly, they also live in extremely remote areas that don't have a lot to offer. It's not like all the other indigenous populations were pacifists, they fought wars, murdered, raided, etc. but they were living in areas that were much more desirable for conquest.
I think there's no other way it could be. If you're not violent you get wrecked by modern pathogens and die, or become integrated somewhat into modern society and can no longer be considered "uncontacted".
In fact there could be a direct link - the less reactive cultures were quickly subjugated by the colonialist cultures with advanced tech. Or the cultures that learned to strike back hard rather than welcome/integrate foreigners (see the lost American settler towns) are the ones that survived independently for longer.
> and it's terrifying how violent they are compared to modern standards
Not really, we just got better at it. Combat in the Ancient Near East consisted of bludgeoning your opponent with maces, clubs, and other blunt instruments. It took awhile to kill someone. We seem to equate "violence" with the duration spent killing someone (as though "dragging it out" is worse), but the end result between the millennia is the same: person A kills person B. We can just do it now in seconds with a single well-placed bullet instead of multiple minutes of agonized bludgeoning.
The alternative is to be potentially oppressed, subjugated, and colonized. A good example is the British Raj. Being peaceful is fine as long as you're able to use overwhelming force and win against someone who might harm you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Raj
Not even remotely similar. India had been trading with the rest of the world for millennia, was far more technologically developed than stone age tribes (in some ways ahead of pre-industrial revolution Britain) and was only conquered at all with the help of Indian allies, soldiers and even Indian financing. British people could not have conquered India alone.
Divide and rule, they say.
That is true but makes it sound too much as though it was entirely the clever British outsmarting and manipulating naive Indians.
The British Raj was not Britain conquering a peaceful people it was Britain winning a multi-century great game to replace the Mughal Empire.
the Dark Forest theory on a micro scale.
contact, even if benevolent, would probably kill them all via disease. that doesn't include potential social and cultural upheavals, etc.
you either keep everyone out, hard, or you lose everything.
In the case of the North Sentinelese, this incident in 1880 might have something to do with their hostility to the outside world.
> After several days, six Sentinelese—an elderly couple and four children—were taken to Port Blair. The colonial officer in charge of the operation wrote that the entire group "sickened rapidly, and the old man and his wife died, so the four children were sent back to their home with quantities of presents".
After the 2004 tsunami, indian government sent helicopters to see if they had survived and they started firing arrows at the helicopter. It's possible that they think the foreigners caused the tsunami.
Some gangs are like that today.
> terrifying how violent they are compared to modern standards.
Oh you mean October 7th Hamas standards or the Israeli Gaza genocide standards, or maybe the US in Vietnam standards?
Those are not real “wars”. Basically mostly for show.
Tribal warfare is often ritualized [1]. I remember reading that the tribes on what is now Canada's West Coast practiced real, brutal warfare compared to their eastern counterparts, due to the scarce resources.
In Burden of Dreams [2], the documentary about the making-of Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo, some of the tribal extras would occasionally go off in their motor boats for raids on neighbouring tribes. It's so interesting to me, tribal life would be fascinating to experience.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ritual_warfare
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_Dreams
> tribal life would be fascinating to experience.
Not when life is filled with warfare, murdering other people, and having loved ones killed?
All this ritual warfare makes it sound like the exact opposite. Sounds like the bigger problem with tribal living would be the lack of antibiotics.
I didn't say "a grand time". It would also be fascinating to live through the Fall of Rome, the Pazzi conspiracy, the Black Death, or any number of other unpleasant things. I'm pretty on-edge about the interesting times I'm living in right now, but they are certainly interesting.
> 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.
Maybe for the simple reason that a pike doesn't need to be charged up, or stocked up with ammunition. Maybe sharpened.
Im fully on the spectrum, but my first thought when I hear about stuff like this is what would be the moral implication of "recreational gang war" experience. I.e you pay a lot of money, you get guns and armor, you go into gang territory, they shoot arrows at you, you defend yourself. Seems like you would have the right to use deadly force, but you would obviously be at a big advantage.
There is no moral or philosophical debate to be had here. It's morally wrong to do this and in my opinion that's clear as day. Putting yourself in a dangerous situation and provoking a "self-defense" scenario like that only serves as a thinly veiled excuse to murder people you consider inferior.
Do you often have violent power fantasies? Do you find yourself daydreaming about them regularly?
Spare me the psycho analysis please, its pretty cringe.
Explain to me how is this different from safari hunting trips where you can get attacked by a wild animal (often an agressive one thatvattacks villagers) and have to shoot it to defend yourself? And the argument of them being human versus safari trip featuring an animal is not something that is given, you have to show that their lives are worth more than the animal life
They are both bad.
I agree, but there is a market for the former, hence the question.
There being a market for something does not justify its existence, at least morally.
There being a market for something doesn't make it morally right, but it highlights the demand aspect where someone is willing to pay money, which means that there is some level of it not being universally bad.
In the case of a Safari, there is this moral middle ground - according to the countries policy, if an animal attacks a human, it generally is a candidate for being put down because of perceived danger to humans in the area, but on the flip side, its also morally wrong to kill an animal just because it does that.
In the case of the gang warfare, you are doing a service by reducing the number of gang members and crime, but its also morally wrong to take someones life in offense for personal entertainment? (If its not clear, the difference in doing that in PNG versus any other country is because specifically of the lack of law enforcement that is the way of life there)
Another hypothetical scenario - say you have a country where age of consent is low, and certain type of porn that is highly illegal in the rest of the world is freely available (which is not far from reality, scarily). You can't stop the creation or distribution of that porn without basically invading the country and changing its law. However, what if you used said porn and supplied to convicted pdf files in your home country so that they are less likely to exploit young kids irl? Is that morally wrong, or is it morally justified?
Did you know there have been literal slave markets in the past? And they still exist today (e.g. in Lybia). Please explain how this is "not universally bad". Actually don't. Spare us your disgusting mental gymnastics that you shamelessly try to disguise as autism.
>Please explain how this is "not universally bad".
Lets say that you have a country where slavery is legal. The slaves of course don't like it. But lets say that the populace is largely in favor of it, because slave labor keeps the barebones economy going and people can trade and have food to eat. Most people don't actively capture slaves, they just buy them at the market.
If you had the power to eliminate slavery in that country, you would free the slaves, but you would basically condem a lot of the people to die from starvation.
So whats the "correct" moral stance? Real world isn't black and white like you would want it to be.
I am holding my finger on the nuclear bomb button and I say if you don't murder everyone except me and you, I will press the button and it will murder everyone including me and you. So what's the "correct" moral stance?
Do you have a desire to kill people?
Not at all. But the world we live in is pretty fucked up from that perspective. There are ex military contractor guys on youtube talking about their weapons and how they used a certain rifle to fight off invaders in the middle east. Nobody seems to care that the people on the other end of those bullets may have families.
My interest in this is purely philosophical. If you have a what is effectively a lawless country, where native populace has the desire to kill you, to what extent could you engage with that in a moral framework?
sounds vaguely similar to pirate hunting tours, put yourself in a dangerous situation where you can respond with deadly force.
https://www.sail-world.com/USA/Russian-luxury-yachts-offer-p...
Not that you've explicitly claimed it's authentic, but the very idea of a pirate hunting tour is a hoax that resurfaces across the Internet every so often in different forms:
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/somali-pirate-luxury-cruis...
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
> 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.
“The media” are simply a mouthpiece for the ultra-wealthy. Basically their propaganda arm.
I obviously think this is an oversimplification but I've also slowly come to believe this is basically accurate. Reading the history of the Guatemala coup that the US did and the role the NYTimes played in it is very convincing evidence for this view
Save the orangutans? or sell more Oreos? Hmmm
Our media mostly talks about things we have something to do with.
Defianus Kogoya: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Gome_torture_scandal
A few years ago I got to accompany a small group of friends to an isolated tiny village on the southern coast of SW Papua, and I swam with the jellyfish in one of the inland saltwater lakes you’re describing! That trip still remains the coolest place I’ve ever been.
> and no media or journalists, and not even Indonesians are allowed to enter West Papua.
Uh, no? There's an active tourism industry particularly around the Baliem Valley and the Raja Ampat islands. You can fly into any of the larger cities without a permit, and while travel in the interior does require permits (surat jalan), these are usually readily granted.
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.
Wow. Really? This sounds terrible.
I am shocked it’s not reported about in Western media.
> I am shocked it’s not reported about in Western media.
Average american already has their hands full (slash "their brain full") with local matters - family, friends, community. It's hard enough to get attention to spare to turn to national matters, much less stuff that happens on the other side of the world in non-allied poor countries.
western media has a habit of not reporting on atrocities they are complicit in. When the genocide in Indonesia happened (where as many as 2 million were killed) they presented it as liberation from communist sympathizers. Union workers, and people of certain ethnicities or religions that were seen as sympathetic to communism were all put to death. Goodyear Tire company, just 2 decades after the Holocaust, was using labor from death camps for its rubber manufacturing. US corporations in general had a lot to gain from the genocide
There are lots of atrocities all over the world that western media just ignores flat out. But they do hyper focus on one or two specific cases for their political agenda.
Hell, then love self flagellating about how they themselves (the west) are the worst people on earth, which is also a political agenda and is only convincing if you ignore pretty much all of human history and large parts of the current day reality elsewhere in the world.
It's so ironic that your first paragraph is an example of your second.
Both paragraphs are criticisms of western media, I’m not sure I follow your point
Paradise Broadcasting also made an incredible documentary[0] on the bombing of OPM by the Indonesian government. The follow up videos are great as well.
[0]: https://youtu.be/65_DgLwjePA
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/
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.
> 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 (but according to https://tools.watannetwork.com/blocked in Belgium, Luxembourg, Netherlands, and United States)
Blocked.
I hear 'The Act of Killing' is an amazing film. But I am not sure if I can bring myself to watch it.
It's maybe not as bad as you might think. People reminiscing about killing rather than footage of it.
Still sounds horrible.
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
Shrugs. Works for me.
Sorry YouTube regional-based DRM (presumably) is fucking you. Director's name and documentary title is available, you're going to need to search it for yourself.
Worked for me
> Suharto (who was put into power by the US)
Suharto was responsible for his own rise. He took money and intel from wherever he liked and was basically an independent & ruthless strongman. Neither he nor other Indonesians need to be infantilized by lazy neocolonial narratives.
The coup was literally armed and equipped by the US. The US provided intelligence, made the plan, did the homework. They even gave them list of targets. Wherever you wanna draw the line, no one would seriously deny that he could've gained power without the US.
The US' strategy to use a proxy to commit heinous crimes against humanity is named after this event. It's called the Jakarta Method.
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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 :/
That was an amazing introduction to your stories. I would love to hear them.
Would love to hear some of the wild stories...
I know someone who worked there maybe 10 years ago in an embassy, and it was wild in a very bad way.
- they had a meeting with some locals and the locals discussed the need for retaliation for something, and their plan was to rape someone's daughter
- a kid bought a mini packet of chips on credit from a general store, the debt wasn't repaid and the end result was the general store getting burned down
- a fellow employee forgot to lock their car doors (everyone gets told to do this) and was car-jacked, but he got his car back because the car-jacker couldn't drive a manual car
- the embassy had high fences and security, but just in case, each house within the embassy compound had a central panic room in case the outer wall is breached
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.
Share some stories with us!
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It's a reasonable guess but wrong. My dad is a carpenter and my mum is an artist. Dad was helping build houses up there for one of the government building contractors. Mum was along for the ride.
Edit: And not that it really matters, but neither of my folks are religious.
It is a pity you are being downvoted. I do linguistic fieldwork in a similarly remote region and, yeah, you learn pretty quickly visitors fall into about those three types.
I worked in two way geostationary satellite for years and learned pretty quickly what sort of groups of people needed to pay money for Internet in truly the most off the grid locations. The other major users not so relevant for PNG which I intentionally didn't mention are military/government. I guess if it's not "mining" in some places you've also got "oil/gas", which basically falls into the same category of resource extraction. Sometimes forestry/logging.
By the way, your discontent about missionaries shouldn't be centered just around "gospel" groups. Multiple denominations of Islam have pretty far-reaching missionary networks into seemingly faraway places.
Yep, absolutely agreed. There's even Islamic parallels in the kinda-fundamentalist-Sunni world to weird USA TV Christian evangelists if you know who people like Zakir Naik are.
Now at the risk of over generalizing
And yet you couldn't help yourself.
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Let me tell of a missionary school and it has left me totally jaded about the cultural wipe-out that is practiced methodically. All the cultural icons are appropriated and a cross plastered on everything, from didgeridoo to the boomerang and placed alongside the holy book. Indigenous knowledge production is low because there frankly it requires audience and artist needs to be rewarded and paid, but this can be taken advantage of by well endowed people. If you search results for that local language on Youtube, all the main results you get are from Christian missions who have translated hymns and set it to indigenous rhythms. It is like you learn keys of the castle from somebody without telling them the end purpose you have in mind from the very beginning, take their knowledge and re-package it. Within the next gen you have new converts actively forgetting what their own parents are teaching them, and think this all is gift of missionaries.
You are not alone, its pretty obvious what force of evil overall (even if some local good was done here and there) missionaries have been. And I don't mean just some 16th and 17th centuries horror stories, I mean even recent times.
The idea that christianity is somehow above all other religions, while covering at best around 1/3 of world population... lets say I don't enjoy talking to irrational, highly emotional people on such topics. Where facts become irrelevant so does my presence in discussion.
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> This was fuelled by what is known as moka, a system of competitive gift giving, where you give someone in your tribe goods like a pile of pigs and shells, and they are then obligated to give you back more later, and you them more again after that. Whoever gives the most, publicly, becomes the big man.
This reminds me of the Reciprocity and Re-Distribution system in the Inca Empire. There wasn't a system of currency or markets. But there was an Ayni (mutual aid) and Minka (collective work) system, paired with a Mita system: work done for the Sapa Inca which was in return "paid" by the Sapa Inca in feasts, food and goods/gifts. This was all glued together by the concept of Ayllu (family), where these obligations were established through family connections and of course the Sapa Inca had marriage connections with subordinate chiefs.
I myself can't stop thinking about the Inca Empire Economy and how it shows in reality that currency is not about the paper nor number nor symbols, and more about the "I owe you"s that move in the economy.
I’d recommend reading the late David Graeber’s “Debt” which does a good job illustrating exactly what you described, which is how currency is at its core an IOU
I cannot recommend reading this book enough.
So… does it follow that the very wealthy basically hold a massive IOU to the general public?
To expand the sibling comment. In principle the money would reflect IOUs the general public owes them. But also following this logic the way I see it is they accumulated their money was by getting more IOUs through: people employment (being able to command a big pool of work and get a cut of IOUs from it), arbitrage (exchanging lower value IOUs with higher value IOUs), or simply stealing (eg. siphoning government resources).
If by wealthy you mean people with a lot of money specifically, than no, the IOU is the other way around.
They hold IOUs from the general public.
See also Bourdieu's Outline of a Theory of Practice.
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.
This does not make sense I love it. Why State of Origin and not just simply the NRL?
It's safe to say they're both highly watched in PNG, Origin is just more of an event (a three game series, compared to the NRL which is a full season + playoffs). It's the same two sides every game, you're maroon or you're blue. Meanwhile there's 17 clubs in the NRL, I assume people from abroad pick one arbitrarily, of which only two clubs are going to make the grand final every year.
The origin teams are comprised of the all the best players in the league across clubs so they’re like dream teams.
Maybe because State of Origin is the 'tribal' grudge match series, players are only ever eligible for the one team.
Some players do manage to be eligible for both, you just can't swap once you've decided
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.
She’ll probably do that on her next 3 week trip.
Indeed. Given average western diet, 3 weeks of malnutrition can only do good.
How is malnutrition ever good?
"Mal", bad, in the latin
Losing weight is probably worth the tradeoff for most Americans.
Sure, losing weight is of benefit. But malnutrition is defined as a "serious deficiency" in the intake of energy and nutrients. Healthy weight loss is not malnutrition, and you can quite definitely be missing essential vitamins and be malnourished without losing weight.
Heck, some of the worst western diets are both poor in vitamins/minerals and also still rich in calories.
Not just americans. With very few exclusions, we are all overweight, even people who do look great. The food we consuming is mostly crap.
So it's a benefit almost for everyone.
if she was eating sweet potatoes how can that be ? unless she wasn't eating the sweet potatoes at all ?
> 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.
f
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...
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...
I am the furthest possible thing from a linguist but looking at a hastily searched language map of PNG, my first thought is "wow, that's a lot. And some of those aren't even in the same family of language?"
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f6/TNG_map....
> wow, that's a lot. And some of those aren't even in the same family of language?
Indeed! Palmer counts ‘862 languages comprising 43 distinct families […] and 37 isolates’, (where an isolate is a language with no known relationship to any other family). I should add that the map you linked shows the branches of only a single language family, namely Trans–New Guinea — most of the other 42 families are in the grey areas. (Though due to uncertainties in historical linguistics, that map includes some groups as part of Trans–New Guinea which Palmer considers separate families, for instance Timor—Alor–Pantar [there part of ‘West Trans–New Guinea’] and South Bird’s Head.)
It's important to note that languages evolve much faster without a writing tradition to anchor the language down over time.
> my first thought is "wow, that's a lot. And some of those aren't even in the same family of language?"
The meaning of the historical linguistics term "family" doesn't map directly to our common usage.
A language family is a collection of languages for a which we can identify a significant number of shared core historical grammatical and lexical features.
Just because languages belong to different families doesn't mean they don't have a shared ancestry, just that we can't see it in the modern languages.
If anything, in PNG population genetics identifies the highland populations as closely genetically related, but their languages have diverged to the point that signs their shared ancestry have been lost.
There is an theory that the linguistic diversity PNG represents the state of human societies in Southwestern Asia just before the emergence of agriculture - possibly explaining why many ancient attested languages like Sumerian, Elamite, and Assyrian which were in close proximity appear to be entirely unrelated to each other.
TFA answered it though. It's because neighboring tribes were always hostile, and they never developed food that survived long expeditions.
Not an expert view, but I have also heard this explanation for the many hundreds of languages in Africa and India.
If it helps, he's saying those two reasons are the evidence that the highlands were completely cut off, not that those are the cause of the highlands being cut off. As opposed to an alternate history where there was significant trade or interaction between the highlands and coastal peoples.
> The reasons why I believe that ... the highlands were functionally cut off is ...
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.
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.
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
> 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.
Are they actually violently forcing anyone though, like Russians did in Siberia etc?
Probably not, but there is a massive imbalance of power between white missionaries with the trappings of the modern world and indigenous people.
Do you see diversity of cultures with different levels of development on the planet as a problem? Because as long as it exists there will be the imbalance
>Do you see diversity of cultures with different levels of development on the planet as a problem?
When a more 'advanced' group use their wealth, technology, medicine etc to control a less developed group - yes that can be a problem.
Do you argue for full isolation and no assistance between those groups you describe?
No.
can you describe how such groups can coexist without isolation so that the more developed one helps the less developed one without a degree of influence and control in some shape or form?
ideally something not too far removed from how the world works today
Groups like MSF go and provide medical without trying to control or religiously convert people.
only contacting each other via humanitarian aid is more isolation than coexistence.
Humanitarian aid also exerts influence, if anything by showing how advanced the more advanced group is. For someone whose religious practice involves traditional medicine or shamanism for treatment, western medicine seems like is obviously a religious influence and control. (It also has issues like alleged bartering treatment for sex or food supplies helping mostly the bad guys with guns)
and you're looking at locals like they are too dumb to reject a new religion. it's a condescending view. locals in Siberia did reject the new religion at first and paid the price in blood, it stopped when they learned to pretend to be Christian and keep their traditions under wraps. the situation seems completely different here.
> 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".
But...why? If they are just saying that, why is that indefensible? The villagers' are free to reject that message (or a more accurate version of it), as are you or anyone else.
Because they never "just say that." Christians aren't raised to believe that "no" is a valid answer - that means eternal damnation after all. Everyone must accept Christ, that's the message, and Christians must do whatever it takes to get that message across. Food, medicine and other elements of "civilization" are always used as leverage, a means of influence and control, to pacify and eventually convert. Inevitably another "pagan" culture is erased, its heritage and language forgotten, its children indoctrinated (perhaps by force as happened with American and Canadian indigenous people) and its people made subservient to Western interests.
All that has been true, but it was not always true, and it is only half the truth.
You've used "never" and "always" as if Christianity, Christian missions, and the cultures they try to reach are a monolith and the same everywhere. You've also insisted that any aide must only be to strengthen the power of the missionaries, and has nothing at all to do with the character of the very message itself.
You've also underestimated the agency of indigenous cultures and their ability to appropriate Christianity, so much so that some Tiwi Islanders (islands to the south of PNG) insist that they converted the Catholic church when it embraced them (https://researchportalplus.anu.edu.au/en/publications/going-...)
> underestimated the agency of indigenous cultures l
yeah thinking "we shouldn't influence poor locals because obviously we can do it so easily" is a little condescending.
I know people from the west who reject religion but pretend just enough to get some benefit from the church, why assume locals are too dumb to do it.
there were historic cases where native people rejected a religion and paid price in blood. THAT is a problem. if there is no forcing, there is no problem.
The character of the message is that "every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord."
Missionaries bring aid because they bring the Gospel. They wouldn't bring aid without bringing the Gospel. But like that idiot who tried to convert the Sentinelese, they would bring the Gospel without aid, if they felt so compelled. I don't think it's incorrect to say that everything else is a means to the common end. Christianity is an assimilationist religion. Jesuits may do it differently than Catholics who may do it differently than Baptists, but conversion is always the end goal.
>You've also underestimated the agency of indigenous cultures and their ability to appropriate Christianity, so much so that some Tiwi Islanders (islands to the south of PNG) insist that they converted the Catholic church when it embraced them.
I mean, they didn't, that isn't ever really how that works. Whatever Catholicism they appropriated will inevitably erase and obscure their culture and identity, as will the influence of Western culture. I couldn't read the article you posted unfortunately but I did find an article that basically seems to tell the story[0]. I also found an article written by someone of Tiwi descent that tells a less friendly, or at least more complicated story[1].
I'm more willing to believe the word of a native over a Christian missionary, all else being equal. It may not be fair but history demonstrates that the relationship between Christianity and indigenous peoples is one of exploitation, suffering and colonization more often than not.
[0]https://www.abc.net.au/religion/tiwi-christianity-aboriginal...
[1]https://www.thenorthernmyth.com/2017/12/20/graverobbers-god-...
The message is also "love your neighbour as yourself", and this "Lord" that people bow to is, according to the message, someone who died instead of taking that Lordship by force.
While it might be true that "Missionaries bring aid because they bring the Gospel" to some degree, it is also true that the Gospel brings aid. It is the message that generates the desire to help people.
Your accusations of "assimilation" are just too simplistic. Take, for example, bible translation. In Australia, Anglican missionaries did not put much effort into translating the bible into indigenous languages as the had essentially hooked their mission projects up to the assimilatory 'White Australia' policy of the government. BUT that was in stark contrast to their actions in the rest of the Pacific, where they put great effort into translating the bible into native languages.
> Whatever Catholicism they appropriated will inevitably erase and obscure their culture and identity
This again is just completely dismissing the agency of the converted people. Not to mention easily observed cultural particularities across the world. For example, I experienced a group of Solomon Islanders praying. In my Western culture, we would pray one at a time, but they all prayed out loud, all at the same time. Western values of a particular view of orderliness hadn't overridden their culture.
> I'm more willing to believe the word of a native over a Christian missionary, all else being equal.
Fair enough. I do not deny at all the paternalistic, violent, coercive and assimilationist past (and still present) actions of the church. It is shameful and inexcusable. But I don't for a minute admit that this is because the church was being faithful to it's mission and founder. It's because it wasn't being faithful to the message that it perpetrated these crimes.
But again, it is reductionist to say that this is the only experience. Australian Indigenous culture, Maori culture, traditional PNG cultures are still alive and well, and Christian members of these people groups still choose to be Christian. A simple appeal to "power imbalances", "assimilation", "indoctrination" etc. to explain why they remain so is to rob them of agency.
> everything you believe is wrong, here's our god, you must follow and believe in him or you're going to hell
"Democracy" and "human rights" is basically that but on steroids. Surely you're not a cultural relativist that simply going to allow uncontacted people to be racist and misogynist willy-nilly?
Those things aren't at all equivalent, so I'm not sure I understand your point.
I personally know Benny Wenda and the Wenda family. Benny Wenda was the West Papuan President before his people were overthrown and violently ousted by the Indonesian government in part in order to gain full control of the largest gold mine in the world, Grasberg mine.
The family is still in exile in the UK, and are trying to raise awareness via the Free Papua Movement which aims to separate West Papua from Indonesia and create an independent state. If you care about injustice in the world, have a quick read up on the situation and maybe share the link if you feel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benny_Wenda
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Papua_Movement
https://www.freewestpapua.org/
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...
Actually your comment reminds me of this guy who travels to Vanuatu to try really strong kava. The village chief invites him to drink multiple bowls, which he can't refuse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BtP_B4TBWs
Best place to drop this (related to Vanuatu):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meet_the_Natives:_USA
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfovX-ia33tF-6W_gfTvL...
...basically this is the "take a few near-pre-contact villagers around the U.S. and show them how cool the rest of the world is" that the article talks about.
There was another show (might have been "Going Tribal(?)") which did the reverse, where a "modern man" tried to integrate into daily life tribal life, eg: setting fish traps, mauling taro root, trying not to scare away rabbits while hunting with bows and slings, etc.
Probably tobacco. The article mentions it was introduced to PNG in the last few hundred years, and the plant made its way into the highland tribes despite limited travel and trade.
The narration in the video says its tobacco
This was an incredible video, and I feel so many complex emotions after watching it. I wonder where everyone in that video is now.
Sounds like there's some controversy about this video though. There was some accusations that it was staged, and / or that this was NOT the first contact this tribe had.
That was fascinating and endearing. I wonder whether anyone there is still alive, and how profound/impactful that meeting was on those and the generations that followed. Thanks for sharing
Nitpicking here, but Finnish and Hungarian both arrived to Europe after PIE language family.
Excellent.
I love reading about that place, too, but I want to point out that
> They practice cannibalism, and Michael Rockefeller was likely eaten there
is kind of misleading. If you read Carl Hoffman's book Savage Heart you see that the tribe that are suspected to have eaten Michael Rockefeller probably gave up cannibalism for good not long afterward (i.e. the early 60s).
> If you read Carl Hoffman's book Savage Heart you see that the tribe that are suspected to have eaten Michael Rockefeller probably gave up cannibalism for good not long afterward (i.e. the early 60s).
He must have tasted pretty bad then.
This is interesting also (and very sad) https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/08/24/the-scientist-...
TL;DR, one of the main scientists and Nobel Prize winners for his work on the Kuru disease and discovery of prions, Carleton Gajdusek, was also bringing home (essentially kidnapping) young boys from his expeditions, in theory to experiment with how well they could adapt to Western civilization, but in practice to sexually abuse them. And the NIH department that was funding him basically knew it and didn't care.
I happened upon this article around the same time this was posted, too.
Very sad indeed. Everything somehow kept getting worse after the cannibalism and the related neurological disease.
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...
I really want to read it but can't find a digital version for my reader anywhere :(
https://archive.org/details/firstcontact00conn
[dead]
That book is so garbage, psudoscientific, empirically wrong, sinophobic, and I'm probably forgetting a bunch.
Also lol to it's explanation for no beasts of burden in Africa. Sorry, folks have actually mostly domesticated the zebra. The explanations for why Zebra's were not domesticated after all this time are a massive cope. Even worse copes are the non recognition/misunderstandings of Elephant usage in large numbers for warfare / burden from Africa to India,
"It is possible that having evolved under pressure from the many large predators of Africa, including early humans, they became more aggressive, thus making domestication more difficult.[104] However, zebras have been trained throughout history. In Rome, zebras are recorded to have pulled chariots during amphitheatre games starting in the reign of Caracalla (198 to 217 AD).[105] In the late 19th century, the zoologist Walter Rothschild trained some zebras to draw a carriage in England, which he drove to Buckingham Palace to demonstrate that it can be done. However, he did not ride on them knowing that they were too small and aggressive.[106] In the early 20th century, German colonial officers in East Africa tried to use zebras for both driving and riding, with limited success."
Oh and also Africa had cattle and donkies and the donkey was actually domesticated in Africa.
West African empires like Mali, Songhai, and the Oyo Empire famously maintained massive cavalry units. They adapted horses to tropical conditions, using them for state-building and warfare long before the arrival of Europeans.
Also uhh Camels!
Environmental Determinism is the ultimate racism.
>Environmental Determinism is the ultimate racism.
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. Quite the opposite.
What if it's due to neither environmental nor genetic factors but ideas. Europe was backward until it re-absorbed classical learning and absorbed newer ideas from the Orient, which led to the renaissance and everything that followed. Did Europeans suddenly gain 40 IQ points in that time? No. Did their environment change? No.
For some reason a lot of people have a huge problem with this explanation, actually preferring either environmental determinism or racism. This is in spite of what seems to be a lot of historical evidence for it in the form of causal influence: ideas are introduced somewhere (inventions, methods, philosophies, languages, mathematics, literature, etc.) and large changes follow.
I'm sure it is lots of factors, not just environment/geography.
His entire section/epilogue on "Why China isn't actually a counter example to my whole thesis, tee-hee!!" AKA Chapter 13 literally goes into "well the emperor there had so much power and could unilaterally keep their technology levels down with stupid trade restrictions so that's why Europeans put them through the century of humiliation and eclipsed them!" and other nonsense is straight up massive Sinophobia and very racist.
Diamond makes broad genetic/intelligence claims about whole populations, rankes societies as "advanced/backward" constantly and describes conquest as inevitable
"in mental ability New Guineans are probably genetically superior to Westerners"
"modern "Stone Age" peoples are on the average probably more intelligent"
"some societies seem hopelessly conservative, inward looking, and hostile to change."
Actual quotes from this so called bastion of liberalism
"China’s connectedness eventually became a disadvantage" [because] "a decision by one despot could and repeatedly did halt innovation."
China = monolithic, obedient, centralized, despotic, stagnant; Europe = pluralistic, competitive, innovative.
Diamond turns "Chinese authoritarianism" into a transhistorical condition produced by the land itself. I'm all about the LVT and Georgism and all but this is doing too much service for land.
In other words, the old Orientalist story survives perfectly well after the race science has been supposedly removed from the chassis. Better still, Diamond treats Ming maritime policy, imperial bureaucracy, and Mao’s Cultural Revolution as variations on the same ancient geographical bug, as though two thousand years of Chinese politics were basically the Yangtze River repeatedly pressing the "authoritarianism" button with it's floods!!!
> "some societies seem hopelessly conservative, inward looking, and hostile to change."
This rings absolutely true? Do you not think any societies are more hostile to change than others?
Which book would you recommend instead of Diamond's? If nothing exact, what comes to mind?
It's been more than a decade since I have read it, but I remember Diamond writing specifically about the relative lack of domesticable animals in sub-Saharan Africa. Mali, Songhai, and Oyo didn't "[adapt] horses to tropical conditions", they imported already domesticated animals from elsewhere (North Africa). It is telling that none of your examples are in Central or Southern Africa.
Also, domestication is the process of breeding animals over multiple generations to make them more pliable and is not the same as training individual animals to pull a carriage. The very first sentence of the paragraph that you quoted from the Wikipedia article on zebras is "Attempts to domesticate zebras were largely unsuccessful."
Go take a look at where Kenya is located on a map and where Donkey's were first domesticated and tell me that I didn't cover sub-Saharan africa again with a straight face.
That first sentence "attempts were largely unsuccessful" is a cope from wikipedia editors who are mad that it keeps being brought up by race realists who are using this blurb to justify their own racism. Consider that it was a literal Rothschild who did the most recent almost-domestication. 4chan is on this like fly's are on horses (but not Zebra's, or horses painted like Zebras - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-22333-7)
The part I quoted without the unnecessary pre-thinking done with that first sentence is all I need. It was quite possible to get most of the way there over short periods of time with money and effort.
The book in question aside,
> Environmental Determinism is the ultimate racism.
I don't see how this is true, even somewhat? Saying that the environment you're in shapes your culture, progress, and overall development as a society, makes perfect sense. Saying that the environment does not play a huge factor in this leaves open only the option of that development being genetic/hereditary, doesn't it? You'd be blaming the failure or shortcomings of civilizations, current and previous, on the genetic predisposition of their peoples. That feels far more racist to me than saying, "This area did not have X resources in available and sufficient quantities to allow them to develop Y improvement".
I understand that this was often used to justify colonialism, which I want it to be very clear I strongly disagree with. But, it would feel deeply wrong to say that all things are possible to progress in all areas. For example, we could NOT expect some hypothetical area with very poor soil health and little water to become a great improver of early agriculture. Likewise, areas with no easy access to copper, tin, iron, etc, would be unlikely to begin using those resources for farming implements. An area with all of this in abundance would have a much EASIER time developing these things.
I read Guns, Germs and Steel recently and loved it. After finishing it, I was wondering how well the theses had held up in the time since it was published and did some research, and seems like most (though not all) of the major points have held up pretty well or even been strengthened by recent evidence. However, the book seems to have attracted a surprising amount of hate, which this reminds me of! It feels to me like an instinctive hateful backlash to a remarkable achievement, like "crabs in a bucket syndrome" or the Einstein quote -
“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. The mediocre mind is incapable of understanding the man who refuses to bow blindly to conventional prejudices and chooses instead to express his opinions courageously and honestly.”
I think it got a lot of criticism because it was very wide ranging and some experts felt that Diamond was encroaching on their turf. Also it made a lot of sales, which probably provoked some envy. IIRC (some years since I read the book) Diamond made clear that a lot of the ideas were speculative.
>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.
To save people googling
> the music has nothing musically or culturally to do with the country of Papua New Guinea. (https://www.instagram.com/reel/Dak3ViigS61/)The duo (Garry Cobain and Brian Dougans) actually chose the title purely for its mysterious, exotic, and atmospheric feel
> 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.
https://www.freewestpapua.org/
Same thought here: FSOL, 1991. Classic
Off-topic
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)
You may be interested in Ongka's Big Maca (1974)[0]. It is a documentary that shows how the Big Man system and gift based economy work in PNG by following a specific Big Man's (Ongka) effort to put together a huge gift to increase his social status. It's a classic intro to anthropology film.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ongka%27s_Big_Moka
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.
> 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.
It’s rather pointless to speculate—I believe HN moderators can see who downvoted, but even they can only guess at why.
Sometimes people even downvote by accident when they mean to upvote—easy to do on your phone
Also, I find anything which says “conservative religion isn’t purely bad” tends to reliably attract some downvotes. A lot of people feel hurt or even traumatised by conservative religious groups (often not even the one under discussion), so I can understand why they do it.
> 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.
These missionaries don't come in with an army. Its more often small families or a couple of individual vs entire villages of natives and the "conversion" is done via talking, persistence and kindness rather than by force.
> Remote populations aren't global idea consumers at the internet-accessible global ideas mart.
Shouldn't that be a good thing according to your logic? Its not like the global ideas mart is less different from their own society than what the missionaries bring and it would be quite presumptuous to say that your beliefs or those that you consider "global ideas" are better for as yet untouched tribes than those of christian missionaries.
> 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.
It is immoral to treat another human being as too stupid to be exposed to others and worthy of your protection because you view them as primitive.
It's also immoral to expose isolated populations to all manner of the modern world's vices, optimized to be maximally addictive and maximally extractive, for which they have zero defense or even knowledge of their dangers.
That's a decision for them to make. If they don't want it by all means don't force it. But to say you shouldn't talk to them is unfathomably cruel.
But they're not equipped to decide whether they want it or not. It's like offering drugs to children saying they can choose if they want it. Children simply aren't equipped to make that decision, neither are people in these populations. I don't think we should keep them isolated, but contact should be limited initially. The technology we introduce them should be limited, enough to increase their quality of life and eliminate disease and so on without being utterly disruptive. Over time more technology and information can be introduced.
No population should be kept living a life we would consider extreme poverty out of some noble ideal. But we also shouldn't completely disrupt their way of life out of a different noble ideal. Wealth as we understand it isn't the only thing of value. Human connection, meaning anchored in community and deep roots, a sense of belonging and so on, are what really matter. Introducing modernity to such populations will sweep all of that away in one motion. These people would be left adrift in an alien world devoid of personal meaning, their only solace whatever addiction appeals to them most.
> But they're not equipped to decide whether they want it or not.
Why can't you say that about, idk, folks on welfare in the United States? How are they in a position to decide whether buying pop on food stamps is what they want or not? Maybe a woman doesn't really have the tools she needs to decide whether she wants to keep a pregnancy until she's had some counseling and time to cool off?
Obviously I'm not comparing these situations directly, and frankly I'm not sure you're wrong, but the point of view you are expressing here leads us to all of those scenarios and I think we should reconcile that.
I agree the application of the logic doesn't end with isolated populations. The relevant difference is that those brought up in the modern world have/had the potential to engage with knowledge of addiction and other vices, and decide for themselves how to steer their lives in an informed way. We draw a somewhat arbitrary line for being responsible for oneself as the best way to structure society given the tradeoffs. There's just no sense in which these isolated populations as a whole can be sufficiently informed about the modern world to suitably navigate its complexities to lead to their prospering in it.
But on the other hand you are assuming the modern world is bad and so therefore exposure to it is a dangerous and negative thing. I'm here to tell you that having access to medicine and playing sports and whatever is pretty great too. It's not all bad. I think you're taking a little bit of this Star Trek version of "leave them alone to develop on their own" but if the shoe were reversed and there was an alien species out there that could come down and talk to us and share knowledge and potentially harmful things as well, I'd like to make that choice for myself.
It's certainly a complicated subject, but I'd just challenge you to think of the positive version as well, not just the negative (addiction/vices/&c). It seems you have a default negative view of the world, some of us have a default positive view of the world. Modern life is pretty awesome!
My concern isn't mainly about addiction and vices, its more about a loss of meaning and being adrift in an alien world. The addiction/vices are just what one falls into when your life becomes devoid of meaning. I think the mental health crisis that most of the western world seems to be engulfed by, despite living in an age of endless wonders, goes to show that there is something deeply wrong with our modern way of living. My caution is against introducing this "sickness" (for lack of a better term) into populations even less able to defend and preserve personal meaning against an onslaught of technology and ideas that would evaporate their personal sources of meaning in an instant. That is no gift to anyone.
I just think you are super focused on the negatives. My life is great, I don't have a mental health crisis, most of my friends are doing well and having kids and enjoying their lives, and more.
There might be something deeply wrong with the modern world (which by the way includes other countries ranging from, idk, Iran, to Vietnam, to Korea) but there are a lot of things deeply right about it: opportunity, human rights, women's rights, independence, opportunities to build rocket ships or sail the world. That seems like one hell of a gift that I wouldn't want to deny anyone. If anything, providing opportunities and giving human minds the chance to flourish and be creative seems less of a sickness and more of a cure.
The danger when making decisions on behalf of other people is in imagining yourself in their position, rather than imagining them in their position. So you have a happy fulfilled life, you have the kinds of human relationships that provide deep meaning to you, you have the right kind of curiosity and wonder to be fulfilled by witnessing burgeoning technological progress, etc etc. Yes, being deprived of all that would be very bad for you.
Now imagine someone psychologically very average whose source of meaning is in the familiar environment where they have an acceptable amount of status, broad community support and much social engagement. They have a peculiar culture and social practices which gives them deep personal meaning. Now imagine all of that is swept away; no social status, no familiar environment, cultural practices gone, extended family scattered to the wind. What value does the wonders of the modern world have to someone who has lost everything they value?
Consumerism, technological marvels, and endless entertainment are the modern world's answers to the waning sources of personal meaning in modern life. Turns out that it's all a very poor replacement.
Missionaries aren't there to inform the locals but to persuade them. They are intellectually dishonest.
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I don't think they even have electricity, let alone the internet.
One of the problems is the power dynamic westernized/developed societies have. The article talks about just that: Australians brought shells in and basically one-shotted a rich culture for their own gain via hyper inflation.
If a missionaries message was basically "Believe in God and you'll have limitless shells", and backed it up with a crate of shells, they would all be converts.
> 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...
That argument would necessitate treating them like children rather than adults who can think and choose for themselves. I don't think this is a healthy approach that would work out well at all.
Know what? They don't know that they can not listen to people? I don't believe that at all.
You claim they think they have to listen to 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
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...
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...
The crusades were not fighting imaginary enemies and much of the territory was relatively recently conquered by the muslims they were fighting.
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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
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!
People have been saying nasty things about neighbouring groups since forever.
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.
What the actual fuck?
Cannibalism of slaves is very well-known.
Where are you getting your information from?
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Converting people to a modern religion is a lot easier when their existing culture and beliefs are less developed. So there is a race of sorts, to convert as many less developed groups to your religion as possible before a rival religion gets to them.
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Congratulations on your opinion?
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 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.
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.
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...
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?
It's not a publicly available server house. It's local partner. Cannot say more sorry
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 used to have a book about Papua and some westerner who had visited, that had a photo in it of a human head being cooked on a flat metal dish over a fire.
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.
One line that got me wondering: "...and one group ate their dead relatives’ brains at funerals so consistently that they gave themselves a mad cow type disease called kuru, which killed a large percentage of their population and then, within a few generations, evolved a genetic mutation that protects against it"
I had heard this before but my question now is, did they develop this tradition recently? If it were a historical thing wouldn't that genetic mutation have evolved a long time ago? One would expect that if they had this tradition for a long time the genetic mutation that happened so rapidly would have happened long ago, yet it did not. I'm curious as that thought struck me just now.
CJD develops in about 1/1,000,000 people per year globally, and the Fore people have a population of ~20,000. In theory, that suggests there should be an outbreak within 50 years of the society regularly consuming brain matter. Perhaps that number could be reduced somewhat by the infection rate, but the infection rate seems pretty high, to reach the level it did as fast as it did each person with Kuru needed to infect 1.6 people. Perhaps sporadic CJD isn't as sporadic as we assume, and it's tied to being in environments where others have had CJD? Another possibility is tied to the seeming link between genetics and the infection rate of Mad Cow Disease. Perhaps the population regularly went through boom-bust cycles, where everybody with 2 copies of the recessive gene that makes one more susceptible to transmission gets killed off, then the disease dies off for a long enough time for the carriers to re-introduce their recessive trait back into the gene pool.
At least according to this article[1], you're correct; the practice of eating brains that caused kuru to spread was a recent innovation. However, the article doesn't say how recent. I guess I'd need to go read the actual book, since I can't quickly find anything else on how long this was occurring.
[1] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-the-family...
Almost the entire tech crew who were working for Honeywell in Canberra seemed to be from a team that worked in Port Moresby in the late seventies to maybe the early eighties. Their stories were mostly a mix of late stage colonialism and machete terror.
and I thought I was old..
My Dad worked for Honeywell in the 70s, in Australia.
tbh, I just google'd them and they're still in the Nasdaq-100, 100k employees .. damn. I'm not sure of when I last heard of them.
I still think of them as old school punch cards and reels of tapes.
Im kind of sad that tribes, who have never been exposed to the modern world, get exposed to the damaging effects of materialism. It reminds me of that film "The gods must be crazy" [0]
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gods_Must_Be_Crazy
The moral of the story is that things, when they are coveted, can destroy our humanity. I feel like we are destroying ourselves with modernity and to bring that to a culture like this is dangerous.
Jared Diamond speaks of this in one of his book (I think "Collapse", but I may be wrong), and highlights how we romanticize the pre-modern world, but we have the clear example of people in PNG who are absolutely super happy to abandon it and join the modern one.
(the modern world has plenty of problems, of course)
This isnt romanticizing premodern world. Modern doesn't equal better, but I understand the knee jerk reaction to calling out the serious problems with our current society that nobody wants to face.
Having actually travelled there, a lot of authors assumptions are invalid in a way that reveals our (euro-american) biases. There are no roads, but people travel by plane (both jets, our guide made a joke that there are two kinds of airlines in Papua, ones that crash into mountains and into the sea, or prop on grassy landing strips, you can look up videos from visiting remote villages, those pilots are super skilled) and on the coast - by boat. Smartphones, solar panels, FC Barcelona t-shirts and catholic church made their way into the mountains and jungle before any other sort of infrastructure, and so did the tourists and fake attractions: fake cannibals, fake legends and fake customs (even BBC fell for some). Demand gives birth to supply. One super interesting thing the author does not mention is that Papua is the last stand for betel nut chewing: you can try it if you're into light psychedelics. I can also shill my video essay here of anybody is interested in listening to pseudophilosophical/journey journal ramblings in heavy accent: https://youtu.be/0cCoZguizdg?is=o-5urE4E2GTolaDv
Betel nut chewing is still found lots of places in South and Southeast Asia.
Not to that extent: it's against regulations in most cities from Singapore (obviously) to Saigon, and it's considered 'old people thing' in general. In Papua you see people with red teeth all the time, blood like stains on sidewalks accompanied by tiny zipper bags, which are very intriguing when you're out of context. I saw a mother giving betel to her 10 yo daughter on a boat ride - It is a bit calming, so...
The streets are littered with beetlenut in Shenzhen, especially Huaqiangbei. Also Chunking Mansion, HK (take the stairs). Would not recommend if you have elevated blood pressure.
It is very pervasive in certain parts of India. Google Pan Masala India.
I read somewhere that the famous tall stilt houses were now mostly made to attract tourists.
That's true and that's what BBC fell for (korowai tribe in eastern Papua AFAIR).
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).
Just a fantastic book.
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.
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 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.
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’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.
Any cool facts to share about Timor Leste? My usual go to - wikipedia - does paint a rather mundane picture of it.
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 live in Vietnam. Bavet is a popular border for visa runs for expats. Normally, you don’t actually leave the Cambodia border building or you just take a bus all the way to Phnom Penh to wait for a visa was approved.
I was curious about the town, because it’s famous for casinos, scam centers, and Chinese manufacturers.
Interesting, did you take pics? Most living quarters (小区）in China have electrical fences and most windows have been barred. Left over from the 80’s when crime was high. Nowadays the bars prevent pets and children from falling out of the window (plus the cage like construction allows for some extra storage space)
I wrote a quick blog post about my experience and included the photos that I took. I was traveling alone and I knew the area was not safe, so I really didn't take enough photos, but the best one is at the end.
https://www.kcoleman.me/2026/09/08/Cambodia-Scam-Centers.htm...
Thank you so much, what a great write up (did you submit it here?). Surprised you took any pictures to be honest. Some great observations! Those barred windows def look familiar. Correction:on a second look, these do not look like the typical chinese square tubing bars!
There have been big crack downs in Cambodia and Myanmar just recently. Thousands arrested.
That's great. Apparently that's why they're trying to move on to Sri Lanka, Timor Leste, etc.
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.
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.
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.
I was a volunteer in PNG at the PNG Institute of Medical Research, which at that time was run by Michael Alpers, the guy who did the initial scientific investigation into Kuru - the disease mentioned in the article. Fascinating stuff. I lived for just over half a year in Goroka the highlands, then a further year in Madang on the north coast. That was 25 years ago now but I will never forget it.
> 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.
This is super interesting given that I had just watched an episode of survivorman where Les Stroud was given the "sing sing" ceremony by the villagers in the mountains, and also was wondering how they learned English that far up in the mountains.
No one complaining about substack's forced age-verification now.... Maybe it's because I'm in AU. Anyways...
https://archive.is/rs2jc
I lived in Igam Barracks in Lae for 2 years when my father was posted there from the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF). His name is William Fiedler.
The trappings of colonialism were still all around when we stayed there in the mid 80s.
We had a house Mary who came over from a nearby village and worked for us, Mrs C. There was a hut behind each house for the house Mary or house man. Pidgin English was spoken. Betel nut stains covered the sidewalks in Lae.
Still it was an incredible experience for a 10 year old I'd like to go back one day, but it's unlikely I'll ever get the chance.
Truly an amazing place and people.
Lived in Lae as well, em tasol. Did middle & high school at tisol. Many ppl I've met since then cant believe that I lived in png - until I show pics.
Why is it unlikely? Seems like quite the adventure to pursue at some point in your life as a small goal. You should pursue it before your body decides for you.
Because it's a dangerous place my friend
That was a great read !
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
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.
The juxtaposition of someone's instinct to be thinking of bitcoin when reading about indigenous trade is at the best a bit funny, and at the worst small-minded when you consider the havoc those Australians brought onto their culture. Basically wiped out a foundational part of their way of life in an instant for their own gain. It's sad. That was my takeaway.
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.
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
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.
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.
You're right, I hadn't realized that. But you get the broader point.
Until 1975, in fact.
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 is perhaps a blessing that the climate of the Papua lowlands makes the potato impossible to grow. While the potato would grow in the cooler highlands, this village to village transmission mechanism would not get the potato past the hot lowlands where plants would rot in the ground. The potato yields a lot more calories per hectare than the sweet potato, and when introduced to New Zealand, fueled massive wars.
Dang, I did not know about this part of New Zealand's history, what an incredible and sad story:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musket_Wars
This is fascinating, and there's a key inconsistency in the article that points to an unresolved mystery.
The author posits that sweet potatoes and tobacco moved into the highlands through intermarriage. Yet he later acknowledges that genetic evidence suggests no mixing of the highland people with the coastal people. So to me the mystery remains of how those crops got there.
There's a key phrase you may have missed.
"So the plants crossed over and started moving east along the coast and up into the interior. Beyond that point, there were no merchants. But when a woman married into the next clan over, she took cuttings from her family’s garden with her."
The key phrase is "Beyond that point", where that point is up into the interior where there were no merchants. That's when marriage took over.
It seems like Alzheimer’s and prion diseases like Kuru share a core molecular mechanism with misfolded proteins propagating and causing brain lesions. I find it really interesting that the gene protecting against Kuru has evolved naturally when according to Wikipedia, prion diseases don’t seem to have any effective treatments.
Cells have machinery for removing worn out proteins (tag em with ubiquitin and send them to incinerator [lysomes]). Doesn't surprise me too much a useful mutation (this folding is wrong detector) could work its way in.
I spent a summer in PNG in 2010, on the island of Karkar. It was wild.
One of my most formative memories was finding out that few of the people who live there, even those who are literate, had books and some DVDs, were high school students, even had occasional access to computers with internet, knew that humanity had landed on the moon!
> What I find so fascinating about all of this is just how separated this group was from the rest of history, and that there will never be a finding like this ever again. The world has effectively been explored, but as late as 1930 that wasn’t the case.
Honestly, I am not so sure about this.
Great article but there's one bizarre statement that just kind of hangs without a clear connection to the rest of the piece. They describe how bird skins are exported without feet.. yet nowhere do they claim that the yighlanders prized feet ... they prized seashells.
What else am I missing?
Never going to be able to see “PNG” written again without secretly thinking “Papua New Guinea” in my mind.
I submit Jean-Paul Gaultier for your consideration.
There's a book called Kuru by an Australian doctor who worked in PNG and studied the disease. IIRC, it's by Michael Alpers. It's a fascinating book, and it's a mixture of adventure, medicine, and anthropology. I highly recommend it if you can find it.
I took a sociology class at Ball State in 2000 and the one thing that stuck with me is that some PNG groups would eat their neighboring tribesmen in an attempt to absorb their spiritual power. Pretty metal. Wouldn't want to be their neighbor.
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
Geographic Determinism
https://www.litcharts.com/lit/guns-germs-and-steel/themes/ge...
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.
If you enjoy the story and history of PNG, be sure to delve into Bougainville - there is a great documentary called 'The Coconut Revolution' if you can find it somewhere.
Hunter gatherer battles are probably less mass casualty events vs agricultural society battles.
A lot of this appears to be sensationalist and racist and it completely ignores the fact that half of the island (West Papua) is under illegal Indonesian occupation and suffering a genocide in which over 500,000 Indigenous people have been killed. https://www.survivalinternational.org/peoples/papuan
In 2005, I took an ethnography class at my university. There were about 10 students (it was an advanced course - Rhetoric and an introductory Anthropology course were pre-requisites). I didn't travel abroad (although some did), and did a book report on Dr. Robert Klitzman: Wrote The Trembling Mountain: A Personal Account of Kuru, Cannibals, and Mad Cow Disease (1998). At the time, I was majoring in microbiology- studying bacteria, although my coursework covered the basics of prions, which were a relatively new type of virus- a protein one. I was quite disgusted by the whole thing, but I researched it anyways out of a morbid curiousity.
https://www.amazon.ca/Trembling-Mountain-Personal-Account-Ca...
I suppose it's good that some Papua New Guineans evolved immunity to it- I had not heard of such immunity at the time, or at least it wasn't prevalent enough that it was confirmed, but it still of course is an "unspeakable" practice..
I hope I don't get it. https://youtu.be/gQDqRlMeJ4U?t=197
Maybe other places in the world, such as the river burials in India may develop immunity.
this is peak rabbithole material
The idea that they’re genetically smarter than Europeans beggars belief.
The title of this post is super intriguing
Off topic: 1991 Future Sound of London, great song!
> when the Australians later sent highlanders to work on coastal plantations in the 1950s, they died at alarming rates
What is this referring to? Indentured Servitude? Slavery?
It says Malaria further in.
No, I am asking why were Australians sending the Highlanders anywhere? By what right? Why were they leaving?
Probably because living in PNG sucks and they would rather risk their lives at a chance of improving their condition. Same reason immigrants came from Germany to the US to live in mud dugout houses in the plains. Or immigrants go anywhere really.
If you live in Asia/Singapore, you know the bulk of the scam calls originate from here unfortunately.
"A Blank on the Map" is an incredible documentary about this sort of contact, though 40 years later. Here's an un-paywalled link: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xsynjb
why is there so much gps blocking on inland PNG, does anyone know?
Mountainous jungle terrain?
Really well written
> 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."
No control for prosperity. Lifelong comfort insidiously cripples any people on all these levels.
For a fun novel on the very subject, read The Dosadi Experiment.
Jared Diamond's whole thesis in Gun, Germs etc is post hoc ergo propter hoc.
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As opposed to us smarter people making cattle feed that contains cow brains, thereby propagating mad cow disease, then killing ourselves by eating them (Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease)!
Or for that matter killing ourselves in dozens of other ways due to lack of scientific knowledge, or ignoring it.
We didn't keep contracting mad cow disease until everyone who wasn't genetically immune to it died. I'm pretty sure we figured it out and killed loads of cattle to stop us getting it.
OK, but generations of people keep drinking themselves to death.
Generations of people lived with lead water pipes and asbestos roofs.
Within living memory we had cocaine in coke, heroin in cough remedies and were giving pregnant women thalidomide for morning sickness.
Western science is a modern thing, and even now many people don't believe it.
FSOL
> 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.
The environment makes a very real difference to what outcomes are possible/likely. It is hard to create a complex society if there is little food surplus and no real way to store food long term.
Not related but See also: future sound of London's version of P.N.G.
one of the all time great rave tracks
> They were having bow and arrow battles as late as 1963
They still do this, in fact.
Read a book.
Wrote a blog
Got nothing to say
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or perhaps The Proper English has been adopted by LLMs, so now real people have to write like middle-schoolers to avoid being accused of publishing slop.
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This virtue signalling where everything surrounding an indigenous people or other minority must be handled with the fluffiest epistemological gloves is really exhausting. Can the author describe his own personal wonder at discovering this factoid (maybe with the same wonder as when he learned about penicillin in fact) without being de facto labeled a racist?
The New Guinea highlanders were equally ignorant of the existence of the Australians, or most of the other peoples outside of the New Guinea highlands. But it wasn't one of the New Guinea highlanders who took the initiative to make the discovery, it was "some random Aussie". So I think it's fair to credit the discovery of New Guinea highlanders to the Australians, rather than the other way around.
A group of people find out another group of people exist and react with surprise. That's not a mindset, it's been happening since ever since there were people.
Jumping at every opportunity to apply a moral perspective just undermines its credibility.
> Coloniser's mindset much? Finding out people live in a place where is not the same as discovering Penicillin.
Well the people living there certainly weren't going to make themselves known to the rest of the world now were they? The importance of the discovery is debatable but it seems that whitey did legitimately make a discovery, sorry to disappoint you.
What a useless title
There was a discussion on it here yesterday: https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1wfdnus/why...
lol don't go there it's a trap. Civilization, despite all these people, is good.
>Jared Diamond thinks the people there are genetically smarter than Europeans
Well Jared Diamond sounds like a stupid person.