Indonesian New Guinea Adventure Guide. David Pickell
live two centuries) have been stripped, the meat canned and frozen for the Asian market, and fish-bombing has destroyed nearshore reefs in many areas.
The frilled lizard, Chlamysosaurus kingii, looks fierce, but unless you are an insect, the animal is quite harmless.
PREHISTORY
Papuans and
Austronesians
in New Guinea
Prior to the arrival of the Portuguese in the early 16th century, there appear but scant references to New Guinea and its inhabitants.
Frizzy-haired men and women appear on some of the friezes at Borobudur, the great 8th century Buddhist stupa in central Java, but these could just as well represent peoples from islands closer to Java.
The Negarakertagama, a 14th century panegyric poem dedicated to the East Javanese king of Majapahit, mentions two West Papuan territories, Onin and Seran on the southwestern side of the Bird's Head peninsula, but direct control from Java must have been practically non-existent.
It is certain however that prahu-borne trade between some of the Moluccan islands—and perhaps even Java—and the western extremity of what is now West Papua existed long before this. Items such as bird of paradise skins and massoi bark, unquestionably of West Papuan origin, were well-known trade items. And the Sultan of Tidore—a tiny, but influential clove-producing island off Halmahera—long claimed areas in and around western West Papua.
The Papuans
The indigenous West Papuans, black-skinned, hirsute and frizzy-haired, are physically very distinct from Indonesians in the rest of the archipelago. Just when these so-called "Papuans"—and the Australian aboriginals—first arrived in the area is still mostly a matter of conjecture.
Most scientists now believe that Homo sapiens developed more recently than had been thought, and linguistic and genetic evidence points to a single African origin. Our species arose in Africa, perhaps no more than 200,000 years ago, and it was 100,000 years later before any of these early humans left the African continent and crossed the oceans.
There is no longer thought to be any link between so-called "Java Man" or Homo erectus, an extinct humanoid that lived a half-million years ago in Java (and elsewhere in the world), and any of today's people.
What has been established is that 100,000 years ago humans began to fan out from Africa, and some 30,000-40,000 years ago they settled New Guinea, Australia and points in between. These original Southeast Asians, related to today's Australian aboriginals, Papuans and Melanesians, are the direct ancestors of the West Papuans.
The Papuan migrations
How did the Papuans reach New Guinea? The first clues date from the Pleistocene era, when periods of glaciation reduced sea levels 100 to 150 meters below their present levels. The history of man and animals in insular Southeast Asia is intimately linked with the resulting submergence and emergence of two great continental shelves at opposite ends of the archipelago: the Sahul in the east and the Sunda in the west.
At no time was there a land bridge stretching all the way across what is now Indonesia, and vast stretches of open water had somehow to be crossed. Man was successful in making this crossing, but other placental mammals—except for bats, which flew, and rats, which tagged along—were not.
Asmat stone axes. Photograph courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History.
The earliest tentative figure for human presence in New Guinea, based by inference on Australian paleoanthropolocal evidence, is 60,000 years ago. But there is in fact little hard evidence arguing for a date prior to 30,000 to 40,000 years ago. This is nevertheless very early—fossils of modern man are found throughout the Old World only from about this time.
Even for the more recent dates, however, linguistic comparisons are unable to relate the distribution of contemporary languages to the earliest migrations, and we have no way of knowing if there were one or many. And the archaeological evidence is meager. A dig has recovered 39,000-year-old stone tools from the Huon Peninsula, but little else from this earliest period.
A later Papuan migration may have coincided with the last glacial peak, which occurred some 16,000 to 18,000 years ago. After that, as the earth's atmosphere warmed, the seas rose as much as 6 meters above their present level.
The Papuans of 18,000 years ago lived in a New Guinea radically different from the one we find today. Ice sheets covered 2,000 square kilometers of the island and the snow line stood a mere 1,100 meters above sea level. (Today, there is only 6.9 square kilometers of glacier left.) The tree line stood at 1,600 meters below the present one and temperatures averaged 7° Centigrade cooler.
For many millennia after reaching the island, the Papuans expanded within New Guinea and to neighboring islands. Their aboriginal Australian cousins adapted themselves to a radically different ecology. The two gene pools have been isolated from one another for at least 10,000 years, and probably longer.
A linguistic Babel
Linguistic studies show, moreover, that the various Papuan groups have evolved in relative isolation from one another for many thousands of years, partly because of the island's rugged geography but also because each group was typically in a perpetual state of warfare with its neighbors. As a result, New Guinea, with only .01 percent of the earth's population, now contains 15 percent of its known languages.
Estimates of the number of distinct languages spoken by the 2.7 million people of New Guinea vary from a whopping 800 down to about 80, depending on one's definition of what constitutes a distinct language. Some languages in West Papua today are spoken by just a handful of people, and the 1.6 million West Papuans probably speak 250 languages.
In trying to bring order to this linguistic chaos, experts have been forced to divide West Papua's many tongues into at least four distinct phyla or families. (Languages in a phylum share less than 5 percent of their basic vocabulary with the languages in another—and by way of comparison, most of the languages of Europe fall into a single family, the Indo-European phylum.) These are the East Bird's Head phylum, the Cenderawasih Bay phylum, the West Papua phylum (which includes north Halmahera) and the Trans-New Guinea phylum. The last is the most widespread on the island, comprising 84 percent of Papuan speakers and 67 percent of the languages.
As the climate of New Guinea warmed, more ecological zones became suitable for human habitation. Farming may have begun more than 20,000 years ago, but for most West Papuans, hunting and gathering remained the basic source of food for many thousands of years after. A lack of systematic archaeological work leaves us with hypotheses and conjectures for the next stages of human development, but it is likely that agriculture, based on taro as the staple, was already in progress 6,000 years ago, and there is evidence of agriculture in the highlands from 9,000 years ago.
The seafaring Austronesians
The peoples who are known today as Malays, Indonesians, Filipinos and Polynesians share a common ancestry that can be traced back to a handful of hardy seafarers who left the coasts of southern China some 6,000-7,000 years ago. Collectively they are known as Austronesians (older texts call this group "Malayo-Polynesians").
The accepted wisdom had been that the original Austronesians moved down through mainland Southeast Asia and hence to the islands. But contemporary linguistic evidence suggests that this group underwent a gradual expansion, as a result of advancements in agriculture and sailing techniques, with Taiwan as the jumping-off point. From there they voyaged through the Philippines to Indonesia and out across the vast reaches of the Pacific and Indian Oceans.
The Austronesians brought with them a social organization distinguished by what are called bilateral, or non-unilineal, descent—wherein both biological parents are