YHK - yet another hacker news clone

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.

Supposedly the Japanese during WW2 also resorted to cannibalism.

Just curious if the hospital still exists there. Do you know?

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.

~ https://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/screen-guide/kuru-the-sci...

PNG has changed very rapidly. Parts of the country were in the Stone Age within living memory and are moving over.

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 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.

Gonna press X to doubt on that one, bro.

  Northern Territory Police are investigating a series of disturbances in Ngukurr after a 14-year-old boy was speared in the back on Saturday afternoon.

  Police respond to armed disturbance in Wadeye involving up to 100 people, bows, spears

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

In regards to Suharto, it seems the 1965 coup attempt that got him into power was a surprise even to the US embassy in Jakarta, but of course they welcomed it, considering the previous president (Sukarno) was anti-imperialist and was flirting with the 3rd largest communist party in the world (after USSR's and China's).

Somewhat relatedly, a documentary moviemaker realized what was behind the curtain of Indonesian society and said "it's as if I had wandered into Germany 40 years after the Holocaust only to find the Nazis still in power.". He made a documentary following a man who was sanctioned by the Suharto regime to kill a lot of "communists" in 1960's Indonesia: The Act of Killing (available at e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TDeEObjR9Q ).

A review:

> Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing is a challenging documentary. It is not only difficult to watch, but it also probes into one of the most grotesque aspects of human nature: the capacity for self-delusion in the face of horrific atrocities. This isn’t a film about history, facts, or statistics; it’s about the memories of the men who killed, the stories they tell themselves, and how they continue to live with the horrors they’ve inflicted on others. The film’s power lies in its ability to take the viewer beyond a surface-level understanding of evil and into the psychological abyss of those who have committed atrocities—and seemingly moved on with their lives.

From: https://docthisway.com/2024/09/23/the-act-of-killing-review/

I'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.

[0]: https://youtu.be/65_DgLwjePA

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.

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.

The straight of Gibraltar is 10km and barely any Europeans have anything more than superficial knowledge about North-African cultures.

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.

You can learn more about them here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torres_Strait_Islanders

~ 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

I can't stop crying about West Papua. It is such a horror story, an ecocide and a genocide happening simultaneously.

Off-topic

> 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

https://www.amazon.com/First-Contact-Guineas-Highlanders-Enc...

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.

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...

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.

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...

The contemporary role of missionaries is complicated. My mother is a (now retired) doctor, who formerly (>10 years ago) worked for a Seventh Day Adventist church mission in the Solomon Islands (I also mentioned in another comment she worked in the PNG, that was with Australian Doctors International, a secular charity–although even part of that work involved working with a French doctor who happened to be a Catholic nun). My mother isn't a Seventh Day Adventist, she isn't even particularly religious (lapsed Catholic) – her personal motivations weren't about religion, it was about charity, and also the professional and personal experience. She just somehow (I think through some work colleagues who happened to be Seventh Day Adventists) became aware of the mission and ended up working for it–it was essentially volunteering, they may have reimbursed some of her expenses, but whatever she was paid was a fraction of what she'd get working as a doctor in Australia. The mission wasn't currently converting the local population – that had already happened generations ago - and much of the local population combined Christianity with elements of their indigenous belief systems. I guess coming from a Catholic background gave her some personal tolerance for the religious aspect, even if it was never her motivation.

"The captive women told the Spaniards that Carib men traveled by canoe to neighboring islands, killed or captured men and carried away young women. Chanca says the women were kept as servants and concubines. They further alleged that children born to these captive women by Carib men were eaten, whereas children born to Carib women were raised."

IMHO People had it rough before missions. These particular natives left right there and were ready to sign up!

> 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.

> The reasons why I believe that ... the highlands were functionally cut off is ...

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."

Or for that matter killing ourselves in dozens of other ways due to lack of scientific knowledge, or ignoring it.

1. Mining

2. Missionary work and ancillary things related to it.

3. Anthropological and linguistic research, biology/ecosystem related research and similar.

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...