I feel as though it's a bit uncouth to mention Mick Leahy's exploration and documentation in fawning terms, in material meant to introduce the subject to people who are unfamiliar, without also mentioning that he was a colonialist murderer personally responsible for the killing of dozens of the people whose land he was invading. I don't deny that the material is historically interesting, but it is nonetheless kind of gross to admire someone for making historically interesting material with his own two hands in part by killing people.
I have read somewhere that the cannibalism claims are overrated and kind of artificially inflated by the natives. I have not looked closely into it though.
Unrelated. We have servers across the world; one in Mount Hagen. It has by far the biggest latency in the world; so I always use it as a "benchmark"; if it works in Mount Hagen, it works everywhere.
I randomly had a conversation with a guy at a bar in Taipei who was an administrator during the transition to self rule, and he said basically the same thing.
He said about many of the tribes modernized within a generation or two, and the ones that didn't still dropped the cannibalism stuff in the 50s.
I’ve just asked a friend of mine who lives in PNG and yeah, this definitely happened. Nowadays it doesn’t happen anymore except potentially in some insanely remote areas.
Supposedly the Japanese during WW2 also resorted to cannibalism.
> Supposedly the Japanese during WW2 also resorted to cannibalism.
Germans and Russians did too. Most humans with a survival instinct will turn to cannibalism if it their only means to survive. This is completely unrelated to cannibalism as a cultural practice.
I visited Papua among some other places ~20 years ago. The steep elevation changes and extreme rain and infinitely deep mud means roads to many areas aren’t viable, will rapidly degrade if built, or there simply isn’t anything worth building a road to. You can see on Google Maps areas void of settlements. So I rode a twin engine Aztec into fuck knows where anymore, hiked barefoot through muddy rainforest, and met some Korowai. Treehouses, sago grubs and all.
From what I learned from groups that work with the Korowai, the cannibalism stuff was very real at one point, but wasn’t really something they liked to do. It was a matter of fear, superstition and ritual, rather than a method of substance.
My poorly remembered summary (take with a grain of salt): if someone got sick, it was because of a witch doctor or someone possessed by an evil spirit putting a curse on them. Only way to deal with the curse/evil spirit) was the find the caster (through torture of course) and kill and eat them. If you just kill them they 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 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.
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
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 Erie 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. Almost every block here in China has an uncle (or auntie) ‘live welding’ these chromed bars on the street, made to order.
I wish I could share photos. Food is insanely cheap. I had street fried chicken, rice, and I think two sides for literally one US dollar.
Their primary currency usd.
They have all the child labor problems that other countries in the region have.
Everybody seems to know each other.
Unlike French colonialized countries, Vietnam, Timor Leste is proudly and vibrantly Portuguese. Similar to Macau but not as wealthy.
The public transit system is basically a tiny van that just drives around in loops around the city. You wave the driver down, jump in, and then tap your money against the metal framing when you’re ready to get off (there are no bus stops). I don’t know if you’ve been to Kenya, but it was like very similar to the vans in Kenya, except even smaller.
I tend to fly cheaply with multiple transfers/layovers. What I figured out recently is that it is nice to combine the flights in such a way that one of the layovers is _longer_.
When the airport has a good connection to a major city then 12 hours during the day are enough, but I'm happy to bump it to 2-3 days.
I have managed to visit some Chinese and Canadian cities this way and it was both more interesting and much cheaper than taking a direct flight.
It seems astonishing to me that a "relatively complex" intercontinental trip these days means "have to spend a whole night waiting for the next flight".
the additional complexity is visas and immigration for that country.
I’m American, so I have to pay $35 every time I enter Indonesia and I’m limited to the number times per year I can enter the country.
Australia is easier. Just need to fill out ETA for a $20AUD fee.
The extra night also eats into your limited vacation time. 18 hours in addition to the 20 hours flying means you’re losing almost 4 days of your trip just transiting.
Also, my flights aren’t intercontinental. I did this monkey dance going from tp hcmc to Timor Leste.
I read about a Japanese flying to Indonesia in 1959 (the president of the country was courting her). She flew from Tokyo to Hong Kong, then to Bangkok, then to Singapore before making the last hop to Jakarta.
That would have been right around the time that airlines were transitioning to jet aircraft. Back before jet travel it could take a whole week to reach the far east.
It’s not a place for most visitors to go off-piste, unless you’re like MacAffee or that British lad Mike who does a hitch-hikers YT travel channel. They both were/are quite a-tuned to where they are think on their feet and are adept at escaping tough situations. Most people ate not like them.
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.
On the other hand, the MAF is a highly questionable organization that exists specifically to convert the local people away from their own belief systems into whatever brand of evangelical Christianity its supporters are peddling. There's plenty of bush plane videos from Alaska, Nunavut and other challenging places in the world from ordinary small commercial bush plane operators.
It's morally indefensible in my opinion for a bunch of random people from many thousands of km away to go off to some pre-technology rural villagers' home territory and basically say "everything you believe is wrong, here's our god, you must follow and believe in him or you're going to hell".
If people want to go do bush plane things in remote areas and work in very challenging environments as weird foreigners, there's plenty of ways to justify that in the form of a secular NGO (something like Medecins Sans Frontiers) without combining it with missionary work.
> On the other hand, the MAF is a highly questionable organization that exists specifically to convert the local people away from their own belief
At this stage in the ecocide and genocide of West Papua, any eyes are welcome no matter what their biases. If they want to convert people to their belief system, honestly I couldn't care right now as long as they protect the indigenous West Papuans from being genocided by Prabowo and his cronies and the beautiful ecology of the island from being ecocided.
If there is no funding for helping the people coming from the non evangelical sources, i'm sure the people would rather have medicine than keep dying, no matter the indoctrination they receive
> 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-...)
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.
> 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.
> 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?
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.
Gonna press F to doubt on that one, bro. Sounds like you're taking an anecdote and trying to justify your ideological views.
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.
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:
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?
How is this different from safari hunting trips where you can get attacked by a wild animal and have to shoot it to defend yourself?
Cause to me, there doesn't seem to be much difference between a wild animal and a canibal in a lawless society. Just cause they are human speices does not put their life on the same importance as the rest of humanity.
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.
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.
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?
> So nearly all groups eventually internalized a similar set of norms, a similar food culture and similar political institutions, without ever being part of the same political unit.
They managed to achieve eventual consistency in a distributed system, thousands of years before we even thought of it.
i 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
Indonesia's dictator Suharto (who was put into power by the US) annexed West Papua in the 60's on behalf of US corporations. Indigenous groups united together to form the Free Papua Movement (OPM) and wage a guerilla war of resistance. The resistance is ongoing and most of West Papua (which is basically a colony) and PNG (which is basically a banana republic) want reunification
In regards to Suharto, it seems the 1965 coup attempt that got him into power was a surprise even to the US embassy in Jakarta, but of course they welcomed it, considering the previous president (Sukarno) was anti-imperialist and was flirting with the 3rd largest communist party in the world (after USSR's and China's).
Somewhat relatedly, a documentary moviemaker realized what was behind the curtain of Indonesian society and said "it's as if I had wandered into Germany 40 years after the Holocaust only to find the Nazis still in power.". He made a documentary following a man who was sanctioned by the Suharto regime to kill a lot of "communists" in 1960's Indonesia: The Act of Killing (available at e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TDeEObjR9Q ).
A review:
> Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing is a challenging documentary. It is not only difficult to watch, but it also probes into one of the most grotesque aspects of human nature: the capacity for self-delusion in the face of horrific atrocities. This isn’t a film about history, facts, or statistics; it’s about the memories of the men who killed, the stories they tell themselves, and how they continue to live with the horrors they’ve inflicted on others. The film’s power lies in its ability to take the viewer beyond a surface-level understanding of evil and into the psychological abyss of those who have committed atrocities—and seemingly moved on with their lives.
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.
A book 'The Jakarta Method' by Vincent Bevis is a great exploration of those events and similar cases of deliberate destruction of the independent third world.
> The resistance is ongoing and most of West Papua
I'm unsure if that's an accurate description. I would say it is more accurate to say that West Papua is being genocided. Indigenous West Papuans are being genocided by settlers from Java. More than 500,000 West Papuans have been killed according to estimates by indigenous groups. It is hard to verify since Javanese settlers (Prabowo is Javanese) control the army and no media or journalists, and not even Indonesians are allowed to enter West Papua. This year, thousands of excavators were shipped on barges into West Papua. Western corporations like Freeport McMoran are complicit. It is horrific to see videos that have come out. There is one which I saw, I still get nightmares. It is an indigenous Papuan man being skinned alive in a drum of water. The name that was spread was Defianus Kogoya. It is so sad... West Papua was one of the most beautiful places on this planet with inland seawater lakes that had non-venomous jellyfish in Misool. Cave systems with handprints said to pre-date the Toba erruption. All of this being destroyed.
I 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.
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.
> 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
> 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.
> Papua is hardly a hermetically sealed off North Korea.
We're talking about West Papua. Not Papua New Guinea. The Western half of the island is occupied by the Prabowo regime. The Prabowo regime enforces strict limitations on international journalists, human rights monitors, and foreign researchers trying to enter the region. Indonesian authorities have consistently restricted or delayed official access to West Papua for high-level United Nations representatives, including requests from the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. All of this is done with full knowledge by collaborating companies like Blackrock (owner of Freeport McMoran) that massive human rights abuses, we're talking about at a level greater than that in the middle east is actively being committed there.
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.
Suharto was responsible for his own rise. He took money and intel from wherever he liked, and was otherwise a wily, vicious strongman in his own right. Neither he nor other Indonesians need to be infantilized by Western 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.
The line is the time. Suharto seized the capital by himself and became the voice of the military. The US watched and decided, in the fateful beginning, that this up-and-comer could work in their interests. The US and Suharto then used each other for the next 30 years.
You wrote "the US put him in power" and I say that's babying.
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 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.
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.
> 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.
The "Pre-bronze age war between two tribes in West Papua, 1963" video in the article is an embedded tweet. Twitter currently doesn't allow to view it without an account (extensively discussed on HN [0]). Fortunately, it is also available on Youtube [1] (longer version [2]).
Thanks for posting the videos. Two thoughts that came from watching that:
1. It is really interesting that we live on a planet that has such a society, along side one that had built nuclear weapons, launched astronauts into space, and was soon to walk on the moon.
2. Our modern society has not progressed at all from any of these base instincts, and in some cases & applications we have gotten worse.
Agreed. My theory about our "great filter" event is that our technological advancement proceeds so much faster than our genetics, which will be our ruin.
To put in plain terms, we keep inventing far better "spears," while still behaving like cavemen.
Possibly, but look at modern times. It takes years to build social constructs that might guide us towards cooperation and non-violence. They can be overturned in an instant by a slick turn of phrase that appeals to our genetics.
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 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).
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.
3. Handing a people that can not progress, exponential tech, without which they regress, but which also kills them all when they regress, is a trapdoor function worthy of St.Fermi .
They had had a long battle with what looks to be hundreds of participants and there were a few wounded, but nobody died. Compare with e.g. battles in the ancient Mediterranean, where the fighting would have continued until one side panics and tries to flee, and the winning side kills anyone who can't run away fast enough. Now maybe they're simply bad at warfare, but I think a more likely explanation is that they're intentionally not escalating to that level of violence and mostly stay at a standoff distance where fatalities are unlikely. The narrator also calls it a "formal battle" at one point.
In any case, I don't think you can ascribe much of their bow-and-arrow tactics to base instincts.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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 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.
>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).
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.
> 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 generics, but then once in a while, over multiple generations, something in the environment changes quickly and the gene pool as a whole, that of the individuals, is 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.
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 that support that belief.
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 e.g. the sciencedaily link is complete rubbish.
The article itself has a fantastic example (why didn't you mention it?).
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 person 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
The gene is selected for. There are no population effects.
The key part 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 (because they didn't have that ancestor).
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.
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.
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 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 matters. Even the paper is confusing because it talks about 50 year old women (survival bias , not whether they will pass on genes at 50).
Group selection as a theory has alot going for it in terms of expressive power, like, say, Haskell. Unfortunately, it's never been firmly demonstrated in nature outside abstract assertions. Every example proffered has subsequently been shown to be fully and better explained by orthodox genetic selection. We can infer some kind of group selection in the case of humans, if only because genetic selection models alone seem to fail to predict the emergence of our altruism, but like with other species it's all still largely abstract assertions.
You can believe in group selection, and maybe (probably?) it'll turn out to be true, albeit largely as a supplement to genetic selection, but for now that belief has about as much evidentiary substance as believing in various science fiction tropes.
>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?
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
The alternative is to be potentially oppressed, subjugated, and colonized. A good example is India and the British. 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Warfare has historically varied in intensity, especially tribal warfare. 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.
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.
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.
It’s of interest certainly but why would it be strange that Australia, a member of the Commonwealth and New Zealand, also a member of the Commonwealth have closer ties? The US has closer ties with the UK than it does Cuba, for example.
Not that strange, actually, once you understand the geography and ethnography. First of all (although not that significant), straight line distance between the population centres of AU and PNG is further than that of AU and NZ: Sydney to Port Moresby ~4 hours by direct flight, Sydney to Auckland ~3 hours. More significantly, the whole ~1000km length of Cape York Peninsula is one hell of a barrier: virtually uninhabited, no sealed roads most of the way, and extremely inhospitable (cyclones and mass flooding for several months every year, killer crocodiles / jellyfish everywhere, prevalence of dengue fever / malaria).
The Torres Strait Islanders are genetically and culturally part of the peoples of New Guinea, which is why here in Australia we refer to "Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples", why the TSIs have their own flag that's different to the Aboriginal flag, etc. We non-indigenous people of Australia and New Zealand share the same predominantly British ancestry, a very similar (and intertwined) colonial / post-colonial history, etc.
Are you aware of the Australian indigeneous ethnic group called the Torres Strait Islanders? They are considered ethnically distinct from Aboriginal peoples in the rest of Australia. There are about 100,000 of them. They reside on the islands between the north tip of Australia and the south coast of Papua New Guinea. Thus, I would qualify your post by saying: The vast majority of Australians have little contact with PNG, but the Torres Strait Islanders have had contact with PNG peoples for thousands of years.
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
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.
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!!!
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.
> 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.
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."
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.
How adult people (and more often than not Anglo-Saxons) can non-ironically publish tracts like this which are no different from a middle schooler's "I read about Disneyland and it's really really awesome, you guys!" is another symptom of Idiocracy being a documentary.
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.
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
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 131 ms ] threadUnrelated. 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.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannibalism_at_sea
https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoryMemes/comments/qr1zth/in_sep...
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 they 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...
I visited Timor Leste earlier this year and what an interesting country
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)
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 was curious about the town, because it’s famous for casinos, scam centers, and Chinese manufacturers.
https://www.kcoleman.me/2026/09/08/Cambodia-Scam-Centers.htm...
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.
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.
I visited Japan, Taiwan, Australia, Hawaii, and Turkey at almost no extra dollar cost. If I like the city I go back.
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.
really excellent insight into society and values there as it meets capitalism
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.
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.
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.
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-...)
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-...
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.
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.
"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?
But still. Gourds up. Highlander pride worldwide.
"Mal", bad, in the latin
So it's a benefit almost for everyone.
Heck, some of the worst western diets are both poor in vitamins/minerals and also still rich in calories.
Gonna press F to doubt on that one, bro. Sounds like you're taking an anecdote and trying to justify your ideological views.
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
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
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?
https://www.sail-world.com/USA/Russian-luxury-yachts-offer-p...
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/somali-pirate-luxury-cruis...
Do you often have violent power fantasies? Do you find yourself daydreaming about them regularly?
Cause to me, there doesn't seem to be much difference between a wild animal and a canibal in a lawless society. Just cause they are human speices does not put their life on the same importance as the rest of humanity.
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.
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.
If the argument
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.
They managed to achieve eventual consistency in a distributed system, thousands of years before we even thought of it.
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/
> 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
This one works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKoP2PnU60s
Sorry, I copy/pasted half my reply from an old comment.
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.
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 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.
I am shocked it’s not reported about in Western media.
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.
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.
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.
We're talking about West Papua. Not Papua New Guinea. The Western half of the island is occupied by the Prabowo regime. The Prabowo regime enforces strict limitations on international journalists, human rights monitors, and foreign researchers trying to enter the region. Indonesian authorities have consistently restricted or delayed official access to West Papua for high-level United Nations representatives, including requests from the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. All of this is done with full knowledge by collaborating companies like Blackrock (owner of Freeport McMoran) that massive human rights abuses, we're talking about at a level greater than that in the middle east is actively being committed there.
[0]: https://youtu.be/65_DgLwjePA
Suharto was responsible for his own rise. He took money and intel from wherever he liked, and was otherwise a wily, vicious strongman in his own right. Neither he nor other Indonesians need to be infantilized by Western neocolonial narratives.
The US' strategy to use a proxy to commit heinous crimes against humanity is named after this event. It's called the Jakarta Method.
You wrote "the US put him in power" and I say that's babying.
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.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49694296
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNHIP2FJzko
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JI4uirwxx1Y
1. It is really interesting that we live on a planet that has such a society, along side one that had built nuclear weapons, launched astronauts into space, 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.
Not at all surprising given that base instincts come from genetics and genes take tens to hundreds of thousands of years to change significantly.
To put in plain terms, we keep inventing far better "spears," while still behaving like cavemen.
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 of billions of humans.
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
For example, "self-domestication" by executing or ostracizing individuals that don’t fit into the culture.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sentinel_Island
In any case, I don't think you can ascribe much of their bow-and-arrow tactics to base instincts.
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"
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.
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.
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.
Note though that even in the Mediterranean, routes where most of the enemy was killed were relatively rare.
“The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed.”
― William Gibson
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.
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.
Fighting always works better when only your side is doing it.
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.
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).
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.
"Fighting to the death and mating are not the same!"
Your original question and your current statement are in confliction. Pick one.
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.
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.
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 generics, but then once in a while, over multiple generations, something in the environment changes quickly and the gene pool as a whole, that of the individuals, is 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 e.g. the sciencedaily link is complete rubbish.
The article itself has a fantastic example (why didn't you mention it?).
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 person 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
The gene is selected for. There are no population effects.
The key part 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 (because they didn't have that ancestor).
[1] We don't fucking evolve genetic mutations
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.
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.
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.
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 matters. Even the paper is confusing because it talks about 50 year old women (survival bias , not whether they will pass on genes at 50).
(reedits for clarity).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49734849
You can believe in group selection, and maybe (probably?) it'll turn out to be true, albeit largely as a supplement to genetic selection, but for now that belief has about as much evidentiary substance as believing in various science fiction tropes.
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?
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.
(Attacking them in their beds, pah, don't you think maybe the neighboring tribe thought about that and had someone on watch?)
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)
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.
I have read stories about this happening in the current day Amazon.
A History of Warfare by John Keegan is a good introduction to military anthrolopogy, with an extensive bibliography.
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.
For what it's worth, cops in America in certain scenarios act the same way, faced with similar upside/downside risks.
> 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".
I feel a straightforward example of exatcly this may be Moriori of Chatham Islands.
Oh you mean October 7th Hamas standards or the Israeli Gaza genocide standards, or maybe the US in Vietnam 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.
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.
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.
(kinda pricey though)
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ritual_warfare
Not when life is filled with warfare, murdering other people, and having loved ones killed?
https://youtube.com/shorts/91moJcyiS00?si=EYzspw-B7y_J77Os
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
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...
~ 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.
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.
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!!!
This rings absolutely true? Do you not think any societies are more hostile to change than others?
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.
> 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.
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."
“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.”
They still do this, in fact.