The rise and fall of the third chimpanzee

bird-watching in New Guinea, I take pains to stop at the nearest village to request permission to bird-watch on that village's land or rivers. On two occasions when I neglected that precaution (or asked permission at the wrong village) and proceeded to boat up the river, I found the river barred on my return by canoes of stone-throwing villagers, furious that I had violated their territory. When I was living among Elopi tribespeople in western New Guinea and wanted to cross the territory of the neighbouring Fayu tribe to reach a nearby mountain, the Elopis explained to me matter-of-factly that the Fayus would kill me if I tried. From a New Guinean perspective, it seemed perfectly natural and self-explanatory. Of course the Fayus will kill any trespasser; you surely do not think they are so stupid that they would admit strangers to their territory? Strangers would just hunt their game animals, molest their women, introduce diseases, and reconnoitre the terrain in order to stage a raid later.

While most pre-contact peoples had trade relations with their neighbours, many thought they were the only humans in existence. Perhaps the smoke of fires on the horizon, or an empty canoe floating past down a river, did prove the existence of other people. But to venture out of one's territory to meet those humans, even if they lived only a few miles away, was equivalent to suicide. As one New Guinea highlander recalled his life before first arrival of whites in 1930, 'We had not seen far places. We knew only this side of the mountains. And we thought that we were the only living people.

Such isolation bred great genetic diversity. Each valley in New Guinea has not only its own language and culture, but also its own genetic abnormalities and local diseases. The first valley where I worked was the home of the Fore people, famous to science for their unique affliction with a fatal viral disease called kuru or laughing sickness, which accounted for over half of all deaths (especially among women) and left men outnumbering women three-to-one in some Fore villages. At Karimui, sixty miles to the west of the Fore area, kuru is completely unknown, and the people are instead affected with the world's highest incidence of leprosy. Still other tribes are unique in their high frequency of deaf mutes, or of male pseudo- hermaphrodites lacking a penis, or of premature aging, or of delayed puberty.

Today we can picture areas of the globe that we have not visited, from films and television. We can read about them in books. English dictionaries exist for all the world's major languages, and most villages speaking minor languages contain individuals who have learned one of the world's major languages. For example, missionary linguists have studied literally hundreds of New Guinea and South American Indian languages in recent decades, and I have found some inhabitant speaking either Indonesian or Neo-Melanesian in every New Guinea village that I have visited, no matter how remote. Linguistic barriers no longer impede the worldwide flow of information. Almost every village in the world today has thereby obtained fairly direct accounts of the outside world and has yielded fairly direct accounts of itself.

In contrast, pre-contact peoples had no way to picture the outside world, or to learn about it directly. Information instead arrived via long chains of languages, with accuracy lost at each step—as in the children's game called 'telephone' or 'Chinese whispers', where one child in a circle whispers a message to the next child, who in turn whispers it to her neighbour, until by the time the message is whispered back to the first child its meaning has become changed beyond recognition. As a result, New Guinea highlanders had no concept of the ocean a hundred miles distant, and knew nothing about the white men who had been prowling their coasts for several centuries. When highlanders tried to figure out why the first arriving white men wore trousers and belts, one theory was that the clothes served to conceal an enormously long penis coiled around the waist. Some Dani believed that a neighbouring group of New Guineans munched grass and had their hands joined behind their back.

Thus, first-contact patrols had a traumatic effect that is difficult for all of us living in the modern world to imagine. Highlanders 'discovered' by Michael Leahy in the 1930s, and interviewed fifty years later, still recalled perfectly where they were and what they were doing at that moment of first contact. Perhaps the closest parallel, to modern Americans and Europeans, is our recollection of one or two of the most important political events of our lives. Most Americans of my age recall that moment on 7 December 1941 when they heard of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. We knew at once that our lives would be very different for years to come, as a result of the news. Yet even the impact of Pearl Harbor and of the resulting war on American society was minor, compared to the impact of a first-contact patrol on New Guinea highlanders. On that day, their world changed forever.

The patrols revolutionized the highlanders' material culture by bringing steel axes and matches, whose superiority over stone axes and fire drills was immediately obvious. The missionaries and government administrators who followed the patrols suppressed ingrained cultural practices like cannibalism, polygyny, homosexuality, and war. Other practices were discarded spontaneously by tribespeople themselves, in favour of new practices that they saw. But there was also a more profoundly unsettling revolution, in the highlanders' view of what comprised the universe. They and their neighbours were no longer the sole humans, with the sole way of life. A book by Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson, entitled First Contact, poignantly relates that moment in the eastern highlands, as recalled in their old age by New Guineans and whites who met there as young adults or children in the 1930s. Terrified highlanders took the whites for returning ghosts, until the New Guineans dug up and scrutinized the whites' buried faeces, sent terrified young girls to have sex with the intruders, and discovered that whites defaecated and were men like themselves. Leahy wrote in his diaries that highlanders smelled bad, while at the same time the highlanders were finding the whites' smell strange and frightening. Leahy's obsession with gold was as bizarre to the highlanders as their obsession with their own form of wealth and currency—cowry shells—was to him. For the survivors of those Grand Valley Dani and Archbold Expedition members who met in 1938, such an account of first contact has yet to be written.

I said at the outset that Archbold's entry into the Grand Valley was not only a watershed for the Dani, but also part of a watershed in human history. What difference did it make that all human groups used to live in relative isolation, awaiting first contact, while only a few such groups remain today? We can infer the answer by comparing those areas of the world where isolation ended long ago, with those other areas where it persisted into modern times. We can also study the rapid changes that followed historical first contacts. These comparisons suggest that contact between distant peoples gradually obliterated much of the human cultural diversity that had arisen during millennia of isolation.

Take artistic diversity as one obvious example. Styles of sculpture, music, and dance used to vary greatly from village to village within New Guinea. Some villagers along the Sepik River and in the Asmat swamps produced carvings that are now world-famous because of their quality. But New Guinea villagers have been increasingly coerced or seduced into abandoning their artistic traditions. When I visited an isolated tribelet of 578 people at Bomai in 1965, the missionary controlling the only store had just manipulated the people into burning all their art. Centuries of unique cultural development ('heathen artifacts', as the missionary put it) had been destroyed in one morning. On my first visit to remote New Guinea villages in 1964, I heard log drums and traditional songs; on my visits in the 1980s, I heard guitars, rock music, and battery-operated boom boxes. Anyone who has seen the Asmat carvings at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, or heard log drums played in antiphonal duet at breathtaking speed, can appreciate the enormous tragedy of post-contact loss of art.

There has been massive loss of languages as well. For example, as I shall cescribe in Chapter Fifteen, Europe today has only about fifty languages, most of them belonging to a single language family (Indo-European). In contrast, New Guinea, with less than one-tenth of Europe's area and less than one-hundredth of its population, has about 1,000 languages, many of them unrelated to any other known language in New Guinea or elsewhere! The average New Guinea language is spoken by a few thousand people living within a radius often miles. When I travelled sixty miles from Okapa to Karimui in New Guinea's eastern highlands, I passed through six languages, starting with Fore (a language with postpositions, like Finnish) and ending with Tudawhe (a language with alternative tones and nasalized vowels, like Chinese).

New Guinea shows linguists what the world used to be like, with each isolated tribe having its own language, until the rise of agriculture permitted a few groups to expand and spread their tongue over large areas. It was only about 6,000 years ago that the Indo-European expansion began, leading to the extermination of all prior western European languages except Basque. The Bantu expansion within the last few millennia similarly exterminated most other languages of tropical and sub-Saharan Africa, just as the Austronesian expansion did in Indonesia and the Philippines. In the New World alone, hundreds of American Indian languages have become extinct in recent centuries.

Is language loss not a good thing, because fewer languages mean easier communication among the world's people? Perhaps, but it is a bad thing in other respects. Languages differ in structure and vocabulary, in how they express causation and feelings and personal responsibility, and consequently in how they shape our