(Missionaries usually adopt the precaution of sending an emissary from a contacted neighboring group to ask whether a missionary would be welcomed, rather than expose themselves to the danger of walking in unannounced.) But those “uncontacted” mountaineers must have known of Europeans and Indonesians from “contacted” neighboring groups with which the uncontacted group did have contact. In addition, the uncontacted group had for many years seen airplanes flying over, such as the plane in which I arrived at the village of their contacted neighbors. Hence the world’s last remaining uncontacted groups do know that there is an outside world.
Conditions were different when Europeans began expanding over the globe from AD 1492 onwards and “discovered” people long before there were any airplane overflights to alert them to an outside world. The last large-scale first contacts in world history will prove to be those that took place in the New Guinea Highlands, where from the 1930s to the 1950s patrols by Australian and Dutch government and army reconnaissance expeditions, miners on prospecting trips, and biological expeditions “discovered” a million Highlanders of whose existence the outside world hadn’t known and vice versa—even though Europeans had by then been visiting and settling the coasts of New Guinea for 400 years. Until the 1930s, first contacts in New Guinea were made by Europeans exploring overland or by river, and the first evidence of Europeans’ existence to Highlanders was the Europeans’ physical arrival. Increasingly from the 1930s onwards, airplane overflights preceded the overland parties and warned Highlanders that there was something new out there. For example, the densest Highland population in western New Guinea, the approximately 100,000 people in the Baliem Valley, was “discovered” on June 23, 1938, when an airplane belonging to a joint expedition of New York’s American Museum of Natural History and the Dutch colonial government, financed by oil heir Richard Archbold and exploring New Guinea for animals and plants, flew over mountain terrain previously assumed to be rugged, forest-covered, and uninhabited. Archbold and his team instead were astonished to find themselves looking down on a broad, flat, deforested valley criss-crossed by a dense network of irrigation ditches and resembling thickly populated areas of Holland.
Those final sites of large-scale first contacts of Highlanders with Europeans are described in three remarkable books. One, entitled
A virtue of the first and third of these books is that they relate the impressions made by first contact both on the New Guineans and on the Europeans involved. Both authors interviewed involved New Guineans 50 years after the events described. Just as older Americans will remember for the rest of their lives what they were doing at the moment of the three most traumatic events of modern American history—Japan’s attack against Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the assassination of President Kennedy on November 22, 1963, and the World Trade Center attack of September 11, 2001—so, too, New Guineans over 60 years old in the 1980s recalled clearly how they as children first saw whites of the Leahy-Dwyer patrol in 1930. Here is an account by one such New Guinean: “At that time, these bigger men [pointing to two old men]—they’re old now—were just young men, and unmarried. They hadn’t shaved yet. That’s when the white men came…. I was so terrified, I couldn’t think properly, and I cried uncontrollably. My father pulled me along by the hand and we hid behind some tall kunai grass. Then he stood up and peeped out at the white men…. Once they had gone, the people [we New Guineans] sat down and developed stories. They knew nothing of white-skinned men. We had not seen far places. We knew only this side of the mountains, and we thought we were the only living people. We believed that when a person died, his skin changed to white and he went over the boundary to ‘that place’—the place of the dead. So when the strangers came we said: ‘Ah, these men do not belong to the earth. Let’s not kill them—they are our own relatives. Those who have died before have turned white and come back.’”
On first seeing Europeans, New Guinea Highlanders sought to fit these strange-looking creatures into known categories of their own world view. Questions that they asked themselves included: Are these creatures human? Why have they come here? What do they want? Often, New Guineans took whites to be “sky people”: people like New Guineans themselves, who were supposed to inhabit the sky, who traded and made love and war like New Guineans but were immortal, who were either spirits or ancestral ghosts, and who occasionally took human form and were then either red or white and descended to earth. At times of first contact, New Guineans carefully scrutinized Europeans, their behavior, and the debris that they left at their camps, for evidence about what they were. Two discoveries that went a long way towards convincing New Guineans that Europeans really were human were that the feces scavenged from their campsite latrines looked like typical human feces (i.e., like the feces of New Guineans); and that young New Guinea girls offered to Europeans as sex partners reported that Europeans had sex organs and practiced sex much as did New Guinea men.
Trade and traders
A remaining relationship between neighboring societies, besides defending boundaries and sharing resources and making war, is trade. I came to appreciate the sophistication of trading among traditional societies in the course of bird surveys that I was carrying out on 16 islands of Vitiaz Strait off northeastern New Guinea. Most of the islands were largely forest-covered, with only a few villages, each consisting of houses spaced dozens of feet apart and fronting on large open public spaces. Hence when I landed on an island called Malai, I was astonished by the contrast. I felt as if I had suddenly parachuted into a small-scale version of Manhattan. Crowded close to each other, almost side-by-side like a row of New York townhouses, were tall two-story wooden houses, veritable skyscrapers compared to the one-story huts prevailing elsewhere then on the Vitiaz Strait islands. Large wooden dugout canoes pulled up on the beach gave the sense of a First World marina all of whose berths had been rented out. In front of the houses were more people than I had seen gathered in a small area anywhere else in Vitiaz Strait. A 1963 census counted Malai’s population as 448 people, which when divided by Malai’s area of 0.32 square miles yields a population density of 1,400 people per square mile, higher than that of any European country. For comparison, even the Netherlands, Europe’s most densely populated nation, supports only 1,010 people per square mile.
That remarkable settlement belonged to the famous long-distance Siassi traders, who ranged in their sailing canoes up to 300 miles through rough seas, carrying pigs, dogs, pots, beads, obsidian, and other goods. They rendered a service to the communities they visited, by supplying them with those necessities and luxuries. While doing good for others, they did well themselves, acquiring some of their own food and becoming immensely rich by New Guinea standards, which measured wealth in pigs. One voyage could yield a 900% profit, by loading pigs at Malai, converting each pig at the first stop of Umboi Island into 10 packets of sago, converting those 10 packets at the second stop at Sio Village on the New Guinea mainland into 100 pots, and converting those 100 pots at the next stop on New Britain into 10 pigs, to be brought back to Malai and consumed in ceremonial feasting. Traditionally, no cash was exchanged, because all those societies lacked cash. Siassi twin-masted canoes, up to 60 feet long and 5 feet deep, with a cargo pay load of about two tons, were technological masterpieces of wooden sailing ships (Plate 32).
The archaeological record demonstrates that our Ice Age ancestors were already trading tens of thousands of years ago. Cro-Magnon sites in the interior of Pleistocene Europe contain Baltic marine amber and Mediterranean seashells transported a thousand miles inland, plus obsidian, flint, jasper, and other hard stones especially suitable for stone-tool-making and transported hundreds of miles from the sites where they had been quarried. Only a few modern traditional societies have been reported as largely self-sufficient and carrying out little or no trade, including Siberia’s Nganasan reindeer-herders and Bolivia’s Siriono Indians as studied by Allan Holmberg. Most traditional societies, like all developed societies, did import some goods. As we shall see, even traditional societies that could have been self-sufficient usually chose not to be so and instead preferred to acquire by trade some objects that
