New Guinea

New Guinea, located just north of Australia, is the world's second largest island having become separated from the Australian mainland when the area now known as the Torres Strait flooded around 5000 BC. The name papua has also been long-associated with the island: this is discussed further under History, below.

The people

Populated by very nearly a thousand different Papua Melanesian tribal groups since 45,000 BC, New Guinea is the home of the world's oldest independent societies and a staggering number of separate languages, the Papuan languages. The separation was not merely linguistic; warfare among societies was a factor in the evolution of the men's house: separate housing of groups of adult men, from the single-family houses of the women and children, for mutual protection against the other groups. Pig-based trade between the groups and pig-based feasts are a common theme with the other peoples of Southeast Asia and Oceania. Most societies practice agriculture, supplemented by hunting and gathering.

Related Topics:
Language - Papuan languages - Agriculture - Hunting and gathering

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The island's population is comprised of roughly two indigenous ethnic groups: Papuans and Austronesians. Papuans are Melanesian peoples with brown skin and woolly hair. Current archaeological evidence indicates they are the oldest human residents of New Guinea, and they constitute the majority of the western New Guinean population. Austronesians are of Southeast Asian, or Micronesian, stock. These seafaring peoples colonized New Guinea from the north, it is estimated, several thousand years after the arrival of the Papuans. Other routes of colonization of Papua are surmised to have been land bridges from the Australian continent and neighboring islands after a climate change lowered the sea level. Over the millennia, the confluence of people and cultures of the islands of Micronesia, Melanesia and Polynesia, and the region's history of European and Asian colonization, have combined to create a highly ethnically diverse island. The Indonesian government of western New Guinea has instituted an aggressive transmigration program designed to bring chiefly Sumatran and Javanese immigrants to western New Guinea to tip the largely black population toward a more Asian "balance." To date, more than 1 million Asian immigrants have settled in western New Guinea as part of the transmigration program.

Related Topics:
Austronesian - Southeast Asian - Micronesian - Polynesia - Sumatran - Javanese

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