The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? Read Online Free PDF Page B

airplanes flying overhead and have heard of outsiders from neighboring “contacted” New Guinea groups. (By “contacted,” I mean contacted by distant outsiders such as Europeansand Indonesians; of course the “uncontacted” groups have been in contact with other New Guineans or South American Indians for thousands of years.) For example, when I was in western New Guinea’s mountains in the 1990s, my hosts, who had first been contacted by the Dutch a few decades previously, told me of a group to the north of them that had not yet been contacted, in the sense that they hadn’t yet been visited by missionaries or other outsiders. (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
First Contact
by Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson, recounts the patrols by the miners Michael Leahy, Michael Dwyer, and Daniel Leahy, who were the first Europeans to enter some densely populated Highland valleys of eastern New Guinea between 1930 and 1935. (Lutheran missionaries had alreadyreached the eastern fringe of the Highlands in the 1920s.) A second is Michael Leahy’s own account,
Explorations into Highland New Guinea, 1930–1935
. The remaining book is
The Sky Travelers
by Bill Gammage, describing the Australian government patrol led by Jim Taylor and John Black that trekked through the western portion of the Papua New Guinea Highlands in 1938 and 1939. Both expeditions took many photos, and Michael Leahy made motion pictures as well. The horrified expressions on the faces of New Guineans