Figure 1.-- The indigenous people of the island belong to three major groups: the Negritos, Melanesians, and Papuans. The population was one of the most heterogeneous in the world. There were thousands of small communities with little contact with neighboring communities, let alone the outsise world. The Australian and Dutch colonial aministration had very little impact on the locals. Most New Guinea communities both in the eastern Ausralian Mandate and the Dutch western colony were villages with only a few hundred people.

The indigenous people of the island belong to three major groups: the Negritos, Melanesians, and Papuans. The population was one of the most heterogeneous in the world. There were thousands of small communities with little contact with neighboring communities, let alone the outsise world. The Australian and Dutch colonial aministration had very little impact on the locals. Most New Guinea communities both in the eastern Ausralian Mandate and the Dutch western colony were villages with only a few hundred people. The huge island was very lightly populated and the people were divivided by primitice technology, geography, language, customs, and tradition. Many of the communities were involved in endemic warfare with their neighbors. The rugged mountainous terrain and primitive technology divided even neighboring communities. Often villages had no connection with other villages only a few miles away. New Guinea culture was as a result highly varied as can be seen by the absence of a cimmon langage. No one really knows bit lingusts and ethnologists have have identified 650 Papuan languages have been identified and amazingly only 350-450 are related. This is the greatest lingusistic diveresity in the world. Most Papuan languages are unrelated either to each other or to any other important regional language. There are languages belonging to Austronesian language group used in Papua New Guinea. This means that more than 800 languages wereare spoken in Papua New Guinea and of course this means only western New Guinea. Many of these languages are spoken by only a few hundred up to to a few thousand people. The most important is the Enga language, spoken in Enga Province. The people at the time were just emerging from the Stone age and were largely untouched by the outside world. They subsisted by hunting, fishing, and cultivating bananas, maize, cassava, sago, yams, and other crops. Some kept pigs. They produced enough food to feed themselves, but there was no substantial surplus. Most lived in small villages and grew their own food, There were no sizeable cities. They used primitive agricultural methods. There was sufficent given the low population density, but there was no sizable surplus.

Created: 7:29 PM 3/29/2016
Last updated: 7:29 PM 3/29/2016