Humans Reunited

The prospect of gold had brought them into the mountains. They were pioneers in an unexplored land, and at the end of a day’s steep climb, a large fertile valley lay before them. That night the well-armed party of seventeen men grew apprehensive as they saw fires in the far distance. The next day, they met many people who carried stone axes.

This story of encounter could have happened anytime and in many places during the last 600 years. The prospectors could have been Portuguese adventurers, Spanish soldiers, English sailors, Dutch spice-merchants, French trappers, Russian whalers, Danish fishermen, Argentine ranchers or Brazilian loggers. But this was 1930 in the Bismarck ranges of Papua New Guinea (Connolly and Anderson 1988). The two Australian prospectors and their fifteen New Guinean carriers had an official permit to be there. Moreover, they expected to make contact with new people. To help their safe passage, they had brought supplies of trade axes and glass beads. What their leader, Mick Leahy, had not expected were the numbers of people living in the mountains of New Guinea. His small patrol had stumbled across more than a million Highlanders.