Papua New Guinea

The first peoples — 50,000 years on the world's most diverse island

Papua New Guinea's indigenous peoples arrived at least 50,000 years ago — among the world's earliest long-distance maritime migrations — and developed the planet's most extraordinary linguistic and cultural diversity: 840 languages (13% of all human languages) spoken by 9 million people in a country the size of California, separated by mountainous terrain that preserved distinct cultures for millennia.

Highland agriculture — one of the world's first farming societies

The Papua New Guinea highlands (c. 7000 BCE – present) were among the world's earliest sites of independent agricultural development — with evidence of drained swamp gardens and taro cultivation predating agriculture in most of Asia and contemporary with the earliest farming in the Fertile Crescent, making PNG one of a handful of places where agriculture was invented rather than borrowed.

The Huli Wigmen and PNG's extraordinary cultural heritage

Papua New Guinea's Huli people of the Tari Basin — whose men wear elaborate wigs made from their own hair, decorate them with bird-of-paradise feathers, and perform in singsings (festivals) in face paint of red, yellow, and black — represent one of humanity's most visually spectacular living cultural traditions, maintained in full vitality alongside mobile phones and Christianity.

Colonial partition — Germany, Britain, and the making of PNG

Papua New Guinea's colonial history (1884–1975 CE) involved a partition between Germany (northeastern New Guinea and the Bismarck Archipelago) and Britain (southeastern Papua), unified under Australian administration after WWI, then independence in 1975 — leaving an artificial state with colonial borders that cut across linguistic, cultural, and environmental boundaries that had shaped human life for 50,000 years.

The Kokoda Track — the Pacific War's most gruelling campaign

The Kokoda Track Campaign (July–November 1942 CE) — in which Australian forces, initially outnumbered and outgunned, halted the Japanese advance over the Owen Stanley Range toward Port Moresby in what would have been the first invasion of Australia — is the defining military experience in Australian history, fought in conditions of unparalleled physical hardship by soldiers who called it "Green Hell."

Independence and the Bougainville crisis

Papua New Guinea's independence (16 September 1975 CE) under Michael Somare ("the Father of the Nation") created a democratic state in a country of 800 languages and no pre-colonial political unity, followed by the Bougainville Crisis (1988–1998) — a civil war over the world's largest copper mine that killed 20,000 people and ended with the island's eventual independence referendum.