Papua New Guinea: the Last Great Unknown — Land, People, History, and the World's Most Extraordinary Human Tapestry

Papua New Guinea occupies a singular position among the nations of the world. It is a place where modern humans have lived continuously for at least 45,000 to 50,000 years, where farmers began cultivating crops in mountain valleys thousands of years before agriculture appeared in most of Europe, and where today nearly one thousand distinct languages are still spoken in an unbroken living tradition that represents the greatest linguistic diversity on a single patch of earth anywhere on the planet. It is a land of mist-wrapped mountain ridges tumbling down to crocodile-threaded river deltas, of reef-ringed islands scattered across turquoise seas, of rainforests so old and undisturbed that scientists find species new to science on nearly every systematic survey. And it is a country whose extraordinary richness in natural resources — copper, gold, oil, natural gas — has proved as much a curse as a blessing, generating wealth that has largely bypassed the villagers who make up the vast majority of its people while fueling corruption, conflict, and the deep structural inequalities that define modern Papua New Guinea.

No single article can exhaust the subject of Papua New Guinea. But this one attempts something close: a full account of the geography, the deep human past, the astonishing cultural diversity, the long shadow of colonialism, the savage crucible of the Second World War, the turbulent decades since independence, and the urgent questions about the future of a nation unlike any other on earth. For anyone searching for a comprehensive guide to Papua New Guinea history, Papua New Guinea culture, Papua New Guinea travel, or simply trying to understand what makes this remote Pacific nation so important to human knowledge itself, what follows is the most complete picture it is possible to draw.

The Geography of Papua New Guinea: Mountains, Rivers, Islands, and the Edge of the Known World

Papua New Guinea occupies the eastern half of the island of New Guinea — the second largest island in the world after Greenland — along with approximately 600 smaller islands scattered across the southwestern Pacific Ocean. The total land area of the country is 462,840 square kilometers, making it the third largest country in the Indo-Pacific region after Australia and Indonesia. The western half of the island of New Guinea, which shares the same geological and ecological heritage, forms the Indonesian provinces of Papua and West Papua and is beyond the scope of this article, though the two halves together form an entity of such biodiversity and human interest that they merit consideration as a unit.

The mainland of Papua New Guinea is dominated by the central cordillera, a spine of mountains running roughly from the northwestern border with Indonesia all the way to the southeastern tip of the mainland. This range, known broadly as the Owen Stanley Range in its southeastern section, rises dramatically from coastal lowlands to peaks of extraordinary height. Mount Wilhelm, located in Simbu Province in the central Highlands, stands at 4,509 meters and is the highest peak in Oceania outside of New Zealand and the Indonesian province of Papua — a fact that surprises many visitors who think of the Pacific as a region of low tropical islands. The climb to Mount Wilhelm's summit is a genuine high-altitude challenge, frequently shrouded in cloud, sometimes dusted with frost, and always offering views of staggering scope on the rare clear days: the Bismarck Sea to the north, the green valleys of the Highlands stretching in every direction, the world's third-largest island rolling away to every horizon.

The Highlands themselves — a high-altitude interior plateau and valley system lying at elevations generally between 1,500 and 2,500 meters — constitute the demographic heart of the country. The fertile soils of these valleys, watered by reliable rainfall and moderated by altitude to a climate that is temperate by tropical standards, have supported dense human populations for tens of thousands of years and continue to do so today. The major Highland centers — Goroka in Eastern Highlands Province, Mount Hagen in Western Highlands Province, Mendi in Southern Highlands Province, Wabag in Enga Province, and Kundiawa in Simbu Province — are the towns of the interior, connected to the coast by the Highlands Highway, which was one of the great engineering achievements of the Australian colonial period and remains the economic artery of the nation.

To the north of the central ranges, the land descends in a broad arc of lowland valleys and coastal plains to the Bismarck Sea. The most significant geographical feature of this northern lowland is the Sepik River, one of the great river systems of the world. The Sepik drains an area of approximately 78,000 square kilometers and flows for some 1,100 kilometers from its headwaters near the Indonesian border to its mouth on the north coast near the town of Angoram and the Bismarck Sea. Unlike the Amazon or the Congo, the Sepik does not have a significant delta; instead it flows directly into the sea across a broad floodplain of oxbow lakes, swamps, and seasonally flooded grasslands. The middle Sepik in particular — the stretch between Ambunti and Angoram — is perhaps the most culturally rich river corridor on the planet, lined with villages whose artistic traditions, ceremonial systems, and social structures represent an unbroken continuity stretching back thousands of years. The Sepik and its tributaries, including the Korosameri, the Yuat, the June, and the Karawari, have served as highways of human movement and cultural exchange for millennia, and it is here that some of the most extraordinary art ever produced by human hands was and continues to be created.