People often ask about Papua New Guinea by naming things that are said to be true about it. Some ask whether its population stands at around 10 million or 17 million. Others bring up the fact that bow and arrow battles were still happening as late as 1963. Another common question concerns the capital, which is often described as the most dangerous city in the world. Still others point to the country’s history of cannibalism, including the case of Michael Rockefeller, who was likely eaten there, and the practice of Joe Biden’s uncle being too. Or where one group ate their dead relatives’ brains being eaten at funerals so regularly that it caused a mad cow type disease called kuru, which killed a large percentage of the population. That disease then led to a genetic mutation protecting against it within a few generations, one of the fastest cases of natural selection ever documented in humans.
Beyond a few scattered facts, most people do not possess a real grasp of what New Guinea is. Yet underneath all that noise lies a strange tale, one of the most unusual meetings in human history. In 1930, an Australian man named Mick Leahy wandered into a million people living in the highlands of New Guinea, and nobody knew they were there.
The Highlands That Nobody Knew Existed
The second largest island in the world is New Guinea, long treated as a blank spot on maps. Its western half was colonized by the Dutch, now part of Indonesia, while the eastern half was taken over by Australia. Yet even with that occupation, there was very little foreign governance or control in the interior.
The island breaks down into two distinct zones:
- a coastal region marked by malaria-infested rivers, swamps, rainforest and jungle
- the highlands, located near the equator, where glaciers and snow cover peaks that rise to just below 5,000 metres
The highlands appeared as vast, impassable mountains forever shrouded in cloud, with no sign of life anywhere upon them.
In 1930, New Guinea was considered to be limited to its coastal regions. People assumed that no one occupied the mountains of what is now known as the New Guinea highlands. The local inhabitants along the coast were unaware that the highlands were populated, and the colonial authorities had no records of any residents there either.
Gold Mining Opens The Way
The tale opens in 1926, a time when Australians discovered gold in New Guinea and began mining the surrounding region. Seeking more of the precious metal, an adventurous Australian named Mick Leahy resolved to push as far into the interior as possible, advancing up the mountains that had never before been penetrated.
Leahy was no professional explorer; he was an adventurer and a prospector who ventured into regions untouched by human feet. His search was for mineral wealth, yet what he discovered proved to be far more precious than any ore: a civilization.
The Stumble Into The Million People
In 1930, Leahy accidentally stumbled into the eastern edge of the highlands. He found that the highlands were not empty mountains, but rather lush green valleys with no malaria and with roughly a million people living in them. The discovery was accidental, but the consequences were profound.
This record of the meeting is titled “First Contact: New Guinea’s Highlanders Encounter the Outside World.” It is not a tale, but rather a recording of the expedition and the initial contact. Leahy arrived with top-tier cameras and a motion picture camera, and he preserved with thousands of photographs and hours of film the first meeting of hundreds of thousands of individuals.
What The Highlanders Thought Of The Outsiders
Before the Australians arrived, the Highlanders had no idea what lay beyond their own region. They had never laid eyes upon a white man. Upon seeing the Australians, the Highlanders first believed these strange visitors were ghosts of their dead ancestors returning from the afterlife. In order to test whether this was true, they watched the Australians relieve themselves and then sniffed the excrement, concluding that these white men must be human just like themselves.
The Australians showed off “strength” by hunting pigs and drawing crowds from whole communities to watch. They got the Highlanders to sit through records, toy with child dolls, gaze into mirrors, and watch planes land, most of them believing everything was a holy spirit. The Highlanders took bits of the Australians’ garbage, like a Kellogg’s cereal wrapper, and wore them on their heads as prized treasure.
The Australians brought Highland children along with them on their aircraft, taking them to the shore where they could view the ocean and the ways of civilized life for themselves. Once returned home, the young ones reported back to their families what great strength the white men possessed.
The Shell Hyperinflation Story
The story of hyperinflation stands out as one of the most compelling narratives in the book. The Highlanders fixated on shells, an extremely scarce resource. These shells served as the precious stone that leaders and the most powerful men adorned themselves with to show their status, and they functioned as the closest thing the Highlanders possessed to money.
The Australians arranged for shells to be flown in by the planeload so they could trade them for food and labour. At the start, the Highlanders appeared to be getting a good deal, since they were ready to hand over nearly everything for more shells. Yet the planes kept arriving, and the cost of everything measured in shells kept climbing.
Shells lost their worth entirely. A position once gained through them and “rich” turned into nothing at all. Nearly everybody, from children up, wore hundreds of shells, until the shell itself became worthless. That decline was recorded on camera and film, preserving the whole collapse as it happened.
The Scale Of The Encounter
Picture a moment when 1,000,000 individuals were cut off from the rest of humanity for almost all of recorded history, then came face to face with a party of Australians who recorded the whole encounter through still images and moving pictures. That scope defines this account.
The first meeting took place in 1930, and at that time it was believed that nothing lay within New Guinea except rock. Patrol officers from Australia had walked from south to north across the whole island without finding it, even though they passed through the area on foot. Then, quite unexpectedly, some chance Australian traveler came upon the highlands and found a million people living there.
This meeting has no equal in modern history for its first-time nature. The Highlanders were unaware of the wider world, and the wider world knew nothing of them. When they came face to face, the encounter was captured in photographs and film.
Jared Diamond’s Claim About Intelligence
The idea that the inhabitants of Papua New Guinea possess greater genetic intelligence than Europeans is a view put forward by Jared Diamond. It stands apart from the tale of first contact, yet it adds a peculiar dimension to that story.
| Region | Geography | Population |
|---|---|---|
| Coastal | Malaria-infested rivers, swamps, rainforest, jungle | Unknown |
| Highlands | Glaciers, snow, peaks just below 5,000 metres | Roughly 1,000,000 |
Mick Leahy’s tale is more than a mere historical oddity. It serves as a reminder of how little we actually know about our own world. There are still parts of the Earth that have yet to be explored, and there are still individuals whose ways of life differ profoundly from our own.
Why The Story Still Resonates
What makes the tale of the Highlanders remarkable is its recency. They were found in 1930, and their world remained utterly strange to the outside world, for they knew nothing of it at all.
Photographs and film document the meeting, so we can actually observe it. We can see the Highlanders gazing at the Australians, struggling to comprehend what they are looking at. We can see the Highlanders treating the Australians’ castoffs as though they were precious possessions. We can see the instant of discovery when the Highlanders catch the odor and grasp that the Australians are, in fact, human.
The tale serves as a warning about what happens when two groups meet for the first time. The Highlanders fell under the influence of the shells, and the fallout was ruin for their economy. Their money lost all worth in a single night. The moral is that trading with another culture can bring unforeseen results.
The Highlanders’ tale stands as a warning about how easily human communities can fall apart. For generations, a million people remained cut off from the wider world, living in isolation for thousands of years. When they finally came into contact with outsiders, the results were vast, and they played out before observers could record them.
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