Timothy Birdnow

This is mildly interesting; researchers using AI have determined that Papua New Guinnea's population is related more to east Asians than to Subsaharan Africans.

Rewriting History: AI Unravels the Hidden Origins of Papua New Guineans

I find this hard to believe; it's not just their color but their facial features and skull shapes look like black folks.

The authors of this study argue that this is a case of neotany, which is the reassertion of genetic traits via epigenetics under certain conditions. Man was already adapted to the hot jungle climate and so the New Guinneans genes just reset.

They are also more closely related to Denisovans than are other human races it seems.

There is the ‘First Out of Africa’ theory which suggests there was a first wave of colonists out of Africa that moved into Oceania (among other places) and that perhaps this was one group of early settlers, who traveled through India and Indochina to reach New Guinnea (along with the Australian Aborigines, who themselvs are quite black but have different facial and body features).

At any rate this study suggests there was no major population mixing that has been speculated for these peoples but that they may have just evolved the way they were or even evolved back to a more tropical form (Subsaharan African).

The article says their population likely droppped considerably after arriving in New Guinnea. I suspect that is so. New Guinnea's forests lack adequate easily-obtained produce. That is because the Island lacks any pollinating insects; plants have tobe pollinated by winds,meaning most fruitwinds up at the tops of tall trees. So foraging produces scant food there. Animal life is more prevalent and hunting is o.k. in New Guinnea but it's still not as good as in other places. And the soild - plus the rainforests - make farming difficult. New Guinneans have subsisted on micro-farms for centuries, and would have died out without agriculture long ago. They mostly grew yams, bananas, and taro, which were native to the highlands of New Guinnea (and by yams I do not mean the sweet potatoes grown in the West and passed off under the name yams. Yams are a completely different species than sweet potatoes; the sweet potato industry adopted the name yams to make their products sound more exotic and thus boost sales. Sweet potatoes are from South America - yams from Africa originally. Yams are tubers while sweet potatoes are part of the root of the plant.)

At any rate New Guinnea has always been a hungry place for mankind and so the New Guinneans have suffered culturally and civilizationally. Cannibalism was practiced until the 20th century and likely still happens today in isolated places.

New Guinnea fascinates me; it's a land that still has paleolithic peoples - not just neolithic, but paleolithic. There are people there who basically live in caves or the simplest brush shelters and scratch out a living with the most primitive of stone implements and with their teeth. I was watching the show Survivorman and he went to New Guinnea. The locals where he did his show actually CHEWED down trees because they lacked axes or hatchets. Their teeth were just nubs after a few years. Most of them died in their late 20s and early 30's.

And remember New Guinnea was home to Koru, the laughing sickness. It was caused by mortuary cannibalism, the practice of eating your dead loved ones. A prion in the flesh infected the cannibal and attacked the brainstem, leading to tremors, disorientation, and the laughing which gives it it's nickname. Nobody who does not eat human flesh develops Koru. So they've been eating other people there for a long, long time; long enough for a disease to evolve that took advantage of the fact.

At any rate I may be the only one to find this interesting but there you have it.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 09:32 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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