I can't stop thinking about Papua New Guinea

The main banana variety you eat is partially derived from New Guinea, alongside nearly all the world's sugar.

In 1930, Australian prospectors discovered approximately one million people living in the remote highlands of New Guinea, a population previously unknown to colonial governments and coastal inhabitants. This "first contact" event, documented extensively through photography and film by figures like Mick Leahy, revealed a society that had been isolated from the rest of the world for millennia. The highlanders, unaware of external civilizations, initially perceived the Australians as supernatural beings. Their culture was characterized by a multitude of distinct languages, a lack of centralized governance, and frequent inter-tribal warfare, partly due to agricultural limitations that prevented large-scale storage and trade. This isolation persisted for about 10,000 years, during which New Guinea independently developed agriculture, contributing staple crops like bananas and sugarcane to global food systems. The discovery highlighted the extreme insularity of this population, showcasing one of the most recent instances of a large human group encountering the wider world.

The encounter with the New Guinea highlands in 1930 offers a unique perspective on human societal development, illustrating how a large population could remain isolated for thousands of years. This isolation was enabled by the independent invention of agriculture in New Guinea around 10,000 years ago, leading to the domestication of crops like bananas and sugarcane that now underpin global food supplies. The study of this "first contact" provides rare insights into societal structures that did not lead to centralization, due to factors like perishable crops, lack of draft animals, and absence of writing, which fostered constant warfare and limited large-scale development.

This historical event underscores the vast diversity of human experience and the potential for entirely separate trajectories of civilization. The documented interactions, from the highlanders' initial beliefs about the outsiders to their eventual exposure to advanced technology and economic systems like hyperinflation through shells, serve as a powerful case study. It challenges conventional notions of progress and development, highlighting how environmental and resource constraints can shape societal evolution and prevent the formation of larger, more complex political and economic entities.