I have read somewhere that the cannibalism claims are overrated and kind of artificially inflated by the natives. (Most natives are actually Christian.) I have not looked closely into it though.

Unrelated. We have servers across the world; one in Mount Hagen. It has by far the biggest latency in the world; so I always use it as a "benchmark"; if it works in Mount Hagen, it works everywhere.

PNG is on my list to visit. It’s relatively complex to get to. Most flights either leave from Australia or Jakarta, they don’t run frequently enough to where you will probably spend the night in Jakarta or Australia in order to catch the flight the next day.

I visited Timor Leste earlier this year and what an interesting country

two great films in PNG are joe leahy's neighbours and black harvest

really excellent insight into society and values there as it meets capitalism

One of my parents' friends had spent a lot of time doing research in PNG as well as remote parts of South America. He was the nearest real life equivalent to Indiana Jones I've ever met. He told us some wild stories about the place. He would have been old enough to see the place when cannibalism was still around.

lol don't go there it's a trap. Civilization, despite all these people, is good.

There was a discussion on it here yesterday: https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1wfdnus/why...

I used to watch https://www.youtube.com/@MissionaryBushPilot deliver stuff around PNG in a Kodiak. If you're into aviation, the videos are golden

This article makes me angry about colonialism, misrepresentation of genetic studies and just-so pseudo-scholars.

But still. Gourds up. Highlander pride worldwide.

A friend (now a very fine lawyer in London) travelled PNG during an election assisting in some fashion for several weeks if not months. She came home with a crimp in her hair and ridges on all her toe and fingernails from nutritional deficiencies. This is when I realised differences in standards of living were not theoretical.

> People still shoot arrows at each other in urban centres

My mother (who is a doctor, although she's retired now) was part of the medical team who worked on this case: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/arrow-attack-attempted-rape-in-...

My mother isn't mentioned in that article, but the "Allan Mason" it mentions is her husband

> So nearly all groups eventually internalized a similar set of norms, a similar food culture and similar political institutions, without ever being part of the same political unit.

They managed to achieve eventual consistency in a distributed system, thousands of years before we even thought of it.

That was a great read !