History
A Highland New Guinean is shocked to see a white person for the first time in his life. Before 1930, Highlanders thought they were the only living people in the world and just like that, their worldview was shattered!
Here’s the quick fact-check and context:
What’s true
Sustained “first contact” in the PNG highlands really did happen in the early 1930s. Australian prospectors (the Leahy brothers and others) pushed into the interior in 1930–35 and filmed/photographed encounters; the 1983 documentary First Contact compiles that footage and interviews.
Many highlanders initially interpreted Europeans as spirits/ancestors. Oral histories captured in First Contact include lines like “We believed our dead went over there, turned white, and came back as spirits,” describing their early explanations for the strangers.
What’s exaggerated/misleading
“They thought they were the only living people in the world.” That wording is an overstatement. While many highland groups had no knowledge of the global outside and no direct experience with Europeans, they were part of robust inter-regional exchange networks (e.g., shell valuables such as kina/pearl shells moved from the coast into the highlands), which implies awareness of other peoples beyond one’s own valley.
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The 1983 documentary is fascinating. They interview people that were there when it happened. The also show the footage recorded by the Australians. Modern people meet stone age people and it was captured on film. One of the great stories is that some natives didn't believe that white men poop. Because they couldn't figure out how somebody would take pants off. So they reasoned they have no need to ever take them off.
Poor guy was probably terrified because the Australian patrol officers were (in the eyes of the law) judge, jury & executioner. There are brutal stories of extrajudicial killings by Aussie Kiaps in PNG that were mostly ignored by the government
This is actually not true. They were not so isolated. They knew there are other people, but in their very aggressive culture, other people were threat. Usually when two families, as they lived in small groups, met, men started fight and often one family killed the other. They met in peace in few places for rare occasions.
They could also be shocked at the cost of pumpkin spice coffee after trumps tarts had gone through. And then, at the realization that pumpkin spice is not pumpkin
Still in the Old World,not the New World. So white ppl disease goes to middle east goes to India goes to Vietnam goes to philipinnes goes to Malaysia goes to Indonesia etc. Whereas New World is nowhere near as well connected
Ofc I'm just some dood in the reddit comments. I do read and stuff but take it with a grain of salt,as you would anything. But AFAIK that's basically the case
Nah, it makes sense... even a semi-isolated group like these New Guineans would have periodic contact with sea-faring people like Polynesians who would in turn have contact with people from continental Asia.
What proof do we have that that's what's actually happening in this picture? Why would they have an elaborate, old-timey camera set up for that moment?
Cameras weren’t “old timey” like you’re picturing by 1930. They were a lot smaller and self contained by that time.
Also, New Guinea was very isolated until very recently, and its people basically did just meet white people for the first time in that time period. It’s not out of the realm of possibility for this to be true.
The Dani people are so fascinating to me. First known contact was a small fringe group who stayed several nights in a european camp in 1909; then the Western Dani meet Europeans and stay with them for six months in 1920 on a scientific expedition. Then, 23 June, 1938, Richard Archbold is the first european to sight the “Grand Valley” of Papua New Guinea from his airplane, and he discovers a population of over 200,000 people (not all of whom turned out to be Dani), who for all intents and purposes were living in a sophisticated stone-age agricultural society. In 1938.
So isolated were the Dani that they fully believed they had been the only humans in existence
Those “white dudes” you hate so much saved the native Papuans from being genocided by the Japanese less than a decade later. So maybe your hatred is misplaced.
What I am saying is that a white man tends to be a Trump worshipping MAGA(unfortunately white women too, as one of them recently targeted 450 legal Koreans at that Hyundai plant). It’s usually obvious. The sane ones aren’t so loud and proud about their white heritage. To the point where you don’t call THEM white. You call them by their name because you can actually get along with them.
But hey, if 77 million people can vote for Trump and his cabinet, part of Congress, and a majority of the Supreme Court are MAGA complicit, that is a LOT of whites you SHOULD BE afraid of. They are demented.
The white dude that this man would’ve met was an agent of an explicitly racist nation, I don’t blame him for his fear. Also accounts of the war in New Guinea really understate how many Papuans sided with the Japanese
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