My Indigenous New Guinean Civilization TL Brainstorm

Hello everyone,

I have recently decieded that it is about time I start my own TL where the main difference from OTL is that an early civilization developing in Ancient New Guinea. BTW, by early I mean between the foundation of OTL Shang China and the beginning of the Mature Harappan period for the Indus Valley civilization - thus, roughly the millennium between 2600 BCE and 1600 CE.

IMHO, I see the reason for why New Guinea - despite its very early lead in agriculture, lithic technology and archery - fell behind the other cradles of agriculture by Western Eurasia's Chalcolithic, or maybe the Bronze Age in the Indian Subcontinent, at the very latest, is primarily cultural, not geographical.

In terms of its geographical advantages over many OTL cradles of civilization, New Guinea had, and still has: Abundant rainfall -unlike Egypt, Mesopotamia or much of the Central Andes; fertile soils, thanks to numerous volcanoes - unlike southern Mesoamerica or most of the Andes, especially the Maya area or the Altiplano; a somewhat diverse but pretty stable, if not at least predictable, climate on the whole - far more so than northern China, Asia minor, Egypt or the Sahel; and, unlike the Fertile Crescent or Egypt, the New Guineans had a "functionally complete" (my own ad hoc terminology) crop package, with complete proteins, fiber crops - bananas, which can be used to make an alternative to silk, in addition to the rougher coir, Borassus palm fiber and ijuk, from the Black-fiber palm, sugar sources - namely sugarcane and several species of palms, such as Borassus, nitrogen-fixing Casuarina spp. - a type of ironwood, the complete protein of winged beans (which can also be used to make tofu and tempeh, as Surinamese immigrants found out); oil crops, chief among them galip and pili nuts, and several staples, such as taro, bananas and yams. Plus, there are plenty of fruits and vegetables native to New Guinea as well. So, even with only dogs and pigs, New Guinea could easily develop more intensive agriculture.

Anyway, my TL will focus on the development of the New Guinean civilization from this foundation.

Any thoughts, questions, ideas or comments?

I like this idea. I've always thought that highland New Guinea was an obvious candidate for development of a full-fledged independent civilization.

If I were to guess, I would say that this was hindered by the relative difficulty in long-distance travel, partly due to geography and partly due to the enormous number of independent and often hostile polities that filled the region.

Perhaps they could be a seafaring culture that spreads through modern-day Indonesia and resists the settlement of Austronesian peoples?

Pretty cool. How far are you planning on taking this scenario? Could we see the whole of Oceania- Indonesia, Australia, possibly even New Zealandia and The Phillipines- coming under the sway of the PNG civilsation or its successor states at some stage? And how much of a profound impact would its existence and legacy have if the TL continued to the present-day?

Sounds really interesting, especially since that region gets like no coverage. What would the POD be for this? Any ideas yet?

This is a truly excellent idea. And highland New Guineans can spread westard into the underpopulated Moluccas and into Sulawesi, which has highlands similar to New Guinea as well as into the Melanesian Islands and south into Northeast Australia, at least as far as what is now Port Curtis and possibly to the Clarence or even (in globally warm periods) the Hunter Valley before running beyond the range of their staple plants. And if they get to the Philippines, they will pick up rice and bronze from Southeast Asia.
My suggestion is to read "Payback" by Garry Trompf, one of my old professors from Sydney University. That book has one of the best digests of Melanesian ethnograpphy I have seen. From it you may be able to identify candidates for dominant actors in the New Guinea Higlhlands; ethnic groups that may be able to conquer nearby others and establish true states that can unify enough chunks of the highlands to prevail against the coastal Melanesians who are much less advanced and who are what is keeping the highlanders isolated.

Somebody call in Jared!

I guess my comment is, what about the highlands? The staple crops that you've described didn't do too well historically in New Guinea's mountainous areas. That's a lot of land where your civilization could not only grow massive, but have contact with outsiders through trade while simultaneously being protected from invasion by geography. IMO, you need either a different staple crop which is cold-resistant or, alternatively, a temperate-adapted variant of a staple native to New Guinea from OTL.

Edit: Also, just a thought. The demand for specialized craftsmen for building boats or creating pottery in this alt-civilization could lead to Austronesians settling New Guinea in much higher numbers. Whatever smaller number migrates to the Pacific Islands merges with the native Melanesian population instead of sailing further out, thus butterflying away OTL's human settlement of Polynesia.

Thanks everyone for the prompt responses!

I don't know a POD yet, but know I will want to carry on this TL until the present day.

Just to clear up what I meant by "culturally" determined: I meant that, from what I can tell, most New Guinean cultures, several of which I have studied in some detail (I'm an undergraduate anthropology major), have certain qualities that are unusually dysfunctional, overly tribal/nationalistic and, for lack of a better word, primitive - not necessarily in the sense meaning "obsolete", "crude" or "antiquated", but rather in the sense of "undeveloped" or "naïve".

For example, dysfunctional behaviours that have become custom in parts of New Guinea but which are not comparable to behaviours encountered in other similarly technologically developed cultural areas and peoples include: How we got prion disease from the Fore (who know it as a witchcraft-caused ailment known as kuru), who grief for the dead relatives by eating their corpses, including their brains; various absurd genital mutilation/modification (whatever you want to call it); older men raping young boys in a coming of age ceremony involving forced fellatio on the part of the boys; the Dani have their women remove parts of their fingers to show grief for lost loved ones; and so on.

More problematic by far however is the extreme nationalism/tribalism of most New Guinean Peoples: Many, perhaps most, of these people, live in a constant state of extremely deadly endemic warfare (even more so in most cases than Pol Pot's Year Zero) and apparently cannot trade or travel much beyond their territories (often less than ten square kilometres) due to this chaos.

Finally, the art of many New Guinean cultures, though often compared to African, Micronesian or Polynesian art, frankly looks very crude by comparison: Just look up "Micronesian wood carvings" or "sculptures of Ifé" if you want to see the difference.

This is not to say in any way that New Guineans as a whole or any group or nation thereof are inherently biologically, physiologically or mentally inferior or less than any other group of people; they obviously are not, especially after all the interbreeding with each other and other groups throughout the millennia. To argue otherwise would be absurd and racist.

[QUOTE/Grouchio] Somebody call in Jared! [/QUOTE]Sorry, but it needs to be said: With all due respect, I think Prof. Diamond is relied upon way too much as a source on this board: Rarely does anyone quote: Gary Urton; Kennath Pommeranz; Charles C. Mann; John Hobson; Joseph Needham; Michael Moseley; Henry Louis Gates, Jr. or any other person with actual, and frankly greater, expertise in a more specific field or who is a more technical read. Also, while Jared Diamond indeed now has a good enough grasp of anthropology as a whole to write books for an educated but lay audience, he was in fact trained as an Ornithologist and his speciality - from the four of his books that I have read (The Third Chimpanzee, Guns, Germs and Steel, Collapse and The World Until Yesterday, namely) - is clearly in the peoples of New Guinea. And while his speciality is indeed coincidentally relevant here, it must be remembered that Jared Diamond is only one person, one source.

AH.com's Jared is a member who is merely named after Prof Diamond, and who is the author of several timelines including Lands of Red and Gold, wherein Australian Aboriginies developed sedentary cultures and all which follows. He is quite brilliant IMO, and would likely have a number of interesting things to say on PNG's native cultures.

Oh yes yes yes please ! But this marks the second time my idea gets stolen though, so you better make it good

I've thought about this a bit before.

One thing to consider is New Guinea was actually pretty successful all things considered. Not only did it have the population density to beat off the Austronesians, but there are Papuan languages spoken as far west as Sumbawa historically, and ones remain spoken in Timor and Halmahera. We're not talking about distantly related language isolates either. The Timorese languages are very closely related to one language family in the Western Papuan highlands. It seems clear that the Papuans were expanding - and replacing - the hunter-gatherers in Indonesia before the Austronesian expansion stopped them cold.

One thing I think that New Guinea lacked IOTL which would have made it much easier to expand was a good lowland staple crop. New guinea agriculture tended to flounder in the lowlands, with several pockets of hunter-gatherers surviving through to the modern day. The agriculturalist groups (mostly Trans New Guinea and those in the Sepik river valley) also never replaced the even weirder linguistic isolates in these regions.

I think a great POD would be if after leaving the highlands, lowland New Guinea agriculturalists independently domesticate rice. New Guinea has wild rice after all. From here they would have a much easier time settling the lowlands densely, and in turn be able to settle outlying islands and eastern Indonesia more fully. In addition, the lowlands are more conducive to empire forming than the highland region, which increases the chances of the formation of viable states.

I will watch this with great interest.

Jared and Garry

Grouchio said:

Somebody call in Jared!

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Jared Diamond has probably met Garry Trompf.

Dominic said:

AH.com's Jared is a member who is merely named after Prof Diamond, and who is the author of several timelines including Lands of Red and Gold, wherein Australian Aboriginies developed sedentary cultures and all which follows. He is quite brilliant IMO, and would likely have a number of interesting things to say on PNG's native cultures.

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My mistake, I apologize .

Anyway, with that said, I think my POD will be somewhere between around 8000 BCE and 5500 BCE or so, very roughly. It will probably involve a group of visionary leaders and culture bringers who are able to form a cohesive polity and culture out of multiple nations, either through: Purely soft power, similarly to Hiawatha or the Great Peacemaker in OTL's Northeastern Woodlands, or how the (mythical) Eri of founded Nri and spread its influence via peaceful missionaries; through military force, or through some mixture of both. In any case, this culture would then become locally dominant, leading to a cycle of increasing power and influence. Even when the original power structure falls, it will need to have set up a new and enduring world system.

Somehow, this society will need to fight off the Austromelanesian invasion that in IOTL takes over the coastal parts of New Guinea and completely isolates it. So they can't be too peaceful.

is primarily cultural, not geographical.

Abundant rainfall; fertile soils; a somewhat diverse but pretty stable climate on the whole

More problematic by far however is the extreme nationalism/tribalism of most New Guinean Peoples: Many, perhaps most, of these people, live in a constant state of extremely deadly endemic warfare

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There are argument that to create a society/state, you need fertile land surrounded by hostile land; usually river in the middle of desert.

because land is valuable, the people become willing to defend it, thus following authoritarian leader, accepting conscription, paying tax, etc.

if every land is as valuable as other, the argument goes, state/society will fail to develop, since anybody who displeased could always move.

if this true, New Guinea problem is geographical not cultural, since every land is fertile and rain is enough, no state managed to established, and each small clan follow its own interest and make war on everybody.

Oba said:

My mistake, I apologize .

Anyway, with that said, I think my POD will be somewhere between around 8000 BCE and 5500 BCE or so, very roughly. It will probably involve a group of visionary leaders and culture bringers who are able to form a cohesive polity and culture out of multiple nations, either through: Purely soft power, similarly to Hiawatha or the Great Peacemaker in OTL's Northeastern Woodlands, or how the (mythical) Eri of founded Nri and spread its influence via peaceful missionaries; through military force, or through some mixture of both. In any case, this culture would then become locally dominant, leading to a cycle of increasing power and influence. Even when the original power structure falls, it will need to have set up a new and enduring world system.

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See Mesopotamia. In the early days, when they were almost all of the civilized people they knew of, they were diverse and warred on eachother, but when they were faced repatedly with large outside civilizations, they become relatively unified culturally & ethnically, and to some degree, politically.

Oba said:

Anyway, my TL will focus on the development of the New Guinean civilization from this foundation.

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A very interesting idea!

Any thoughts, questions, ideas or comments?

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A few. These are mostly a brain-dump, and not meant to be in any particular order.

New Guinea's Native Flora and Fauna

From what we know of New Guinea's native crops, they were not all that great for supplying a balanced diet. Carbohydrate-rich, but protein-poor and to a lesser degree fat-poor [1]. They also mostly didn't store very well, a problem exacerbated by the humid tropical climate.

The protein deficiency is a major problem, and one that the native crops don't overcome all that well.

Winged beans are about the best there is, but while they're useful, there are problems relying on them. For one thing, it's not even clear if they were native to New Guinea. Their place of origin is not known; speculation ranges from East Africa to New Guinea. However, every other species in their genus is native to Africa, and it would be strange if the only non-African species shows up in New Guinea, of all places. If they are not native to New Guinea, then they won't show up in time to be useful.

For another, winged beans are limited where they can grow in New Guinea, because their need for rainfall is so high (2500mm+ or good irrigation if lower), and they also need well-drained soils. They are grown mostly in the highlands and a limited number of suitable lowland areas - and, for reasons I'll go into below, it's what can be grown in the lowlands that matters.

The native staple tuber crops are protein-poor, and while certainly enough to sustain agriculture, are not the best of root crops. Messr Diamond has much to answer for, but he was pretty much spot on when he pointed out that the sweet potato became a much-preferred crop over native New Guinea tubers.

As for domestic animals... well, pigs and dogs are useful, but relying on them has two problems. Firstly, even the best of domesticated animals doesn't make up for the paucity of protein in most plant crops. Secondly and more importantly, pigs and dogs are not native to New Guinea. They are imported. And if anyone is in a position to give the New Guineans pigs and dogs - the Austronesians, or perhaps predecessors - then New Guinea is already surrounded by better seafaring peoples, which rather limits its opportunities for expansion.

Getting better crop(s) to New Guinea, earlier, or finding alternative native domesticates, would be ideal. This may be your PoD, or a consequence of your PoD, but it's pretty important.

[1] Pili nuts are not easy domesticates; they still haven't even been domesticated today. They are wild-gathered, mostly. Other Canarium species (e.g. gipi) are better, and have a reasonable protein content as a bonus, but even they take a fair few (7-8) years to produce useful nuts, and they are a seasonal food, not a year-round crop (there's a short fruiting season, and they don't store well enough to last the year). They can't be relied on alone.

Geography, Culture, and Technology

I think you're underestimating the effects of geographical barriers in New Guinea. Yes, there's a lot of cultures there with different practices, and many of those cultures may be less suitable for expansion than others, but their sheer diversity means that some cultures could be expected to expand/develop cities etc, if culture was the only barrier.

New Guinea is a seriously rugged place, with geography which divides people into many small groups, and which means that what is suitable agriculture for one region is often not suitable for neighbouring regions even if it's easy to walk between them (which it often isn't).

The best way of summing up the geographical barriers is to consider how many languages New Guinea has. Elsewhere in the world [2], the invention of agriculture led to the geographical expansion of farming peoples and in turn to a great reduction in linguistic diversity; the speakers of a few languages spread out while other languages were lost. This didn't happen in New Guinea: there are something like sixty small language families (ignoring Austronesian), and none of them were very widespread. This is because the geographical barriers made it so hard for agriculturalists to expand like they did everywhere else - the crops spread, but the people didn't.

Rather than a cultural PoD, I think that you need a technological one. And more precisely, better navigational technology. New Guinean agriculturalists were mostly limited to New Guinea itself for a long time. They did some expansion, but it was slow and too late, being mostly overwhelmed by the Austronesian expansion that came later. Let the New Guineans develop their own navigational package to match the Austronesians, but a couple of thousand years earlier, and the world would be a different place.

[2] Except kinda-sorta the farming peoples in the Amazon - and they also had major geographical barriers (jungle).

Highlands vs Lowlands

For the purposes of a New Guinean civilization [3], lowland agriculture is what matters. Lowland agriculture was not as productive as the highlands, and has its own barriers such as areas where sago cultivation isso productive that it inhibits take-up of other agriculture.

But from the perspective of building a civilization, the New Guinean highlands are largely a dead-end. The geography means that they are highly fragmented and have trouble connecting with each other, and massive transportation problems. Worse still, highland agriculture is limited by its very nature - there's nowhere else to take it except through lowlands where it just doesn't grow. While there are highland areas on either islands (as others have pointed out earlier in this thread), getting the highland agriculture there is very difficult.

The lowland agriculture has its problems, but perhaps these can be overcome (better crops, navigational technology linking lowland areas, or some other PoD). Highland agriculture will be in no condition to spread beyond New Guinea unless lowland agriculture has already allowed the establishment of wide-scale contact with other suitable regions, and which has developed technology advanced enough to overcome the internal geographical barriers in contact with the highlands.

[3] Using civilization as a value-neutral term for "higher population-density city-builders", not any other meaning.

Political Unification

You suggested having the New Guineans form some type of unified polity or culture (soft power or military conquest). In themselves, I doubt that either of these will do it as PoDs.

While we obviously don't have records of all formations of large polities (since many were prehistoric), I can't think of a single example of where soft power united large regions. Large polities usually formed either through conquest or unification in the face of an external threat. Neither applies here; the geography inhibits any meaningful military conquest, and the first civilization doesn't have any external threat to provoke unification.

Political unification may come later, but I think that some other change needs to come first, probably technological (e.g. better navigational tech) or possibly biological (e.g. domestication of an alternative crop).

Of course, a lack of political unification does not prevent a New Guinean expansion. And to be honest, I think that geographical expansion is what's needed if you're looking for large polities. New Guinea is a good region to develop agriculture in the first place, but it's a difficult place to create large states.

Anyway, that's a few ideas. I may add a few more suggestions later. Good luck with this project!

This topic is highly interesting. I recently read an article by a linguist, Malcolm Ross, from Australian National University. Its name was "Pronouns as a preliminary diagnostic for grouping Papuan languages". You can find it in Andrew Pawley, Robert Attenborough, Robin Hide, Jack Golson, eds. Papuan pasts: cultural, linguistic and biological histories of Papuan-speaking peoples. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.

Ok so the author explains that most TNG languages are spoken by only a few thousand people, with only four (Melpa, Enga, Western Dani, and Ekari) being spoken by more than 100,000. The greatest linguistic diversity in Ross's Trans–New Guinea proposal, is in the interior highlands of Papua New Guinea, in the central-to-eastern New Guinea cordillera. Ross speculates that the TNG family may have spread with the high population densities that resulted from the domestication of taro, settling quickly in the highland valleys along the length of the cordillera but spreading much more slowly into the malarial lowlands, and not at all into areas such as the Sepik River valley where the people already had yam agriculture and thus supported high population densities.

The important fact is that you could thus have three areas with distinctive agricultures and cultures :

- Highlands : Taro
- Sepik River valley : Yams
- Lowlands : Malaria area and low possibility of unified enough culture.

Ross later developed a Trans–New Guinea phylum, which could be interesting, if you look at the cores and speakers of the various languages as "proto-civilizations". It also interesting to unite the various clans following the language family patterns.

and from :
Berkeley Law, Berkeley Law Scholarship Repository, 1-1-1991
Inventing Market Property: The Land Courts of Papua New Guinea
Robert D. Cooter

http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1576&context=facpubs

The agricultural problem in the highlands is too much water, not too little, and archaeological studies have dated drainage channels cut in the Wahgi Valley at 9,000 years old. Throughout this long history people lived in small groups of kinsmen. Over thousands of years of agriculture, however, the highlands of PNG developed no permanent class of serfs, slaves, land- less paupers, tenants, nobles, kings, or landlords. The people of PNG have historically enjoyed a large measure of liberty and equality. Nor did centuries of use by farmers degrade the environment, at least in comparison to the "cradles of civilization".

The material standard of life, as measured by aboriginal wealth in the subsistence economy or wages in the money sector, is higher than in other countries that are more advanced technologically.

In the highlands people lived in small communities for thousands of years without ever unifying under a single administration. Nations and empires of the scale known in Eu-rope and elsewhere did not arise. There appears to have been a pattern of shifting alliances, rather like Lebanon in the 1980s, in which hostile groups become allies long enough to prevent domination by a third party. Whenever a coalition threatened to dominate its neighbors, some of its members would be induced to defect to another coalition. The pattern seems to resemble what theorists call a game without a "core". The maximum size of coalitions among kinship groups in the highlands remains far short of the coalition of the whole needed to secure peace.

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The question of how to divide the society in classes (specialization) in an environment that is so fertile and which incentives to use to create a polity (no drought, no external threat, ...). The article is also highly valuable to understand the customary systems of alliance between clans.