Yet another Hacker News

I can't stop thinking about Papua New Guinea

79 points networked 3 hours ago 18 comments

karel-3d 34 minutes ago | parent

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.

sampullman 8 minutes ago | parent

I randomly had a conversation with a guy at a bar in Taipei who was an administrator during the transition to self rule, and he said basically the same thing.

He said about many of the tribes modernized within a generation or two, and the ones that didn't still dropped the cannibalism stuff in the 50s.

stingraycharles 7 minutes ago | parent

I’ve just asked a friend of mine who lives in PNG and yeah, this definitely happened. Nowadays it doesn’t happen anymore except potentially in some insanely remote areas.

Supposedly the Japanese during WW2 also resorted to cannibalism.

itake 32 minutes ago | parent

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

nephihaha 30 minutes ago | parent

It sounds like it is easy to get to Port Moresby (which is apparently a bit of a dump and very dangerous), but difficult to get anywhere else.

PNG has changed very rapidly. Parts of the country were in the Stone Age within living memory and are moving over.

damidekronik 27 minutes ago | parent

Any cool facts to share about Timor Leste? My usual go to - wikipedia - does paint a rather mundane picture of it.

sampullman 16 minutes ago | parent

What's your criteria for mundane? Basically every decent sized island in that part of the world is going to have beautiful beaches, coral reefs, mountains, and jungles.

yreg 16 minutes ago | parent

I tend to fly cheaply with multiple transfers/layovers. What I figured out recently is that it is nice to combine the flights in such a way that one of the layovers is _longer_.

When the airport has a good connection to a major city then 12 hours during the day are enough, but I'm happy to bump it to 2-3 days.

I have managed to visit some Chinese and Canadian cities this way and it was both more interesting and much cheaper than taking a direct flight.

Sharlin 16 minutes ago | parent

It seems astonishing to me that a "relatively complex" intercontinental trip these days means "have to spend a whole night waiting for the next flight".

mike_tyson 30 minutes ago | parent

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

nephihaha 27 minutes ago | parent

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.

lifestyleguru 23 minutes ago | parent

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

yreg 22 minutes ago | parent

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

tthbalazs 15 minutes ago | parent

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

avadodin 14 minutes ago | parent

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

But still. Gourds up. Highlander pride worldwide.

ggm 14 minutes ago | parent

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.

skissane 13 minutes ago | parent

> 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