A LONG STAGE OF HUMAN HISTORY DREW CLOSER to its end on August 4, 1938. On that date a scientific expedition from the American Museum of Natural History became the first outsiders to enter the western part of the Grand Valley in New Guinea, a long, lush valley hidden from the island’s coasts by steep walls of knife-edged, jungle-covered mountain ridges. The area was long thought to be uninhabited, but to everyone’s astonishment, the valley proved to be densely populated by fifty thousand people living in the Stone Age. No one had known they existed, and they had no idea that there were other people and an outside world.
The scientific expedition had traveled into the interior of New Guinea to search for unknown birds and mammals. It found an unknown human society, now known as the Dani people. The 1938 entry into the Grand Valley was one of the last first contacts between an advanced culture and a large population with no knowledge of the outside world. It was a landmark in the process by which humanity changed from thousands of tiny societies to world conquerors with world knowledge. To see the significance of that 1938 meeting, we need to understand what “first contact” means—and how it has changed human societies.
The World before First Contact
Most animal species occupy a geographic range that is limited to a small fraction of the earth’s surface. When animals do occur on several continents, individuals from the different continents do not visit each other. Instead, each continent, and usually each small part of a continent, has its own distinctive population. That population has contacts with its close neighbors but not with distant members of the same species.
The fact that populations have limited geographic ranges is reflected in geographic variations within species. Populations of the same species in different geographic areas tend to evolve into different-looking subspecies, because most breeding remains within the same population. For example, there are two subspecies of lowland gorillas in Africa: eastern and western. No east African lowland gorilla has ever turned up in West Africa, and no West African lowland gorilla has been seen in east Africa. Although they belong to the same species, the two subspecies look different enough for biologists to be able to identify them on sight.
Humans have been typical animals throughout most of our evolutionary history, meaning that populations of people have tended to remain inside distinct geographical areas. each human population became genetically molded to its area’s climate and diseases. in addition, differences in language and culture kept humans from freely mixing.
We think of ourselves as travelers, but we were just the opposite for several million years. every human group was ignorant of the world beyond its own lands and those of its immediate neighbors. While most peoples had trade relations with their neighbors, some groups thought they were the only humans in existence. Perhaps the smoke of fires on the horizon, or an empty canoe floating down the river, proved the existence of other people. But to venture out of one’s own territory to meet those strangers, even if they lived only a few miles away, seemed suicidal. Groups had a no-trespassing mentality. The notion of accepting unrelated strangers was as unthinkable as the idea that such a stranger might show up on your doorstep.
Only in the past few thousand years have changes in political systems and technology allowed some people to travel far, to meet people of other cultures, and to learn about places and peoples they had not personally visited. This process speeded up with Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the Americas in 1492. Today there remain only a few tribes, in New Guinea and South America, that still await their first contact with remote outsiders. Yet the world before first contact—a world that is finally ending within our generation—holds the key to the great diversity in human cultures.
Isolation and Diversity
Today, thanks to the Internet, movies, and TV, we can picture parts of the world we haven’t visited. We can read about them in books. Language barriers no longer block the flow of information. Most villages that still speak minor languages contain at least one person who speaks one of the world’s major languages, such as english. Almost every village in the world has received fairly direct accounts of the outside world, and has given the outside world accounts of itself.
Precontact peoples had no way to picture the outside world or learn about it directly. information arrived, if it arrived at all, by way of long chains of accounts passed along by many people, translated into various languages along the way, with accuracy lost at each step. The highlanders of New Guinea, for example, knew nothing of the ocean a hundred miles away, or of the white men who had been prowling their coasts for several centuries. First contact had a powerful effect on the highlanders—one that is hard for those of us living in the modern world to imagine.
First contact revolutionized the highlanders’ material culture by bringing such items as steel axes, which were immediately recognized as better than stone axes. Later came missionaries and government administrators, who changed the highlanders’ culture by ending long-standing practices such as cannibalism, tribal war, and marriage of one man to multiple wives. Tribespeople sometimes voluntarily gave up their old ways in favor of the new goods and practices they saw. But there was also a deeper revolution in the highlanders’ view of the universe. They and their neighbors were no longer the only humans, with the only way of life.
The scientists’ entry into the Grand Valley in 1938 was a turning point for the Dani. It was also part of a turning point in human history. What difference did it make that all human groups used to live in relative isolation, waiting for first contact, while only a few such groups remain today? To glimpse the answer to that question, we can compare places whose isolation ended long ago with areas where groups remained isolated into modern times. We can also study the rapid changes that have followed first contacts throughout history. These comparisons suggest that contact between distant peoples gradually wiped out much of the cultural diversity that had developed during thousands of years of isolation.
ART IN FLAMES
FOR A GOOD EXAMPLE OF HOW ISOLATION increases cultural diversity, while contact means less cultural diversity, we can look at the range of art in New Guinea before and after contact with the rest of the world.
Styles of sculpture, music, and dance used to vary greatly from village to village. Some villagers along the Sepik River and in the Asmat swamps produced wood carvings that are now world-famous because of their quality. But New Guinea villagers have been increasingly pressured or lured into abandoning their artistic traditions. When I visited an isolated small tribe of 578 people in 1965, for example, the missionary who controlled the only store had just manipulated the people into burning all their art—which he called “heathen artifacts.”
Artworks such as this carving (made in New Guinea in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century) are prized by collectors and museums—but many have been destroyed, and the art of making them lost, as the diversity of cultures around the world shrinks.
On my first visit to remote New Guinea villages in 1964, I heard log drums and traditional songs. On my visits in the 1980s, I heard guitars, rock music, and battery-operated boom boxes. Anyone who has seen the Asmat carvings at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, or who has heard a duet played on log drums at breathtaking speed, can appreciate the enormous tragedy of art lost after first contact.
Cultural diversity is represented in diversity of languages—and there has been a massive loss of languages. europe today has about fifty languages. Most of them belong to a single family of languages, called indo-european. in contrast, New Guinea, with less than one-tenth of europe’s area and less than one-hundredth of its population, has hundreds of languages. Many of them are unrelated to any other known language in New Guinea or elsewhere! The average New Guinea language is spoken by a few thousand people who live within ten miles of each other.
That’s what the world used to be like, with each isolated tribe having its own language, until the rise of agriculture allowed a few groups to expand and spread their language over large areas. it was only about six thousand years ago that the indo-european language family began to expand, leading to the end of almost all earlier languages in western europe. The same thing happened in Africa within the last few thousand years, when the Bantu language family exterminated most other languages of Africa south of the Sahara Desert. in North and South America, hundreds of Indian languages have become extinct in recent centuries.
Isn’t language loss a good thing, because fewer languages make it easier for the world’s people to communicate? Maybe, but it’s a bad thing in other ways. Languages differ in structure and vocabulary. They also differ in how they express feelings, relationships among events, and personal responsibility. They differ in how they shape our thoughts. There’s no single “best” language. Instead, different languages are better suited for different purposes. When a language goes extinct, we lose a window into the unique worldview of the people who once spoke it.
Alternative Models of Human Society
The range and diversity of cultural practices in New Guinea is greater than that of same-size areas elsewhere in the modern world, because isolated tribes were able to live out social experiments that others would find unacceptable. Forms of self-mutilation and cannibalism, for example, varied from tribe to tribe. Child-rearing practices ranged from extreme permissiveness, through punishment of misbehavior by rubbing a child’s face with stinging nettles, to repression so strict that it led to child suicides.
Among one group, the Barua, men lived with young boys in a single large house, while each man had a separate house for his wife, daughters, and infant sons. The Tudawhes, in contrast, had two-story houses in which women, babies, unmarried girls, and pigs lived on the lower level, while men and unmarried boys lived on the upper level that they entered by a separate exterior ladder.
If the loss of cultural diversity in the modern world meant only the end of self-mutilation and child suicide, we wouldn’t mourn it. But the societies whose cultural practices now dominate the globe owe that domination to their economic and military success. These qualities aren’t necessarily the ones that encourage happiness or promote long-term human survival.
Our consumerism and environmental exploitation may serve us well now, but they are not good signs for our future. Features of American society that already rate as disasters in anyone’s book include our treatment of old people, adolescent turmoil and stress, abuse of toxic chemicals, and inequality. For each of these problems, there are—or were, before first contact—many New Guinea societies that found far better solutions.
These alternative models of human society, unfortunately, are rapidly disappearing. Surely there are no remaining uncontacted populations as large as that of New Guinea’s Grand Valley. When I worked on New Guinea’s Rouffaer River in 1979, missionaries had just found a tribe of four hundred nomads who reported another uncontacted band five days’ travel up the river. In 2011, filmmakers in airplanes captured on video small bands of uncontacted tribespeople in the Amazon rain forest, on the border between Peru and Brazil. Small bands such as those continue to turn up. But at some point within the early twenty-first century, we can expect the last first contact, and the end of the last separate experiment at designing human society.
That last first contact won’t mean the end of cultural diversity. Much cultural diversity, in fact, has proven able to survive television, travel, and the Internet. But the shift from isolated groups to a global population does mean a drastic loss of diversity. That loss is to be mourned, but there is also a positive side. The fact that our cultures are blending and growing more like one another is cause for hope. Our xenophobia—our fear and hatred of strangers—was manageable only as long as we lacked the means to destroy ourselves as a species. Now that we possess nuclear weapons, it may be best that we learn to see ourselves as members of a shared worldwide culture. Loss of cultural diversity may be the price we have to pay for survival.