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New Guinea villagers unearth evidence of the island's Neolithic past, Ars Technica

New Guinea villagers unearth evidence of the island's Neolithic past, Ars Technica
    

      Rewriting prehistory –

             

New Guinea did import its Neolithic culture from Southeast Asia after all.

      

         

        

When people in New Guinea started tending crops like yam and fruits around 8, 04 0 years ago, they transformed nearly everything about life on the island. By around 5, 0 years ago, people had begun settling in houses supported by wooden posts. The farmers developed new kinds of cutting tools, and they carved stone pestles to prepare yams, fruits, and nuts. They also wove brightly-colored fabrics with dyed fibers, elaborate carved stone figures of birds, and traded across km of ocean for obsidian.

The details of daily life were uniquely New Guinea. But the big picture — more people, settled village life, new types of stone tools, and a sudden flourishing of symbolic art — might have been familiar to people from other early agricultural societies around the world. Together, those things are a bundle of cultural trends that archaeologists call Neolithic. Until recently, archaeologists didn’t think New Guinea had developed its own Neolithic culture. Instead, many researchers thought all the trappings of Neolithic village life had arrived around 3, years ago with the Lapita, a group of seafaring farmers who came to the island from Southeast Asia. That’s because the few Neolithic artifacts that could be properly dated all seemed to come from after the Lapita arrived. But the people of the small highland village of Waim recently rewrote that narrative, with a chance discovery during a local construction project.

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