page_title: Papua New Guinea
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Papua New Guinea / History
caption_attribution_description: Female gable image, wood, raffia, shell, hair, dye, paint and clay, Sawos people, Nogosap Village, Middle Sepik, Papua New Guinea, Bishop Museum, accession 1989.400.358
context_page_description: Papua New Guinea, officially the Independent State of Papua New Guinea, is a sovereign state in Oceania that occupies the eastern half of the island of New Guinea and its offshore islands in Melanesia, a region of the southwestern Pacific Ocean north of Australia. Its capital, located along its southeastern coast, is Port Moresby. The western half of New Guinea forms the Indonesian provinces of Papua and West Papua. It is the world's third largest island country with 462,840 km².
  Papua New Guinea became a colony of Germany and the United Kingdom at the end of the 19th century and was then administered by Australia until 1975 when Papua New Guinea became a sovereign state. It is an independent Commonwealth realm with Elizabeth II as its queen, and is a member of the Commonwealth of Nations.
  Papua New Guinea is one of the most culturally diverse countries in the world. As of 2019, it is also the most rural, as only 13.25% of its people live in urban centres. There are 840 known living languages in the country. Most of the population of more than 8 million people lives in customary communities, which are as diverse as the languages.
context_section_description: Archaeological evidence indicates that humans first arrived in Papua New Guinea around 42,000 to 45,000 years ago. They were descendants of migrants out of Africa, in one of the early waves of human migration.
  Agriculture was independently developed in the New Guinea highlands around 7000 BC, making it one of the few areas in the world where people independently domesticated plants. A major migration of Austronesian-speaking peoples to coastal regions of New Guinea took place around 500 BC. This has been correlated with the introduction of pottery, pigs, and certain fishing techniques.
  In the 18th century, traders brought the sweet potato to New Guinea, where it was adopted and became part of the staples. Portuguese traders had obtained it from South America and introduced it to the Moluccas. The far higher crop yields from sweet potato gardens radically transformed traditional agriculture and societies. Sweet potato largely supplanted the previous staple, taro, and resulted in a significant increase in population in the highlands.
  Although by the late 20th century headhunting and cannibalism had been practically eradicated, in the past they were practised in many parts of the country as part of rituals related to warfare and taking in enemy spirits or powers. In 1901, on Goaribari Island in the Gulf of Papua, missionary Harry Dauncey found 10,000 skulls in the island's long houses, a demonstration of past practices. According to Marianna Torgovnick, writing in 1991, "The most fully documented instances of cannibalism as a social institution come from New Guinea, where head-hunting and ritual cannibalism survived, in certain isolated areas, into the Fifties, Sixties, and Seventies, and still leave traces within certain social groups."
caption: Female gable image, Sawos people[citation needed], Oceanic art in the Bishop Museum.
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