Who domesticated bananas?
Who speaks the most languages?
Why should you care that the world's second largest island is such a cradle of early agriculture
and linguistic diversity?
Stick with me for... wow, this is going to be my longest video in years.
Ok, watch me piece together pictures, my drawings and notes to figure out why here might be
the source of a whole language-farming package, ultimately impacting what all of us eat.
And in the end, with their words powerful enough to shape an island, and food powerful
enough to change the world, the people confront us with a deeply human question.
New Guinea, how have we not talked about you yet?
What grows but does not change?
There's this tradition among people in the Highlands of New Guinea: guests are welcomed
with their own sugarcane stalk.
See, for many speakers of indigenous Papuan languages, sugarcane is a
big part of the diet.
Others are nourished mostly by bananas.
Here these crops are not extra treats or snacks, but sustenance, with deep linguistic roots
and a very long agricultural backstory.
This immense island just south of the equator is home to, well, languages!
I've been wanting to tell you about this for years, now the moment's here and I can't quite
do it justice.
Several hundred different languages, maybe more than a thousand throughout the region...
that's over 10% of the world's languages spoken across just half a percent of the planet's
land and by a fifth of a percent of all people.
Maximum linguistic diversity.
Many handfuls of these languages are Austronesian, brought by people who
sailed to New Guinea long ago.
Most though are Papuan.
For now let's not get into the tricky sticky sago pudding of what exactly "Papuan" means
and whether ideally it should include local Austronesian languages to be consistent.
It creates an impression of languages known here by people who've grown here
since time immemorial.
This quilt?
Patchwork?
Mosaic?
Absolute thick downpour of myriad language droplets in this humid equatorial climate... survived
away from outsiders until really the late 18 and 1900s, when colonizers ushered in a
still ongoing era of "gate-crash[ing]": missionaries and miners, laborers and linguists, anthropologists
and their fellow academic explorers all sought to explore and explain an island that to outside
eyes looked "untouched".
More on that at the end.
With documentation and comparison came this insight: the canopy of distinct languages
isn't evenly distributed across the land.
Many languages along the coast sound unique, maybe isolates or small families.
But head into the interior, up into the Central Range.
These are mountains tall enough to get snow near the equator, that stretch almost
two thousand kilometers, well over a thousand miles.
Here in the New Guinea Highlands you hear languages spanning large areas.
The more linguists documented and compared these languages, the more they wondered if,
unlike many of those lowland languages, they were related to each other, and maybe to some
of those lowland languages too.
So a hypothesis: one large, old, previously unknown language family
had traversed New Guinea.
An intriguing idea
that quickly came under fire.
This hypothetical family faced real complications.
There were the old standby issues we've met before on this channel: random chance
and neighbors borrowing from neighbors.
(I mean there are common Papuan linguistic features all across the island, regardless of family.)
But these languages are also just very hard to compare, and for a while there existed nobody fully
devoted to resolving this problem.
Too shaky; dismantle it!
But over the last couple decades, there came second glances.
The original hypothesizers were "holding an ace" they didn't play well: the pronouns share
some serious family resemblances.
And with more attention, a lot of other vocabulary also has hard-to-deny similarities eroded over time.
So it's a good bet you should believe in some version of the TNG hypothesis, that
one big family crosses New Guinea.
Not sure how much it's right but it's not looking wrong.
Depending who gets counted in and out, TNG could be a massive family in terms
of number of languages.
By one estimate it knocks down other well-known names, taking its spot as the family with
the third most language babies in the world.
Set it aside though, let it vegetate, because we need talk to about an even bigger superlative.
Why compared to the other cozy small families of the island did this one have fuel to spread out
over such a long, wide band across the land?
Rewind to a century ago.
Find a European agronomist and ask them to name a place where agriculture originated.
They might tell you about Mesopotamia, Mexico, China, South America, but
with New Guinea's pristine isolation in their mind, they'd call it a "backwater",
a "passive recipient" of crops from the outside world.
Snap back to the present.
(Hey, welcome back!)
All of that thinking has been overturned.
This island is one of the world's original cradles of early agriculture.
Well, what changed in between?
Ask someone from the Highlands, in Wahgi Valley find a Kawelka person with the same botanical
interests, and they may tell a story about time of darkness long ago when ash covered
the land, and nothing grew.
The first and most important thing their ancestors who survived the darkness passed down from
that time was, what?
Not the language.
Not their amazing sense of style.
No, it's the way they feed the people they love – it's their crops.
People here are renowned for what's been called
"encyclopedic knowledge of the natural world".
Teams of archaeologists and botanists arrived in search of evidence of the time depth behind
that knowledge.
They were absolutely stunned by the result.
Agricultural proof from Kuk Swamp in Wahgi Valley reaches back several thousand years.
Winged beans, purple yams, taro, plants once thought to be imports, instead have grown
here for a long time.
Which brings us back to the start with the grass - yes, grass! -
known as sugarcane and the herb - indeed, herb! - called banana.
That's right, it's the people of New Guinea whose handiwork you have to thank for taking
bananas from this seedy mess to this pulpy staple that later Austronesians would
"launch on a [worldwide] journey".
Early Papuan-speaking agriculturists did this their own way.
Not by tilling the land and sowing seeds, but with vegetative propagation.
Ok, field trip.
Here's a banana tree in auntie's side yard.
Now when we go to eat these sweeties, if you want to propagate the next banana generation,
what do you think you do?
Somehow save their tiny little seeds and plant them in the soil?
No.
You cut.
Cut down here from what's actually one big herb, take and plant the little children.
So the "parent" and "child" actually share the same genes.
Welcome to the world of vegetative propagation.
Once you, ahem, vegetate, you're kind of stuck.
You're committed to a cycle of shrinking seeds and increasing starch until seeds are
merely there for looks and all kids are clones.
But that comes with real benefits for people who practice a kind of gardening-farming that
blurs lines between gathering and cultivating.
Botanically New Guinea has a relationship I was first made to understand about another
rainy place: the Amazon.
Forests that strike outsiders as "wild" are actually food gardens actively managed by
Indigenous people using a variety of their own contextual practices.
No native hands, no food forest.
Their practices aren't static.
Archaeological evidence demonstrates new phases over millenia.
Six drainage phases show a "conscious" process of development and "investment" in new technology.
Dani people have terms for their farm and drainage patterns, as well as the tools, spades
and ever-useful-in-the-Pacific digging sticks.
The Huli have words related to drain and ditch "sizes and functions".
Watch your step; these time-tested drainage systems can be deeper than 2 meters!
And they even factor climate and altitude into vegetative production.
Climate changes predictably with height, with moderating effects closer to the ocean.
Because plants grow faster down in the hot rainforests and get a lot less sunshine
in the cloudy Highlands, expect greater yields at altitude.
Make sense?
No?
Honestly it's true.
Consider taro, widespread staple of the Pacific.
Taro produces carbohydrates through photosynthesis, growing faster in the hotter, sunnier lowlands.
Go up in elevation, and their slow growth gives them plenty of time to absorb through
the typical cloud cover.
So plant two same-size areas with taro, one low and one high, and you'll get a similar yield
over the same period of time.
But since you'll put more work into planting and harvesting, planting and harvesting
the faster growing taro, you'll
end up producing more "food per person-day of labour" in the Highlands.
So if vegeculturists up here spent thousands of years perfecting and spreading food forest
techniques, technologies and plants across the Highlands,
what else did they spread with them?
Words?
Languages?
Turns out I didn't only bring you here to talk about growing bananas at altitude.
In this place humans and plants are connected. A lot of that connection is explicitly verbal.
Like in the braided gatherings of food, lyrics and dance at the annual Sing-sing.
Or like when some Highlands people go out to collect nuts from karuka trees, they switch
to special, intricate gathering languages.
Otherwise ordinary words might tip off the spirits of the forest and end up
damaging the nuts.
Think again about TNG and taro.
As taro cultivation spread across the land so did one TNG word for the plant.
Across a wide range it sounds something like "ma".
Some New Guinea Austronesian speakers even took this word on and replaced their own,
their taro or talo, with ma.
Is this proof of a language-agricultural spread, a "langriculture"?
It's interesting but maybe less than compelling.
"Ma" is so widely borrowed, and exactly who first domesticated taro and where
is a surprisingly difficult question to answer.
Want to know what's more compelling?
Invite them back in, say their names again: sugarcane and bananas.
Compared to their tuberous friends, these crops have stable names across the family.
Just for fun, one linguist asks us to consider the possibility that this word for banana
even journeyed with the fruit to India, then all the way into Arabic and Latin.
Sugarcane and banana are not just snacks here.
They are staples.
Yes, even sugarcane, unlike elsewhere in the world, is a dietary and social centerpiece.
Connecting the words to the plants to the culture, we arrive at the hypothesis of a
whole linguistic-agricultural package fueling the TNG family.
A shared, intertwined langriculture.
Not sure how much it's right but it's not looking wrong.
While researchers at the Kuk Swamp site were turning the tables and proving that New Guinea
had early independent agricultural origins, the local Kawelka people were on the move.
In an "efficiently executed operation", they reclaimed their traditional land and built
homes and gardens to inaugurate a new, living agricultural phase.
This act culminated in nomination as a world heritage site and their recognition as the
"ground root" people of the land.
If you're watching after this many minutes you have at least some care for somewhere
that is far from your home.
Unless you're one of my awesome viewers from the island, I see you!
I hope you'll stay for one more big connection.
Like all good stories about language and food, this one is ultimately about people.
Because when their longstanding commitment to a langricultural package collides with
the present, it leads them to ask a very Papuan question.
First context, so this question lands for you like it did for me.
Imagination vs reality.
Imagination first: look up the Indigenous peoples of New Guinea.
(Just search "Papuan people" on this platform.)
Results are almost mythic: somehow preserved, pristine, isolated.
That's how educated outsiders even see them, as ripe for research, conversion, building highways,
extracting resources, running news stories about every new "uncontacted" people
in an "untouched" rainforest.
Here's the reality behind that imagination: the villages, the managed food forests
the languages aren't untouched at all.
Even the very act of studying languages on this big big island is so ultimately connected
to colonization, and turning land and food into cash rocks and cash crops.
Which brings us to the next and final moment we'll spend together before we part.
Like you heard before, but once more.
In the Highlands of New Guinea, traditionally people welcome guests with a big sugarcane.
For many sugarcane is a huge part of the diet.
Others are sustained mostly by bananas.
See, here these things are not treats or snacks, but key pieces of life with deep
linguistic roots and a very long agricultural backstory.
But that's not the future everyone wants.
So, what grows but does not change?
That's been a guiding question for me as I researched, wrote, dreamt of and narrated this video.
One possible answer has been here the whole time... and it's bananas!
Vegetative propagation makes for great growth but makes change difficult.
It entails that as plants produce they stay consistent.
But ask it another way, the way I've been learning to: what is the good life?
TNG expansion has been able to include new plants and new people while remaining rooted in vegeculture.
But today it faces serious linguistic competition from English-derived creole Tok Pisin, and
agriculturally from exported seedy crops: oil palm and coffee.
What does "keep growing" mean: this ↻ ...or this ↗?
You may not know Papuan people, but they know you.
What you have, your stuff.
On this island, "nearly a continent" of biodiversity thrives.
People still invent, still manage food forests.
But here's where the present collides with the langricultural package: between struggles
for land and get-unpoor-quick schemes, they wade through the wreckage of your systems
and ask about a road out.
From their view, what does the future hold?
Maybe "people will not build their house, people will not make food gardens.
Money will buy a house, money will buy food.
People will depend on money."
And maybe then "there will be no more gardens, because the population will increase...
School will be to them what gardens are to us today."
Or instead what if, "We will no longer destroy the trees.
The conservation area will expand.
All trees will grow again.
The forest will thrive."
I haven't yet got enough dirt on my fingers to answer wisely, but one anonymous farmer
from Ohu in the north offers a choice: "We need to decide, if you have
a banana and a coin in your mouth, which one do you want to swallow?"
Thanks for watching. On many channels here where you'd expect an ad, I've
never been comfortable encouraging you to consume.
Let's take a more meaningful action.
Now support and aid is notoriously tricky in New Guinea, but check my list below for
groups who advance causes of Indigenous communities of the forests.
And since we've been engaging with other people's stories, that doesn't really work
without their voices.
You don't have to go far, I'm also linking more rooted channels
alongside my sources document.
The names scrolling by are some of my channel patrons who decided to get a piece of
one of these different lovely tiers.
I know it's been so long between videos.
As I shared in patron posts, I've been reflecting lots and figuring out what I want this channel
to do and to be.
Thank you for sticking around, subscribing and hearing voices with me.