some of the finest and least disturbed coral reefs in the world.
As they are so close to the epicenter of species diversity for the vast Indo-Pacific region, New Guinea coral reefs probably harbor some 3,000 species of fish. Important food fish—tuna, jacks, mackerel—support a large fishing industry off Biak Island and Sorong.
West Papua's freshwater lakes and streams contain 158 species of rainbowfishes. These small, and often colorful fishes are found only in New Guinea and Australia and are favorites with aquarists.
The Archer fish (Toxotes spp.) is a small, unremarkably colored inhabitant of some of West Papua's lakes, slow rivers and swamps. This animal's talent is the ability to spit a gob of water—with astounding accuracy—to bring down insects. The insects are eaten as soon as they strike the surface of the water.
Some of West Papua's freshwater species are giants. The sawfish (Pristiopsis spp.) prowls the large river systems and some of West Papua's lakes, including Lake Sentani. These distinctive animals can reach 5.2 meters, and weigh almost half a metric ton. The people living around Sentani believe their ancestral spirits live in these sawfish and refuse to eat them. Lake Yamur, at the base of the Bird's Head, is said to be one of the very few places in the world that one encounters freshwater sharks.
Birdwing butterflies
The colorful princes of West Papua's insect fauna are the birdwing butterflies (Ornithoptera spp.), which can be found in all parts of New Guinea but reach their greatest numbers and diversity in the Arfak Mountains just inland from Manokwari. These butterflies are covered with shimmering colors. Recently, a captive farming project has begun to raise these creatures for the lucrative export market in dried and mounted butterflies.
New Guinea probably has almost 100,000 insect species, and many of these are still undescribed. In the forests one can find great stick insects and katydids—some of them startlingly accurate mimics—as well as tens of thousands of species of beetles.
The capricorn beetle, a tank of a creature, lays its eggs on the sago palm, and its large larvae are prized as food by the Asmat of the South Coast. The sago grubs are an essential feature of every ceremonial banquet.
Spiders, too, are found here in great numbers—some 800 species. These include the formidable giant bird-eating spider (Selenocosmia crassides), whose size and aggressiveness allow it to reverse the usual order of prey and preyed upon.
A precious environment
New Guinea has the world's second-largest rainforest (after the Amazon) and West Papua has the largest tracts of undisturbed lowland rainforest in all of Southeast Asia. These lowland alluvial forests contain valuable timber reserves, making them a major target of the logging industry.
In the mid-1980s, through the efforts of the World Wildlife Fund, an ambitious program of conservation areas was adopted for West Papua. Today, almost 20 percent of the province's land area is a conservation area of one kind or another, making West Papua—at least on paper—one of the best-protected pieces of real estate in the world.
Although the problems of exploitation are still great, West Papua's inherent ruggedness and isolation will do a lot to insure the protection of its forests. Also, unlike, for example, Borneo, West Papua is not very rich in the most valuable species of tropical hardwoods.
It is the marine areas around West Papua that are most in danger. Great fields of the giant tridacna clams (which can grow to 1.5 meters across and live two centuries) have been stripped, the meat canned and frozen for the Asian market, and fish-bombing has destroyed nearshore reefs in many areas.
The frilled lizard, Chlamysosaurus kingii, looks fierce, but unless you are an insect, the animal is quite harmless.
PREHISTORY
Papuans and
Austronesians
in New Guinea
Prior to the arrival of the Portuguese in the early 16th century, there appear but scant references to New Guinea and its inhabitants.
Frizzy-haired men and women appear on some of the friezes at Borobudur, the great 8th century Buddhist stupa in central Java, but these could just as well represent peoples from islands closer to Java.
The Negarakertagama, a 14th century panegyric poem dedicated to the East Javanese king of Majapahit, mentions two West Papuan territories, Onin and Seran on the southwestern side of the Bird's Head peninsula, but direct control from Java must have been practically non-existent.
It is certain however that prahu-borne trade between some of the Moluccan islands—and perhaps even Java—and the western extremity of what is now West Papua existed long before this. Items such as bird of paradise skins and massoi bark, unquestionably of West Papuan origin, were well-known trade items. And the Sultan of Tidore—a tiny, but influential clove-producing island off Halmahera—long claimed areas in and around western West Papua.
The Papuans
The indigenous West Papuans, black-skinned, hirsute and frizzy-haired, are physically very distinct from Indonesians in the rest of the archipelago. Just when these so-called "Papuans"—and the Australian aboriginals—first arrived in the area is still mostly a matter of conjecture.
Most scientists now believe that Homo sapiens developed more recently than had been thought, and linguistic and genetic evidence points to a single African origin. Our species arose in Africa, perhaps no more than 200,000 years ago, and it was 100,000 years later before any of these early humans left the African continent and crossed the oceans.
There is no longer thought to be any link between so-called "Java Man" or Homo erectus, an extinct humanoid that lived a half-million years ago in Java (and elsewhere in the world), and any of today's people.
What has been established is that 100,000 years ago humans began to fan out from Africa, and some 30,000-40,000 years ago they settled New Guinea, Australia and points in between. These original Southeast Asians, related to today's Australian aboriginals, Papuans and Melanesians, are the direct ancestors of the West Papuans.
The Papuan migrations
How did the Papuans reach New Guinea? The first clues date from the Pleistocene era, when periods of glaciation reduced sea levels 100 to 150 meters below their present levels. The history of man and animals in insular Southeast Asia is intimately linked with the resulting submergence and emergence of two great continental shelves at opposite ends of the archipelago: the Sahul in the east and the Sunda in the west.
At no time was there a land bridge stretching all the way across what is now Indonesia, and vast stretches of open water had somehow to be crossed. Man was successful in making this crossing, but other placental mammals—except for bats, which flew, and rats, which tagged along—were not.
Asmat stone axes. Photograph courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History.
The earliest tentative figure for human presence in New Guinea, based by inference on Australian paleoanthropolocal evidence, is 60,000 years ago. But there is in fact little hard evidence arguing for a date prior to 30,000 to 40,000 years ago. This is nevertheless very early—fossils of modern man are found throughout the Old World only
