Papua New Guinea creates two massive new Marine Protected Areas
Together they cover more than 6,200 square miles, tripling the country’s marine area under protection, and are the country’s first to be co-managed by Indigenous communities.
Papua New Guinea
New Guineans independently develop agriculture, transforming the Pacific
New Guinea agriculture began around 10,000 years ago, when highland communities started draining swamps and cultivating taro, banana, and yam entirely on their own. The Kuk Swamp site, now a UNESCO World Heritage site, preserves the planting pits and water channels that document this slow transition. It’s one of only a handful of places on Earth where farming was independently invented.
Papuans in New Guinea domesticate sugarcane, sweetening the world forever
Sugarcane domestication began around 4000 B.C.E. in the highlands of New Guinea, where Papuan farmers selectively bred a wild grass into the ancestor of the world’s sweetest crop. Curiously, they first grew it as pig feed. Thousands of years later, that same plant sweetens billions of morning cups across every tropical continent.