Papua New Guinea is a country in Oceania that comprises the eastern half of the island of New Guinea and offshore islands in Melanesia, a region of the southwestern Pacific Ocean north of Australia. It has a land border with Indonesia to the west and neighbours Australia to the south and the Solomon Islands to the east. Its capital, on its southern coast, is Port Moresby. The country is the world's third largest island country, with an area of 462,840 km2 (178,700 sq mi).
Enga is one of the provinces in Papua New Guinea (PNG). Enga is geographically situated in the northern region of Papua New Guinea and was separated from the adjacent Western Highlands at the time of national independence in 1975. The majority ethnic group are Engans. Approximately 500,000 people live within the province, which has one spoken language in all five of its districts. A small minority of Engans' land on the eastern side of the region remained in the Western Highlands, their territory being accessible by road from Mount Hagen but not directly from elsewhere in Enga territory.
The Fore people live in the Okapa District of the Eastern Highlands Province, Papua New Guinea. There are approximately 20,000 Fore who are separated by the Wanevinti Mountains into the North Fore and South Fore regions. Their main form of subsistence is slash-and-burn farming. The Fore language has three distinct dialects and is the southernmost member of the East Central Family, East New Guinea Highlands Stock, Trans–New Guinea phylum of Papuan languages.
Western New Guinea, also known as Papua, Indonesian New Guinea, and Indonesian Papua, is the western half of the island of New Guinea, formerly Dutch and granted to Indonesia in 1962. Given the island is alternatively named Papua, the region is also called West Papua. It is one of the seven geographical units of Indonesia in ISO 3166-2:ID.
The ǃKung are one of the San peoples who live mostly on the western edge of the Kalahari desert, Ovamboland, and Botswana. The names ǃKung (ǃXun) and Ju are variant words for 'people', preferred by different ǃKung groups. This band level society used traditional methods of hunting and gathering for subsistence up until the 1970s. Today, the great majority of ǃKung people live in the villages of Bantu pastoralists and European ranchers.
Cordyline fruticosa is an evergreen flowering plant in the family Asparagaceae. The plant is of great cultural importance to the traditional inhabitants of the Pacific Islands and Island Southeast Asia. It is also cultivated for food, traditional medicine, and as an ornamental for its variously colored leaves. It is identified by a wide variety of common names, including ti plant, palm lily, cabbage palm.
Duk-Duk is a secret society, part of the traditional culture of the Tolai people of the Rabaul area of New Britain, the largest island in the Bismarck Archipelago of Papua New Guinea, in the South Pacific.
The culture of Papua New Guinea is complex and multifaceted. It is estimated that more than 7000 different cultural groups exist in Papua New Guinea, and most groups have their own language. Because of this diversity, in which they take pride, many different styles of cultural expression have emerged; each group has created its own expressive forms in art, dance, weaponry, costumes, singing, music, architecture and much more. To unify the nation, the language Tok Pisin, once called Neo-Melanesian has evolved as the lingua franca — the medium through which diverse language groups are able to communicate with one another in Parliament, in the news media, and elsewhere. People typically live in villages or dispersed hamlets which rely on the subsistence farming of yams and taro. The principal livestock in traditional Papua New Guinea is the oceanic pig.
The Kombai are a Papuan people living in the Indonesian province of South Papua, more specifically in Mappi Regency. Their total population is about 5,650.
Melanesian mythology refers to the folklore, myths, and religions of Melanesia, a region in Southwest Oceania that encompasses the archipelagos of New Guinea, the Torres Strait Islands, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, New Caledonia and Fiji. The various mythologies consist primarily of the traditions of oral literature in the different populations of Melanesia. More recent aspects include the cargo cults born in the 20th century during the Pacific War.
The Papuan eagle is a large bird of prey. It is also known by several other names, including Papuan harpy eagle, New Guinea eagle, New Guinea harpy eagle, or kapul eagle, the latter name from the local name for a usually arboreal marsupial that the eagle is known to regularly hunt. This is an endemic species to New Guinea, and it can occasionally be found throughout the island. This is a forest-dwelling species, usually occurring in mature rainforest. The Papuan eagle is a fairly little-known species for a large eagle; however, it is known to prey on a wide range of prey, probably by and large mammals and birds from small to quite large sizes. Unique amongst eagles, the Papuan eagle is a surprisingly fast and agile terrestrial avian predator and is capable of chasing down prey on the forest floor. What little study has been conducted about its breeding habits suggests it nests in a large forest tree, perhaps every other year. The Papuan eagle is probably naturally scarce, but it is under the threat of habitat destruction by deforestation, as well as hunting. Due to its small and declining population, the species has been classified as vulnerable by the IUCN.
The Papuans are one of four major cultural groups of Papua New Guinea. The majority of the population lives in rural areas. In isolated areas there remains a handful of the giant communal structures that previously housed the whole male population, with a circling cluster of huts for the women. The Papuan people are Melanesian people composed of at least 240 different peoples, each with its own language and culture. Sago is the staple food of the Papuan supplemented with hunting, fishing and small gardens.
The New Guinea Highlands, also known as the Central Range or Central Cordillera, is a long chain of mountain ranges on the island of New Guinea, including the island's highest peak, Puncak Jaya, Indonesia, 16,024 ft (4,884 m), the highest mountain in Oceania. The range is home to many intermountain river valleys, many of which support thriving agricultural communities. The highlands run generally east-west the length of the island, which is divided politically between Indonesia in the west and Papua New Guinea in the east. These mountains stretch from the Weyland Mountains starting in Wondama Bay Regency in the west to the Milne Bay Province in the east.
New Guinea is the world's second-largest island, with an area of 785,753 km2 (303,381 sq mi). Located in Melanesia in the southwestern Pacific Ocean, the island is separated from Australia by the 150-kilometre wide Torres Strait, though both landmasses lie on the same continental shelf, and were united during episodes of low sea level in the Pleistocene glaciations as the combined landmass of Sahul. Numerous smaller islands are located to the West and East. The island's name was given by Spanish explorer Yñigo Ortiz de Retez during his maritime expedition of 1545 due to the resemblance of the indigenous peoples of the island to those in the African region of Guinea.
The Greater Binanderean or Guhu-Oro languages are a language family spoken along the northeast coast of the Papuan Peninsula – the "Bird's Tail" of New Guinea – and appear to be a recent expansion from the north. They were classified as a branch of the Trans–New Guinea languages by Stephen Wurm (1975) and Malcolm Ross (2005), but removed by Timothy Usher (2020). The Binandere family proper is transparently valid; Ross connected it to the Guhu-Semane isolate based on pronominal evidence, and this has been confirmed by Smallhorn (2011). Proto-Binanderean has been reconstructed in Smallhorn (2011).
The Urapmin people are an ethnic group numbering about 375 people in the Telefomin District of the West Sepik Province of Papua New Guinea. One of the Min peoples who inhabit this area, the Urapmin share the common Min practices of hunter-gatherer subsistence, taro cultivation, and formerly, an elaborate secret cult available only to initiated men.
Yali are a major tribal group in Highland Papua, Indonesia, and live to the east of the Baliem Valley, mainly in Yalimo Regency, Yahukimo Regency, and the surrounding regions.
The Kaluli are a clan of indigenous peoples who live in the rain forests of the Great Papuan Plateau in Papua New Guinea. The Kaluli, who numbered approximately 2,000 people in 1987, are the most numerous and well documented by post-contact ethnographers and missionaries among the four language-clans of Bosavi kalu that speak non-Austronesian languages. Their numbers are thought to have declined precipitously following post-contact disease epidemics in the 1940s, and have not rebounded due to high infant mortality rates and periodic influenza outbreaks. The Kaluli are mostly monolingual in an ergative language.
The Dumo people of New Guinea speak a dialect of the Vanimo language.
Chimbu, Kuman are a Papuan people native to the central highlands of Papua New Guinea. The settlement of Kundiawa, the administrative center of the Chimbu country, is located in one of the many spurs of the valley formed by the Chimbu River and lying at an altitude of approximately 2,000 meters above sea level. The number is about 250,000 people.
