Everyone thinks it's a wild place. Well, we have 30 000 years ago, a nomadic CRO-magnon went to the mammoth on the edge of the glacier, but in the valley of Baliem people already lived settled. May be the same time the first settlements created by people displaced from the mountains appeared in the South of Papua and began to use the sago palm for the extraction of starch and larvae.
A 3.5 m section of organic sediment was obtained from a karstic pond on a hill in the centre of the Baliem Valley, one of the major settled intermontane highland areas of New Guinea. The material spans two time periods each of approximately 2 millennia, one from about 2000 BP to the present and the other from 33,500 to 31,500 BP. The pollen analysis of the earlier section showed that it formed when the valley was forested by Nothofagus forest, but a carbonized particle input was consistently present after about 32,500 years ago. The recent section covers a period when the hill was totally cleared except for grassland and some open shrubby regrowth. The early burning and associated clearances are tentatively ascribed to a human origin. Fire is associated with slope erosion on the hill at 28,000 BP which supports the hypothesis of long term human settlement in the area. Hope, Geoffrey
Journal Of Biogeography. 25(3): 453-461, 1998
Look the program "Cannibals of Papua"
