A Highland New Guinean is shocked to see a white person for the first time in his life. Before 1930, Highlanders thought they were the only living people in the world.

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image showing A Highland New Guinean is shocked to see a white person for the first time in his life. Before 1930, Highlanders thought they were the only living people in the world.

gingertrain77 on June 28th, 2021 at 15:23 UTC »

I imagine we'd have the same look as them if aliens descended upon us from the sky.

nastafarti on June 28th, 2021 at 15:45 UTC »

Papua New Guinea was the last place in the world to get mapped. After that, there were no more new lands to discover, and the world felt a lot smaller.

In the 1950s, a camera crew decided to walk across the island through uncharted territory and meet uncontacted tribes. They finally made it across, two months behind schedule, with one of the crew dead. The name of the film is Sky Above, Mud Below, and although it has been a little sensationalized - these were film producers, not anthropologists - it's still an amazing documentary.

Kuerbovich on June 28th, 2021 at 17:47 UTC »

The documentary "First Contact" (1983) used rolls of film made in 1930 by Australian gold diggers, the first Westerners to go into the Highlands of Papua Island and meet people who had never seen a white man: https://vimeo.com/353936027

The authors of the documentary interviewed the people who participated in that first meeting. One of the Papuans interviewed says: "At first, when we saw them all pale, we thought they were the spirits of our ancestors, who had come from the beyond to bring us a message. One day we saw one of them go to shit; there we realized that they were not spirits, but normal people, like us".