Tiny possum and glider thought extinct for 6000 years found in remote West Papua

Posted by bryanrasmussen 2 days ago

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Comments

Comment by culi 15 hours ago

Cogito, who does some of the most astounding and in-depth research on global histories, just came out with an incredible documentary about the history of West Papua that changed the way I see it forever. I highly recommend it (and most of Cogito's work. Even his extensive citations are worth spending time with)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWp5904RkJY

This is an area where raising the West Papua can give you 15 years in prison.

Comment by esalman 7 hours ago

Thanks for sharing this!

Edit: this is flabbergasting. West Papuans are resisting combined forces of Indonesia, US, UK, with some 300 guns.

Comment by jdironman 7 hours ago

Excuse my ignorance, but what does 'raising the West Papua' mean actually?

Comment by esalman 6 hours ago

I think OP meant to say raising the West Papuan flag.

Comment by culi 4 hours ago

Yes, thank you. As they say, "I a word"

Comment by culi 4 hours ago

*flag

sorry, too late to edit

Comment by swiftcoder 18 hours ago

Really cool. I hope they succeed in establishing native rights to the forest before the logging companies make them extinct again.

Comment by markdown 2 hours ago

No chance! West Papuans are being ethnically cleansed from the forest to make your chocolates cheaper (palm oil).

Comment by nkoren 13 hours ago

Okay, here's a West Papua mystery which the internet needs to become as interested in as I am. It was one of those random things that the Youtube algorithm pushed to me when it only had a few thousand views, and I can't stop thinking about it since: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpNKDCo23iM

tl;dr: very passionate young man develops a special interest in the Thylacine (Tasmanian Tiger), and becomes convinced (not without some evidence) that it might still be alive in Western Papua. So he spends two and a half years preparing to Indiana Jones it into the mountains of Western Papua, and the video ends with him saying "I went". Cut to black. No part 2 was ever posted.

Damn, I really want to know how that story finishes. (I fear that "I went" actually meant "I'm going right now", with the intention that he would post part 2 upon his return. Which appears not to have happened.)

Comment by ycombinete 6 hours ago

From what I can find, that video only contains per-expedition video. So the likelihood that he actually went is itself under doubt.

Comment by nkoren 48 minutes ago

Yeah, and the way the rest of the video is constructed, it doesn't seem like it was trying to claim anything other than being pre-expedition. That's why I'm inclined to interpret the ending "I went" as "by the time you see this video, I'll be in the skies and doing it".

Comment by OneLeggedCat 12 hours ago

Just clicked and watched that. Amazing really. I can't figure out what I believe about his sanity.

Comment by nkoren 56 minutes ago

Same. Watching it, I was ping-ponging between being grateful that people with such possibly lunatic levels of enthusiasm exist, and fearful that he was definitely going to get himself killed.

Comment by ckx 1 hour ago

There is still hope for the dodo.

Comment by culi 15 hours ago

It's incredibly difficult to do research in West Papua which is under very violent occupation by Indonesia, the US, Britain, South Korea, the Netherlands, and France. Foreign journalists and human rights monitors are basically completely barred. Much of this decades long conflict is around the US-owned Grasberg Mine

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grasberg_mine

Comment by graemep 3 hours ago

How do the other countries come into it? its a (part) American owned mine. Are there British, Dutch, French or South korean troops there occupying West Papua?

Comment by t-3 1 hour ago

They are US vassal states. SK's military in particular is formally under US command since the Korean War and have participated in every US conflict since.

Comment by motionlessveloc 7 hours ago

West/Indonesian Papua is not North Korea. Yes, travel in the interior requires permits (surat jalan) and you won't be let anywhere near the mine, but as a tourist you can fly in to any of the major cities with no questions asked and there's even an active tourism industry in the Baliem Valley.

Comment by 14 hours ago

Comment by triyambakam 18 hours ago

I wouldn't be surprised if more such discoveries were found. Papua is, as best as I can describe it, insane.

Comment by abanana 18 hours ago

Indeed, it seems the interior of the country is so little-known and so unspoiled by modern civilisation, it would be surprising if we don't have any unexpected discoveries coming out of there in the nearish future.

Comment by anon84873628 17 hours ago

Not to get all internet indignant about it, but the island is currently split into two countries thanks to the colonization by Indonesia. Which human rights advocates and indigenous leaders consider to be a systematic ethnic cleansing and cultural erasure of the indigenous Melanesian Papuan population. Along with an ecocide driven by a toxic mix of military occupation, corporate exploitation, and resource extraction.

The situation in West Papua is essentially one of the least recognized humanitarian and ecological tragedies slowly happening right under our noses.

Comment by culi 15 hours ago

The part people especially don't like to talk about is that Indonesia is acting as a proxy for the US, Britain, and France here. Readers of The Jakarta Method won't find this surprising but the scale here is astounding. The largest gold and copper mine in the world is here and it is owned by the US.

The US currently has 8,133.5 metric tons of gold which is more than the next 4 combined (Germany, Italy, France, and China). About 1,700 metric tonnes (out of an estimated total 4,720) has been extracted from West Papua by the US

Comment by jakzurr 6 hours ago

Yeah, it's a complicated mess. I'm just going to link some of the New Guinea wiki articles:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papua_New_Guinea (the Eastern half; an independent state, technically a realm of King Charles III)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_New_Guinea (Indonesian since 1962)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Papua_(province) (The province in Western New Guinea where that giant mine is)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grasberg_mine (see parent comment; tons of ore)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papua_conflict (still going on; horrific)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_West_Papua (proposal for independent state in place of Western New Guinea; likely a lot of politics and money involved in stopping it)

Probably still lots of people being killed to keep Indonesia (and commercial interests) in control of Western New Guinea. I don't even pretend to understand it all.

Comment by mmooss 13 hours ago

Is there a well-known, respected source? I see people talking about it, but someone's book and a Wikipedia article don't distinguish it from lots of fringe ideas, unfortunately. (I do know about Suharto, etc.)

Comment by asanineassasin 6 hours ago

The invisibility of non western colonialism and non white bad actors to the western left is all you need to know, to know all about them. A ecocidal catastrophe and its of course all about us.

West papua is basically indonesia colonizing and other economic groupies having a having a free for all feeding frenzy.

Comment by graemep 3 hours ago

We do not have moral agency you see, so we cannot do anything bad.

We are just noble savages who need white saviours to save us from white baddies.

If we actually had choice and agency we might not even need white saviours to guide us.

Comment by red75prime 17 hours ago

[flagged]

Comment by DoItToMe81 16 hours ago

The military goes in and splits up their communities by murdering them on behalf of logging and mining companies.

Comment by red75prime 16 hours ago

What it has to do with the "cultural erasure" I quoted specifically? "Who owns the land" is a different problem that is not made simpler by the fact that the land is subject to tribal conflicts.

Comment by jakzurr 7 hours ago

I'm guessing some thought your previous comment hurtful. Well, maybe it was. I don't know if that's why you got flagged; maybe someone can explain that better.

You have to realize their culture is not being lost mainly from people wanting to leave for a more convenient life. These small communities are not just culturally isolated, the are also physically isolated.

People with modern weapons (The Indonesian National Armed Forces) can basically do whatever they want there. And according to Wikipedia, that's exactly what they've been doing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papua_conflict

Comment by BetterThanSober 4 hours ago

> unspoiled by modern civilisation

Not for long. Tons of forests were burned to make way for more profitable crops

Comment by markdown 2 hours ago

Crop, not crops. A palm oil monoculture as far as the eye can see.

Comment by markdown 2 hours ago

This 48sec video (same island but across the border in PNG) is one of my favourite things. It shows the moment that a conservationist and scientist see video of a bird last documented 140yrs ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVSoZ-bAm9w

Comment by msuniverse2026 14 hours ago

Always surprised when I see new animals discovered. Especially in tiny places like Borneo which seems to be the spawn point for new animals god is testing out.

Comment by hermitcrab 14 hours ago

Tiny? Borneo is 723,154.07 km^2 and the 3rd largest island in the world.

Comment by antonvs 4 hours ago

[dead]

Comment by meindnoch 14 hours ago

Borneo is 3x the size of the UK. It's about as large as Texas.

Comment by sidewndr46 13 hours ago

Which is slightly larger than metropolitan France

Comment by motionlessveloc 7 hours ago

Papua, not Borneo. Different islands, and both of them are huge.

Comment by meindnoch 14 hours ago

So, now that we can observe them alive, how close are they to the reconstructions we've made based on the fossils?

Comment by 18 hours ago

Comment by hulitu 15 hours ago

> thought extinct for 6000 years

Does this makes sense for an English speaker ?

Comment by bryanrasmussen 14 hours ago

In British English it is totally reasonable and in fact relatively elegant, in American it might take a couple of seconds to figure out what was being said and it would seem ungainly for this reason.

On the British elegance: in British English one could of course use "thought to be extinct" and in these kinds of structures it has become common as a stylistic touch to drop the helping infinitive, "to be", considering it implied.

Comment by mkehrt 1 hour ago

To me as an American this sounds perfectly fine.

Comment by Myrmornis 8 hours ago

Right. But, one says "X is thought extinct." or "X is thought to have been extinct for 6000 years" (or "gone extinct ... ago").

As written don't you think it begs the question (joke, fellow language pedant :) of who was doing the thinking that it was extinct over the course of those 6,000 years?

Comment by bryanrasmussen 4 hours ago

if it was written "is thought" that would be wrong because it is not thought to be extinct, if it was written "was thought" then one would have the same problem of wondering who was doing that thinking.

The phrasing is pretty normal, however it might have been better handled with a comma between glider and thought - my personal preference.

This is one of the aesthetic qualities of English (the dropping of helping infinitives) that makes things like "Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" or "Police Police police Police" possible

https://medium.com/luminasticity/cardinality-and-growth-rate...

I appreciate it as an example of the whimsical toleration of ambiguity common to English.

Although maybe it should have been "Tiny possum and glider thought: 'Extinct for 6,000 years!'"

Comment by ChrisMarshallNY 15 hours ago

I don't usually use this structure, but my mother did, and she was an awesome writer. She was British, so it may be more common, over there.

Comment by pgreenwood 6 hours ago

Sounds fine to me but I am Australian

Comment by culi 15 hours ago

Yes but they could've used the word "considered" instead.

"Possum considered extinct for 6,000 years"

Comment by mistrial9 13 hours ago

yes I recognize that as legitimate grammar, in a literary way.. It can be spoken that way, too..

Comment by akk0 15 hours ago

Yes, with the caveat that it's the distinct dialect of Headlinese

Comment by samatman 15 hours ago

It's a bad sentence. They mean "thought to have gone extinct 6000 years ago". But some allowance for headline constraints should be given.

Comment by RomannBami 15 hours ago

C'est vraiment super, mais faisons très attention quand même

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