"By the 1920s it was thought that no corner of the earth fit for human
habitation had remained unexplored. New Guinea, the world's second largest
island, was no exception. The European missionaries, planters, and
administrators clung to its coastal lowlands convinced that no one could live
in the treacherous mountain range that ran in a solid line down the middle of
the island. But the mountains visible from each coast in fact belonged to two
ranges, not one, and between them was a temperate plateau crossed by many
fertile valleys. A million Stone Age people lived in those highlands,
isolated from the rest of the world for forty thousand years. The veil would
not be lifted until gold was discovered in a tributary of one of the main
rivers. The ensuing gold rush attracted Michael Leahy, a footloose Australian
prospector, who on May 26, 1930, set out to explore the mountains with a
fellow prospector and a group of indigenous lowland people hired as carriers.
After scaling the heights, Leahy was amazed to see grassy open country on the
other side. By nightfall his amazement turned to alarm, because there were
points of light in the distance, obvious signs that the valley was populated.
After a sleepless night in which Leahy and his party loaded their weapons and
assembled a crude bomb, they made their first contact with the highlanders.
The astonishment was mutual. Leahy wrote in his diary:
'It was a relief when the [natives] came in sight, the men...in
front,armed with bows and arrows, the women behind bringing stalks
of sugarcane. When he saw the women, Ewunga told me at once that
there would be no fight. We waved to them to come on, which they
did cautiously, stopping every few yards to look us over. When a
few of them finally got up courage to approach, we could see that
they were utterly thunderstruck by our appearance. When I took off
my hat, those nearest to me backed away in terror. One old chap
came forward gingerly with open mouth, and touched me to see if I
was real. Then he knelt down, and rubbed his hands over my bare
legs, possibly to find if they were painted, and grabbed me around
the knees and hugged them, rubbing his bushy head against me...The
women and children gradually got up courage to approach also, and
presently the camp was swarming with the lot of them, all running
about the jabbering at once, pointing to...everything that was new
to them.'
"That 'jabbering' was language--an unfamiliar language, one of eight
hundred different ones that would be discovered among the isolated highlanders
right up through the 1960s. Leahy's first contact repeated a scene that must
have taken place hundreds of times in human history, whenever one people first
encountered another. All of them, as far as we know, already had language.
Every Hottentot, every Eskimo, every Yanomomo. No mute tribe has ever been
discovered, and there is no record that a region has served as a 'cradle' of
language from which it spread to previously languageless groups.
"As in every other case, the language spoken by Leahy's hosts turned out
to be no mere jabber but a medium that could express abstract concepts,
invisible entities, and complex trains of reasoning. The highlanders
conferred intensively, trying to agree upon the nature of the pallid
apparitions. The leading conjecture was that they were reincarnated ancestors
or other spirits in human form, perhaps ones that turned back into skeletons
at night. They agreed upon an empirical test that would settle the matter.
'One of the people hid,' recalls the highlander Kirupano Eza'e, 'and watched
them going to excrete. He came back and said, 'Those men from heaven went to
excrete over there.' Once they had left many men went to take a look. When
they saw that it smelt bad, they said, 'Their skin might be different, but
their sh-- smells bad like ours.'"~Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct, (New
York: Harper/Perennial, 1994), p. 25-26
glenn
Foundation, Fall and Flood
http://www.isource.net/~grmorton/dmd.htm