Papua New Guinea

From the world's first farmers and 800 languages to a young Pacific nation.

Papua New Guinea occupies the eastern half of New Guinea — one of the longest-inhabited regions on Earth, settled around 50,000 years ago — together with the Bismarck Archipelago, Bougainville, and hundreds of smaller islands. In the highland swamps of Kuk, its peoples invented agriculture independently some 7,000 to 10,000 years ago, draining wetlands to grow taro and bananas, and over millennia developed the greatest linguistic diversity of any country, with more than 800 languages. European traders, missionaries, and labour recruiters arrived in the nineteenth century; the island was partitioned into German New Guinea in the north and British (later Australian) Papua in the south, and the whole eastern half came under Australian administration after the First World War. The fierce Second World War campaigns along the Kokoda Track and on Bougainville gave way to decolonisation, and on 16 September 1975 Papua New Guinea became an independent nation under Michael Somare — a young, resource-rich, and extraordinarily diverse state still shaped by the Bougainville conflict and the question of that island's future.