The Una: A stone-age mountain tribe
The Una are a Papuan tribe that lives in the Maoke Mountains at a height of up to 2,000 m. Peaks of this very steep mountain range (which forms he backbone of Newguinea) reach up to 5,000 m.
The Una were discovered only in the 1960s. The tribe inhabits a very rugged land that is totally different from the swampy lowlands of the Asmat and the Korowai. Their way of life and of feeding themselves necessarily needs to be very different, too.
Remarkably, the Una (and some other Papuan mountain tribes) could well be the inventors of gardening - a form of agriculture. They seem to have done so around 40,000 years ago, at a time when in ice-age Eurasia mammoth hunters were active and nobody had thought of cultivating plants yet. Agriculture was (re)invented in Africa and Eurasia less than 10,000 years ago.
