This is New Guinea, the most fascinating

and mysterious island in the world.

Because it's located very near to the

equator, most two-dimensional world maps

based on the Mercer projection warp New

Guinea size and make it appear a lot

smaller than it really is. In reality,

New Guinea is the second largest island

in the world, only behind Greenland, and

only just. If you placed Greenland

directly over New Guinea, you'd see that

they're actually almost the same size.

Despite our popular perceptions thinking

otherwise, placed over Europe, New

Guinea is roughly triple the size of

Great Britain and [music] would extend

from England and Northern France nearly

across the continent through Romania to

the Black Sea. Or placed over America,

it would stretch from the edge of Long

Island in New York State all the way

down to Texas and nearly hit the Dallas

Fort Worth Metroplex. New Guinea is a

way more enormous place than most

outsiders think it is. And it's also a

way more unknown place than you probably

think it is as well. As much as 80% of

New Guinea's territory is covered by

dense rainforest, making it the third

largest rainforest on the planet behind

only the Amazon and Congo rainforest

that are on actual continents. Which is

why some people have taken to calling

the New Guinea rainforest the second

Amazon. And if that wasn't enough, New

Guinea is also extremely mountainous.

The chain of mountains running through

the center of the island, known as the

New Guinea Highlands, are roughly the

same size, elevation, and scale as the

Rocky Mountains are in North America.

And they feature the highest elevated

peaks anywhere between the Himalayas in

Asia and the Andes in South America.

They are by far the highest and most

imposing mountains found on any island

in the world. And because of this harsh

geography of dense rainforest combined

with towering mountains, there is still

a ton of territory hidden there that has

remained unexplored and uncharted to

this very day, deep into the 21st

century. [music] And like we're seeing

beneath the Amazon right now, there are

some incredible new discoveries taking

place here right now. And there's a lot

of things down there beneath the

rainforest canopy that you probably

won't expect. Like for example,

glaciers, which probably aren't the

first thing that you associate with

tropical rainforests in New Guinea. And

yet on the western side of the island

that's under the control of Indonesia,

exists the increasingly small remnants

of ancient glaciers that have been

continually shrinking since the start of

the industrial revolution. The nearby

mountain to them called Punchak Jaya

contains the highest elevated point on

the island at 4,884

m or 6,024 ft above sea level, which is

also the highest point on any island in

the world. [music] It's high enough the

temperatures plummet the further up it

you go, which transforms New Guinea's

abundant rainfall in a snow, which has

compacted down the mountain face into

the glacier below it for at least the

past several thousand years. The New

Guinea glaciers are one of only a

handful of so-called tropical glaciers

that can be found in the world. And

they're so remote and not well known

that even some Indonesians aren't aware

that their country actually contains

them. The New Guinea glaciers were first

spawned by Westerners in 1623 by a Dutch

explorer called Yan Karstens. But his

account of snow and glaciers up on a

mountain so near to the equator brought

him nothing but ridicule from his

contemporaries. and hardly anybody

believed him for centuries. The

existence of the glaciers in New Guinea

that he claimed to see weren't verified

by Western science for nearly 300 years

after Karsten's first observation when

Dutch expeditions between 1909 and 1913

in the early 20th century finally

confirmed them. And unfortunately, they

probably won't exist for very much

longer. We now know that back in 1850,

the area of the New Guinea Glacier stood

at about 19.3 km and they were

photographed extensively by airplane in

1936. But by 1972, the glaciers area had

already shrunk by nearly 2/3 from its

1850 size. And airplane photographs

captured the noticeable decline from the

1936 levels. By 2018, the glaciers had

shrunk by more than 97% from their 1850

levels, and just half a square kilometer

of their area still remained intact.

Their rapid decline in our modern times

has been captured in satellite images

like this one taken in 1988. This one

taken in 2017, and this one taken in

2020, showing hardly any trace of them

still remaining. The most recent

scientific study conducted into the

glacier size was published in March of

2025 and was based on 2024 data and it

showed that just 0.165

km of the glaciers still survive. A 67%

decline just from a few years previously

in 2018. If the current decline rate of

the glaciers here continue, they're

expected to be irreplaceably gone

forever by the end of this decade,

sometime around 2030. and New Guinea and

Indonesia will no longer have any

glaciers for the first time in tens of

thousands of years. [music] And it won't

be the first major geographic alteration

that has happened in New Guinea. In

fact, back during the last ice age when

sea levels were significantly lower, New

Guinea used to be directly connected to

Australia by land in a larger continent

that we've since called Sahul.

Geologically speaking, New Guinea is

located on the Australian tectonic plate

instead of the Eurasian plate, making it

more connected to Australia from a

geological perspective than any of the

islands to its west. And why New Guinea

is classified as being a part of

Oceanania rather than Asia. New Guinea

and Australia were intermittently

connected by land to each other for

millions of years. And they only became

separated due to rising sea levels

around 8 to 10,000 years ago, basically

seconds ago in geological time. Which is

why there is a significant amount of

overlap in the animal species between

both places today like their prevalence

of marsupials and why there's some

speculation that animals that are

currently extinct in Australia might

continue existing somewhere in the deep

remote and unexplored parts of the New

Guinea interior. New Guinea is second

only to the Amazon for the rate of new

species that are still being discovered

and described by modern science.

Literally thousands of new species have

been formally described by researchers

in New Guinea just since 2010. [music]

Though the vast majority of those new

species have been small organisms like

plants, insects, and spiders. Larger

discoveries of previously unknown or

lost mammals are a lot rarer, but from

time to time they do still happen. As

recently as 2025, a biologist from the

Czech Academy of Sciences captured the

first ever photographs of the subalpine

woolly rat living in its natural

environment in the mountainous New

Guinea Highlands.

A massive fluffy rodent measuring more

than 2 1/2 ft long and weighing more

than 4 lb that had previously only been

known to scientists because of a handful

of museum specimens. clearly

illustrating how relatively large

species in New Guinea can continue

remaining elusive in the dense

mountainous jungle. Another notable

recent example of a major discovery of a

large animal like this in New Guinea is

the wand boy tree kangaroo. A large 20

lb tree dwelling kangaroo like marsupial

that was discovered on the island in the

1930s, but was then never seen again for

decades and eventually classified as

extinct, only to suddenly become spotted

again by a researcher in 2018 who

captured the first ever photograph of

one alive and well in the wild. And even

more recently came the rediscovery of

Annenbur's long beak to kind of New

Guinea. This unique looking akinda was

first collected and described in New

Guinea in 1961 and was entirely known by

just a single specimen of a dead one

that happened to be found back then and

it was kept under lock and key for

decades in the naturalis biodiversity

center in the Netherlands. Decades later

after it was found in 1998, researchers

realized that it was a wholly unique

species of akidna and it was generally

regarded to be extinct since no other

example of one had ever been

encountered. That is until just a few

years ago in 2023 when a team of

researchers successfully recorded the

first ever confirmed video footage of a

live one [music] in the Cyclops

Mountains region of northern New Guinea,

pulling it out of the list of extinct

species in the process. [music] And to

give you just a taste of how brutal the

environment can be in New Guinea for

these researchers, one of the expedition

members fell through a moss pit into a

previously unknown cave complex during

the search and broke his arm in two

places, but discovered half a dozen new

species of blind harvest mice, spiders,

and scorpions down there in the process.

[music] While another researcher

reportedly had a leech stuck to his

eyeball for three whole days. No thank

you. But based on these two examples of

large and previously believed extinct

animals showing up again in New Guinea

decades later in 2018 to 2023, there is

a chance that others might be waiting to

be rediscovered somewhere out there too.

And none is a more tantalizing

possibility than the thyloine. More

commonly known as the Tasmanian tiger,

the thyloine was a large carnivorous

marsupial predator that served a similar

ecological niche as canids like dogs and

wolves did elsewhere on other

continents. Though they were completely

biologically unrelated to them, they

were among the largest carnivorous

marsupials to ever exist [music] and

they were most well known for their

impressive ability to open their jaws to

an unusual extent up to about 80°. The

thyloine once had a range that spanned

all across the ancient Sahul continent

when New Guinea and Australia were all

connected. They're believed to have gone

extinct in New Guinea and Australia

around 3,200 years ago at about the same

time as the introduction of the dingo.

But as the dingo never made it all the

way down south to the island of

Tasmania, the thyloine continued

surviving there in robust numbers until

the modern era of European colonization.

The European settlers in Tasmania

treated the thyloine as an unwanted pest

[music] that attacked their livestock.

And so the government introduced a

bounty hunting program on the species

that rapidly eliminated their numbers

and drove them into extinction. The last

known living thyloine died in 1936 at

the Hobart Zoo in Tasmania. And ever

since then, no confirmed sighting of

another one has ever been made, and the

species was formally declared to be

extinct decades ago in 1982. But

nonetheless, because New Guinea is so

massive, because it's such a hard place

to properly explore due to the

rainforest and mountains, because it's

so rural and underdeveloped, because we

know the thyloines range once extended

across the island, and because we have

very recent examples like the wandoy

tree kangaroo and Adenburgh's long

beaked akidna turning back up alive

there decades after they were declared

to be extinct. There is a remote chance

that if the thyloine was ever going to

be rediscovered again, it would probably

be somewhere hidden in New Guinea. And

that is far from the only unknown thing

on the island that could be hidden from

us. New Guinea is politically speaking

divided roughly in half today between

Western New Guinea under the control of

Indonesia and Papua New Guinea in the

east, a separate and independent

country. And Papuyui is bizarrely the

only country in the world today that has

a completely unknown population. As in

nobody really knows how many people are

actually living there. As of the

country's most recent national census

that was conducted in 2024, the official

population stands at 10.18 million. But

that census has been highly criticized

as being inaccurate due to numerous

issues that accompanied it, like

incomplete coverage, missing forms, a

warehouse containing material that

caught on fire in the middle of it, and

serious logistical problems with

accessing some of the most remote

population centers in the country. Only

about 13% of Papa New Guiney's

population are estimated to live in

cities today. By far the lowest

urbanization rate of any country today

in the 21st century. Most of the

country's population lives across the

interior of the country in rugged,

difficult to access areas that can often

only be reached by airplane or

helicopter, making conducting an

accurate census probably harder than in

any other country on the planet. The

2024 census and the last census before

that in 2011 have both been widely

criticized as being unreliable and

inaccurate. And the last census they

conducted that actually was considered

to be reliable was all the way back in

2000, more than a quarter of a century

ago now. And while the official 2024

census estimates the country's

population at 10.18 billion, a separate

study conducted by the UN and funded by

Australia in 2022 that based itself on

satellite data and analysis concluded

that the population was probably closer

to around 17 million people in reality.

a huge difference in the official census

that possibly undercounted the

population by nearly 6 million people.

There's no conclusive agreement on any

of these numbers, but it's absolutely

mind-blowing to me that a country in the

21st century can still be potentially

unaware of the existence of millions of

people within its own territory. Like to

the point where Papua New Guinea might

not even be aware of the existence of

about 40% of its actual population.

Interestingly, there also appears to be

a major difference in population between

the eastern and western halves of the

island. Papa New Guiney's population

could be either about 10 or 17 million

people today, depending on which study

you want to use. While West New Guiney's

officially cited population is only

around 5 12 million, potentially less

than a third of the population in the

east despite their areas being similar.

And this can mostly be explained by the

differences in the geography between the

two halves. In more temperate parts of

the world, population densities are

usually higher and flat lowland

environments. But the opposite is most

often the case in tropical parts of the

world, where the lowlands are covered by

dangerous, hostile rainforests, and

where the mountains have more mild

temperatures and less dangerous diseases

and wildlife that allow for denser human

habitation and agriculture. In the case

of New Guinea, the mountainous highlands

run across the entire island almost

evenly from west to east, but their

structure [music] is very different on

either side of the modern border. On the

western Indonesian side, the mountains

are very steep and almost immediately

plunge down into the rainforest below,

while the coasts are enveloped by dense

mangrove swamps. An overall extremely

difficult place to sustain large numbers

of people in. In comparison, the

mountains on the eastern side feature

lower parallel ranges that contain a

large agriculturally rich plateau

between them that continues to be the

most densely populated non-coastal part

of the island. And unlike on the western

side, the mountains on the eastern side

actually reach all the way down to the

coasts and create natural coes that

break through the otherwise omnipresent

mangrove swamps everywhere else along

the coasts which in modern times enable

the establishment of port cities like

Port Borisby and Lei that continue to be

the largest urban settlements on the

island today. And part of why Papua New

Guinea has very limited governmental

authority anywhere beyond these cities

because getting anywhere else is just so

damn difficult. Another factor that

affects Papua New Guiney's ability to

know how many people actually live

within their borders is the sheer almost

unbelievable levels of linguistic and

ethnic diversity that's present on the

island. Across both sides of the island

of New Guinea, more than 1,000 separate

and individual languages are believed to

still be spoken today, which is roughly

1 in seven languages across the entire

world. In Papua New Guinea alone, there

are more than 840 languages spoken, and

hardly any of them are even remotely

related to any of the others, making

Papua New Guinea by far the most

linguistically diverse country in the

world today, with nearly double the

languages spoken in India. Despite its

vastly smaller geographic size, the

isolation in New Guinea created by all

of the mountains and rainforests is so

great that until fairly recently, some

groups weren't even aware of the

existence of neighboring groups who only

lived a few kilometers away. Because of

its harsh and fractured geography, the

island is never in its history

experienced the establishment of a

strong centralized authority, which in

other parts of the world led to the

dominance of a single language. And

that's how you ended up with hundreds

and hundreds of different isolated

groups who developed their own

independent languages in New Guinea over

thousands of years. There are

technically two lingua franca languages

spoken in Papa Newu Guinea today. An

English-based Creole language called

Takpasin and to a lesser extent an

indigenous language called Hiimatu. But

less than half of Papua Newi's

population knows either of these lingua

franca languages making communication

very difficult between certain groups

even today. Now on a slight tangent

pasin itself has a lot of extremely

interesting grammar and vocabulary that

it takes from English that I think is

very interesting to share. Some of my

favorite examples include me lo for I

love you. Time belong coal for winter

coming from time belong cold. Asl for

place of origin coming from ass place

[music] and grass belong mouse meaning

mustache coming from grass belong mouth.

For a long time, it was circulated in

western media that the topin word for

helicopter was mix belong Jesus Christ

coming from mixmaster belong Jesus

Christ with the explanation supposedly

being that the blades of a helicopter

looked like the blades of a mix blender

and Jesus Christ went to heaven. So

therefore, the blender that rises up to

heaven or mix master belong Jesus

Christ. But apparently this specific

term might have been a fabrication made

up by visitors to Papua New Guinea back

in the 1960s. And none of this is to

even mention the numbers of tribes in

New Guinea that continue to remain

uncontacted today with potentially still

unknown languages of their own. It's

believed that probably no longer any

truly uncontacted tribes that exist in

the more densely populated eastern side

of the island in Papua New Guinea. But

it is still believed that there are

probably several uncontacted tribes who

exist in the western side that's under

the control of Indonesia. At the start

of the 21st century, it was estimated by

Survival International that there were

still around 40 uncontacted tribes that

existed across the remote rainforests of

Western New Guinea. the second highest

concentration of uncontacted peoples

anywhere in the modern world, only

behind the Amazon region of South

America. However, after more than 25

years of the Indonesian government's

activities in Western New Guinea and

visits by missionaries, adventure

tourists, and social media influencers,

the numbers of unconted tribes still

remaining today has been estimated by

survival to have declined down to only

between 2 and 10. most of whom are aware

of the outside world's existence, but

have decided to keep their distance and

remain separated. They are among the

final ancient holdouts on the island,

resisting contact with the outside

world, a process that has been ongoing

for tens of thousands of years now.

Archaeological evidence suggests that

the first humans arrived in New Guinea

as much as 60,000 years ago during one

of the very first human migrations out

of Africa, making the indigenous popins

among the most ancient people on the

planet. Indigenous popins are loosely

related to Aboriginal Australians,

Melanesians, and other dark-kinned

people found across the Asia-Pacific

region. But interestingly, despite their

similar looking physical appearances,

indigenous popins are not closely

related to Africans at all. In fact,

Europeans are genetically closer to

Africans than poppins are. And a large

part of that is due to the incredibly

high concentration of Denisven DNA

that's present in poins. Denisven were

an ancient subspecies of humans that

used to live across Asia tens of

thousands of years ago. And the poppins,

for whatever reason, have the highest

concentration of Denisven ancestry out

of any population in the world today.

Their distant ancestors likely interb

bred with the deniscipans on their way

to New Guinea. And after sea levels rose

and isolated New Guinea from the rest of

the world around 10 or 8,000 years ago,

their genetics [music] became even more

isolated from the rest of the world. And

so the Denisid ancestry managed to stick

around. Today, most popins share between

4 to 7% of their genome with the Denis,

but there are some communities up in the

New Guinea Highlands who have upwards of

12% of their genome shared with them

instead. by far the highest

concentration known of any population in

the world today. And despite the

isolation of the Papuins in New Guinea

after around 10,000 years ago when it

became an island, they were capable of

amazing and still puzzling things too.

At Kuk Swamp, an archaeological site in

Papua New Guinea, evidence has shown

that the Papuins independently developed

agriculture on their own without any

outside influence sometime around 8,000

years ago, making them one of the very

few societies on the planet to have

independently developed agriculture and

domesticated plants. The Papuins were

likely the first people to domesticate

bananas, taro, and sugarcane, which

later spread elsewhere in the world

after a wave of Aranesian settlers began

arriving in New Guinea around 3,000

years ago and initiated trade. The

arrival of the Aranesians also

introduced a new layer of linguistic

diversity to New Guinea as well. Today,

out of the around 1,000 languages that

are spoken in New Guinea, between 200

and 300 of them are believed to be

Austronesian, while the others are

Papuin. [music] Now, one of the most

interesting agricultural mysteries of

New Guinea is how exactly the sweet

potato managed to arrive there. The

sweet potato is originally from South

America, but evidence appears to suggest

that it arrived in New Guinea sometime

during the 13th century, [snorts]

hundreds of years before Columbus ever

arrived in the Americas and started the

Columbian Exchange. The leading theory

is that the Polynesians probably managed

to establish contact with indigenous

South Americans sometime between the

11th and 13th centuries, which led to

the sweet potato spreading westward

through trade until it eventually

arrived in New Guinea and completely

revolutionized everybody's life there.

Because the sweet potato could be grown

in the highland environments of New

Guinea, and because it could be used for

pig fodder without the need for cooking

it, Papuan societies in the highlands

that adopted it were able to rapidly

amass pigs and dramatically expand their

own populations into large and complex

societies in the process, which remained

uncontacted from the outside world

longer than any other major society on

the planet did. The highlands of New

Guinea are basically an island within an

island. highly elevated mountains and

plateaus where agriculture is possible

and human life is comfortable,

surrounded by dense, hostile rainforests

and then the ocean. With knowledge of

the island's actual interior any deeper

than the immediate coastlines being at a

minimum to Western science for

centuries, it was long assumed by

Westerners that the interior of New

Guinea would have no large populations

of people. And the highlands themselves

remained completely unknown and

uncharted to the Western world until

very recently in the 1930s.

To give some context as to how insane

this is, Europeans managed to reach the

South Pole in Antarctica decades before

they ever managed to reach the highlands

within the interior of New Guinea.

Beginning in the 1930s, Westerners

finally began using airplanes to take

expeditions into the New Guinea

interior, where they expected to find

only sparse populations of people.

Instead, to their utter surprise, they

discovered a very densely populated

society in the Highlands that was

probably home to around a million

people, marking the last major first

contact between two large societies in

human history. The Europeans were

flabbergasted to have discovered a large

stone age civilization that was still

thriving so late into the 20th century.

[music]

But many of the photographs taken by

these first western visitors to the

highlands also capture the even greater

feelings of shock on the faces of the

indigenous popins who had literally only

known their own ancient society in the

highlands just as it had been for

thousands of years and then suddenly got

introduced to white people, airplanes,

firearms, and even metal tools for the

first time in their lives. It [music] is

a testament to how hugely isolated New

Giddy really was and to an extent still

is. And among the other greatest

mysteries surrounding the island and its

isolation is how the son of one of the

wealthiest people in the world managed

to just completely vanish there. In the

early 1960s, Michael Rockefeller was the

young 23-year-old son of Nelson

Rockefeller, who was then serving as the

governor of New York. and he was the

greatgrandson of Standard Oil co-founder

and richest man to have ever lived, John

D. Rockefeller. Michael Rockefeller was

deeply interested in anthropology, and

his father had just opened the Museum of

Primitive Art in Manhattan and had

appointed him to the museum's board.

Wanting to find a statement piece for

the museum's collection, Michael wanted

to curate a collection of art directly

from the source itself. [music]

And so he decided to conduct an

expedition to visit the Aszmat people in

what was then still Dutch New Guinea.

The Aszmat had only just started

becoming pacified by the Dutch

government and missionaries in the mid1

1950s. [music]

And even by the 1960s, many of them had

never seen a white person before in

their lives. While headunting,

cannibalism, and crossvillage warfare

were still fairly common practices.

Michael spent months interacting with

the Azmat in 1961. And in November of

that year, he along with three

companions were sailing a small

catamaran down the Azmat coast

attempting to conduct trade. Then one

night, as they crossed the mouth of the

Betsy River, harsh waters managed to

flip and capsize their boat, leaving

them all stuck. Two indigenous Azmat

teenagers on board who had been brought

along as guides almost immediately

jumped into the water and swam for the

shore and eventually made it up to the

village of Agots hours later where they

were able to call for help. Michael and

his other companion on board the

catamaran, Dutch anthropologist Renee

Wasing, were left clinging to the

overturned boat for hours as they slowly

drifted away from the shoreline.

According to Wasing, after waiting

around for a while and growing

increasingly concerned that they would

drift out into the open ocean, Michael

decided to strip down to his underwear

and tie two empty jerry cans around his

waist for buoyancy. Told him he thought

he could make it to the shore and then

jumped into the ocean to attempt to swim

around 8:00 a.m. in the morning, which

at the time was probably around 12

nautical miles away from them. It was

the last time that anybody would ever

see any trace of him. And tragically, an

airplane spotted Wasing still stranded

on the boat just hours later after

Michael had left. And he was quickly

rescued just the following morning. A

massive search and rescue effort that

involved hundreds of people, airplanes,

helicopters, and ships was launched for

Michael across the area where he

disappeared. Seeing as how he was the

son of the governor of New York and a

member of one of America's wealthiest

and most prominent families. But after

two weeks of searching, no trace of him

was ever found, and the search was

officially called off. The Dutch

colonial government that was still in

control of Western New Guinea at this

time officially concluded that Michael

had drowned during his swim to the

shore. But there is a significant amount

of evidence and speculation that he

actually met a far far more gruesome

fate instead. Headhunting, cannibalism,

and tribal warfare were all still common

practices amongst the Aszmat at this

time. And two Dutch missionaries who

were fluent in the local indigenous

languages and who had been living in the

Asmat area for years steadily

accumulated a trove of testimony from

witnesses that directly contradicted the

official Dutch government report.

According to their own reports, a small

group of Aszmat warriors were walking

along the beach that very morning when

they just happened to encounter Michael

Rockefeller after he swam ashore. It's

important to know that a few years

previously, a Dutch colonial raid in a

village nearby had resulted in the

killings of five important Aszmat

warriors, a transgression that the

Aszmat historically resolved through eye

for eye killings and blood deaths. So

upon their happen stance encounter with

Michael that morning, a white man who

looked like the white men who had killed

their tribe members a few years

previously, the group of warriors

allegedly had an argument as to whether

or not to kill him in vengeance until

one of them just stabbed him in the ribs

and began killing him. Then they

allegedly took his body back to their

camp where they cooked and ate his flesh

and brains in a ritualistic cannibal

ceremony that was common for these kinds

of vengeance killings at the time.

Locals allegedly confessed these details

to both of the Dutch missionaries a few

weeks afterward and revealed that they

had distributed his head, bones, ribs,

and glasses amongst more than a dozen

other people. Both missionaries that

sent the reports to the Dutch colonial

government, while another Dutch colonial

investigation into the disappearance the

next year in 1962 came to the same

conclusion as the missionaries had that

he was probably killed in Eden instead

of drowning. [music]

Nonetheless, this information was deemed

by the Dutch colonial government at the

time to be highly politically sensitive

[music] as they were attempting to still

hang on to their colonial possession in

New Giddy at the time and were

incentivized to present their

administration there as being stable and

peaceful. And the potential killing and

cannibalization of the son of New York's

governor in their territory was anything

but a good look for them. So, the

government officially concluded that he

had drowned instead. Well, multiple

independent investigations since then

have seemed to indicate that he was

brutally killed and eaten instead. Then,

decades after his disappearance, the

story took another bizarre turn in 2015.

documentary filmmakers who were working

on a film about Michael's disappearance

were sifting through a small collection

of uncut film reels in a warehouse in

New England that had been filmed in the

Asznat region of New Guinea back in 1969

by a photographer who is investigating

Michael's disappearance at the time just

8 years after he had vanished. These

uncut film reels apparently sat for more

than 40 years collecting dust in that

warehouse. But upon studying the reel in

2015, the documentary filmmakers

discovered something astonishing that

had apparently been overlooked by the

people who had originally filmed it. A

very brief clip of a group of Aszmat

tribesmen paddling a war canoe with a

very conspicuous looking white man

paddling alongside them. The man bears

at least some passing resemblance to

Michael Rockefeller. And since it was

captured just eight years after his

disappearance in this same area, it's

led to a lot of renewed speculation that

rather than drowning or getting killed

in Eden, he may have also joined the

tribe and integrated with them and was

never heard from again that way. And

even if this man in this photo isn't

Michael Rockefeller in 1969, then who

the hell is he? Nobody has yet been able

to figure it out. And regardless of what

actually happened to him, the vanishing

of Michael Rockefeller in his ultimate

fate remains one of the most enigmatic

mysteries of New Guinea. And conclusive

proof one way or the other is somewhere

out there still hidden from us. I also

think it's important to clarify that

cannibalism and headhunting have

continued disappearing from New Guinea

society since that time and since the

1970s and 80s have been practically

non-existent and eradicated. Now, in the

modern day, possibly the biggest thing

that's hidden from view in New Guinea is

one of the world's most dramatic ongoing

conflicts that was just starting to

begin as Michael Rockefeller vanished.

You see, the Dutch still controlled

Western New Guinea at that time, but

they were about to transfer the

territory over to Indonesia, which has

been outrageously controversial ever

since. Back in 1949, a few years after

the end of the Second World War, the

Netherlands finally agreed to recognize

Indonesia's sovereignty over all of the

territories that had used to belong to

the colonial Dutch East Indies, but with

the exception of Western New Guinea,

which the Dutch decided to continue

hanging on to for just a bit longer. The

Dutch government argued that the

indigenous Papuins were too ethnically

distinct from the rest of Indonesia to

be included in the same country. So they

would continue administering it

themselves until it was determined that

the Papuins could sufficiently take over

and govern themselves. The Indonesians,

however, never accepted this. They

argued that they were the legal

successor state of the whole Dutch East

Indies which included Western New Guinea

and so they continued demanding a

complete end to Dutch colonial rule

throughout the entire archipelago. Both

sides were also inherently interested in

Western New Guiney's abundant mineral

resources, especially what at the time

was the recently discovered and then

untapped Grassburgg mine nearby to the

summit of Punchuk Ja, which was already

understood back then to contain an

enormous amount of copper, gold, and

silver. For years, neither the

Indonesians nor the Dutch budged on

their positions regarding the issue. And

in the early 1960s, Indonesia began

turning to the Soviets for support and

began buying up Soviet weaponry. So

then, alarmed at the potential spread of

Soviet influence in Indonesia, the US

began applying pressure on the Dutch

government to give up and surrender

Western New Guinea to them, which is the

political context that Michael

Rockefeller vanished into in 1961. and

why it was especially awkward for the

Dutch who were desperate at the time to

keep the Americans on their side in this

greater overall dispute. In the end, it

didn't matter though. The US wanted

Indonesia on their side in the cold war

in Southeast Asia no matter what. And

the only way they could do that was by

continuing to pressure the Netherlands

into surrendering West New Guinea

[music] to them. So in 1962, the Dutch

agreed to transfer West New Guinea to a

temporary UN administration under the

promise that a plebeite would be held in

the territory to determine its ultimate

fate. The Indonesian military moved into

West New Guinea and then organized this

vote in 1969, but they only allowed

1,025

specific handpicked people to vote in

the decision. less than 1% of the

territo's eligible voters at the time

and they were all made to vote

effectively at gunpoint in the presence

of the army. So naturally the vote was

in favor of union with Indonesia and its

legitimacy has been hotly disputed by

West Papuan independence activists ever

since. Indonesia moved in to formally

annex West New Guinea and an armed

pro-independence insurgency formed to

resist their rule called the free papua

movement or the OPM. Indonesia's

response to the OPM insurgency in West

New Guinea since the early 1970s has

historically been brutal and relentless,

transforming the territory into what

many independent analysts have described

as effectively an authoritarian police

state. Peaceful political expression and

independence advocacy among indigenous

Papuins is still legal and harshly

repressed by the Indonesian state. Even

raising the morning star flag in the

territory, the symbol of the free Papua

movement, is legally regarded by the

Indonesian state as an act of treason

and can theoretically be punished by up

to decades in prison. For decades,

Indonesia has also strictly controlled

access to West New Guinea, blocking

reporters, journalists, NOS's, and even

UN officials, and others from any visits

to the territory, which has obscured

Indonesia's practices and repression

going on there, and have also

complicated scientific expeditions to

the western side of New Guinea that are

frequently denied access, leaving much

of Western New Guinea as a sort of

information black hole on the world map.

Since the conflict began in the early

1970s, [music] credible reports of mass

killings and forced displacements of

indigenous popins by the Indonesian

authorities have been frequent and

extensive. [music]

Scholarly research by the University of

the South Pacific in 2007 concluded that

as many as 300,000

indigenous poins have been killed by the

Indonesian authorities since the

occupation of West New Guinea began.

While a report by the Yale Law School

back in 2004 argued that Indonesia's

actions there amounted to the definition

of genocide. In addition to the harsh

repression and violence, the Indonesian

state has attempted to reinforce their

demographic control in the territory by

encouraging a massive settlement program

that they've called transmigration,

which is aimed at resettling landless

Indonesians from crowded urban

environments in Java, Sumatra, and

Suluisi to West New Guinea and giving

them land that's been taken from the

indigenous Papwins. As many as 300,000

Indonesian settlers were relocated to

West New Guinea under this program

following Indonesia's takeover of the

territory. And today, it's believed that

about half of the inhabitants in West

New Guinea are either settlers

themselves or the descendants of

settlers. The OPM, largely armed with

nothing but bows and arrows, javelins,

and old leftover outdated weaponry from

the Dutch colonial era, have waged a

low-level campaign of guerilla

resistance against the Indonesians in

West New Guinea for decades now,

attacking critical infrastructure like

roads and highways, and most importantly

of all, the Grassburg mine, which as it

turned out was among the largest copper

and gold mines ever discovered anywhere

in the world that helped make the

Indonesians rich as they begin exporting

New Giddy's minerals all around the

world. [music] And while a lot of

outside countries effectively turned a

blind eye to Indonesia's treatment of

the indigenous population. In 2018,

after the OPM launched attacks on an

important road that the Indonesians were

paving across the territory, the

Indonesian army launched its largest

military operation in decades against

them, including massive air [music]

raids, the deployments of thousands of

additional soldiers, and even the

alleged usage of chemical weapons, all

with unclear, but certainly high

fatalities.

As recently as 2022, the UN has

condemned Indonesia's practices in West

New Guinea, and some have even called

for the deployment of a peacekeeping

force to the territory to enforce order.

But regardless, due to Indonesia's

refusal to allow hardly anybody into the

territory ever, and because of the

outside world's reliance on all of the

gold, copper, and timber that the

Indonesians are taking and exporting

from West New Guinea, there's very

little prospect of anybody ever actually

showing up to help the indigenous

Papuins west of the border. And so many

of them have viewed continuing militant

and guerilla activity as their only

effective means of resistance. The

conflict briefly captured the world's

attention in February of 2023 when the

OPM attacked a small airplane that had

landed near their territory that was

piloted by a New Zealand man named

Philip Mark Meridens. They took Meridens

as a hostage, threatened the Indonesian

government that they would kill him

unless they granted West New Guinea its

independence. This all led to an intense

standoff between the OPM and Indonesia.

And because the hostage was a New

Zealander, it briefly brought outside

attention to the reality of the horrors

that were and still are taking place in

West New Guinea. Eventually, after more

than 19 months of holding him, the OPM

agreed to release Meridans alive, and

Western attention towards the conflict

in West New Guinea has gradually waned.

Though Indonesia's continued

restrictions and repression in the

territory continue unabated, and

accurate information about what's

actually going on on the ground down

there is still difficult, if not

impossible, to actually come by. Now,

there's a lot of data that goes into

producing these kinds of videos. Whether

it's visually showing you the scale of

New Guinea compared to Greenland,

detailing out how the glaciers on New

Guinea have shrunk over time, or showing

you how geography influenced the

population being larger on the eastern

side of the island than the western

side, the ability to actually visualize

raw data like this on the map instead of

just reading about it in text format is

exactly what makes learning about these

kinds of complicated geographic subjects

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