Independent agriculture at Kuk Swamp, New Guinea highlands
- Date
- c. 7000 to 5000 BCE (c. 9000 to 7000 years ago)
- Category
- Science, technology & invention
- Region
- Sahul (New Guinea highlands)
- Era
- Prehistory
- Significance
In the Wahgi Valley of the New Guinea highlands, the wetland site of Kuk Swamp preserves some of the clearest evidence that agriculture arose independently in the tropics of Sahul.
Excavations revealed traces of plant exploitation and mounded cultivation from around 10,000 years ago, with formal drainage ditches and channels for managing wetland gardens appearing by roughly 7,000 years ago. Starch grains, phytoliths and other microremains indicate the cultivation of taro (Colocasia esculenta), bananas (Musa) and sugarcane (Saccharum), a vegetatively propagated, root- and fruit-based farming system fundamentally different from the seed-grain agriculture of Eurasia and the Americas. New Guinea is therefore recognised as one of the few places on Earth where people domesticated plants without outside influence. Bananas first cultivated here later spread across the Indian Ocean world to become a global staple. Kuk was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2008 in recognition of this independent agricultural origin.
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Related science, technology & invention events
- Domestication of maize from teosinte in Mesoamericac. 7000 BCE (c. 9,000 years ago)
- Pottery becomes a Neolithic mainstay across western Eurasiac. 7000 to 5000 BCE
- Earliest milk processing: the dawn of dairyingc. 6500 to 6000 BCE
- Domestication of rice in the Yangtze River basinc. 8000 to 6000 BCE
- Domestication of foxtail and broomcorn millet on the Yellow Riverc. 8000 to 6000 BCE
- First canal irrigation at Choga Mami and the Samarra culturec. 6000 BCE
Essential reading
- Monumental urbanism at Caral and the Norte Chico civilisationc. 2600 BCE
- Standardised Binary Weights System of the Indusc. 2600 BCE
- Rise of Kerma as an Urban Centre in Nubiac. 2500 BCE
- The Pleistocene-Holocene boundary and the start of the Holocenec. 11,700 years ago (c. 9700 BCE)
Further reading
The wider story
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