Astro Hacker News - Tiny possum and glider thought extinct for 6000 years found in remote West Papua

swiftcoder |next [-]

Really cool. I hope they succeed in establishing native rights to the forest before the logging companies make them extinct again.

culi |next |previous [-]

Cogito, who does some of the most astounding and in-depth research on global histories, just came out with an incredible documentary about the history of West Papua that changed the way I see it forever. I highly recommend it (and most of Cogito's work. Even his extensive citations are worth spending time with)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWp5904RkJY

This is an area where raising the West Papua can give you 15 years in prison.

nkoren |next |previous [-]

Okay, here's a West Papua mystery which the internet needs to become as interested in as I am. It was one of those random things that the Youtube algorithm pushed to me when it only had a few thousand views, and I can't stop thinking about it since: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpNKDCo23iM

tl;dr: very passionate young man develops a special interest in the Thylacine (Tasmanian Tiger), and becomes convinced (not without some evidence) that it might still be alive in Western Papua. So he spends two and a half years preparing to Indiana Jones it into the mountains of Western Papua, and the video ends with him saying "I went". Cut to black. No part 2 was ever posted.

Damn, I really want to know how that story finishes. (I fear that "I went" actually meant "I'm going right now", with the intention that he would post part 2 upon his return. Which appears not to have happened.)

OneLeggedCat |root |parent [-]

Just clicked and watched that. Amazing really. I can't figure out what I believe about his sanity.

msuniverse2026 |next |previous [-]

Always surprised when I see new animals discovered. Especially in tiny places like Borneo which seems to be the spawn point for new animals god is testing out.

hermitcrab |root |parent |next [-]

Tiny? Borneo is 723,154.07 km^2 and the 3rd largest island in the world.

meindnoch |root |parent |previous [-]

Borneo is 3x the size of the UK. It's about as large as Texas.

sidewndr46 |root |parent [-]

Which is slightly larger than metropolitan France

culi |next |previous [-]

It's incredibly difficult to do research in West Papua which is under very violent occupation by Indonesia, the US, Britain, South Korea, the Netherlands, and France. Foreign journalists and human rights monitors are basically completely barred. Much of this decades long conflict is around the US-owned Grasberg Mine

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grasberg_mine

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triyambakam |next |previous [-]

I wouldn't be surprised if more such discoveries were found. Papua is, as best as I can describe it, insane.

abanana |root |parent [-]

Indeed, it seems the interior of the country is so little-known and so unspoiled by modern civilisation, it would be surprising if we don't have any unexpected discoveries coming out of there in the nearish future.

anon84873628 |root |parent [-]

Not to get all internet indignant about it, but the island is currently split into two countries thanks to the colonization by Indonesia. Which human rights advocates and indigenous leaders consider to be a systematic ethnic cleansing and cultural erasure of the indigenous Melanesian Papuan population. Along with an ecocide driven by a toxic mix of military occupation, corporate exploitation, and resource extraction.

The situation in West Papua is essentially one of the least recognized humanitarian and ecological tragedies slowly happening right under our noses.

culi |root |parent |next [-]

The part people especially don't like to talk about is that Indonesia is acting as a proxy for the US, Britain, and France here. Readers of The Jakarta Method won't find this surprising but the scale here is astounding. The largest gold and copper mine in the world is here and it is owned by the US.

The US currently has 8,133.5 metric tons of gold which is more than the next 4 combined (Germany, Italy, France, and China). About 1,700 metric tonnes (out of an estimated total 4,720) has been extracted from West Papua by the US

mmooss |root |parent [-]

Is there a well-known, respected source? I see people talking about it, but someone's book and a Wikipedia article don't distinguish it from lots of fringe ideas, unfortunately. (I do know about Suharto, etc.)

red75prime |root |parent |previous [-]

[flagged]

DoItToMe81 |root |parent [-]

The military goes in and splits up their communities by murdering them on behalf of logging and mining companies.

red75prime |root |parent [-]

What it has to do with the "cultural erasure" I quoted specifically? "Who owns the land" is a different problem that is not made simpler by the fact that the land is subject to tribal conflicts.

meindnoch |next |previous [-]

So, now that we can observe them alive, how close are they to the reconstructions we've made based on the fossils?

hulitu |next |previous [-]

> thought extinct for 6000 years

Does this makes sense for an English speaker ?

bryanrasmussen |root |parent |next [-]

In British English it is totally reasonable and in fact relatively elegant, in American it might take a couple of seconds to figure out what was being said and it would seem ungainly for this reason.

On the British elegance: in British English one could of course use "thought to be extinct" and in these kinds of structures it has become common as a stylistic touch to drop the helping infinitive, "to be", considering it implied.

ChrisMarshallNY |root |parent |next |previous [-]

I don't usually use this structure, but my mother did, and she was an awesome writer. She was British, so it may be more common, over there.

culi |root |parent |next |previous [-]

Yes but they could've used the word "considered" instead.

"Possum considered extinct for 6,000 years"

samatman |root |parent |next |previous [-]

It's a bad sentence. They mean "thought to have gone extinct 6000 years ago". But some allowance for headline constraints should be given.

akk0 |root |parent |next |previous [-]

Yes, with the caveat that it's the distinct dialect of Headlinese

mistrial9 |root |parent |previous [-]

yes I recognize that as legitimate grammar, in a literary way.. It can be spoken that way, too..

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RomannBami |previous [-]

C'est vraiment super, mais faisons très attention quand même