On Thu, 9 Feb 2006, Darryl and Natalia <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >Highlights from an article by The Associated Press, Feb. 8/06, printed in >The Times Colonist, Victoria > >Remarkably, there still exists an isolated old growth tropical forest of >over a million hectares in the western summits of the Foja Mountains, >nestled in Indonesia's more remote eastern Papua province. Should you be >overcome with the desire to explore it on your own, you may expect to go >through umpteen legal and political barriers to obtain a simple fly by >permit. Fortunately, the area has been protected not only as a wildlife >sanctuary, but as a land tightly restricted to foreigners.
This "Papua province of Indonesia" is actually Western New Guinea, and the highlands are famous among other things for having, as discussed here before, an incredible density of languages, directly resulting from the deeply valleyed ruggged terrain which isolates the inhabitants of each valley from their near neighbours, a situation which is similar to here in BC, where the number of deeply distinct (=> anciently separated) native languages exceeds the total number throughout the rest of the continent. (Western New Guinea is also along the route of the earliest Homo sapiens settled regions in the world outside of africa, easily twice as ancient as our european habitation, so those languages have really had some deep time in which to grow.) And being east of the "Wallace line", its biota are associated with Australia, ie marsupials and gum trees. -Pete V _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] http://fes.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
