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

Tiny possum and glider thought extinct for 6000 years found in remote West Papua

bbc.com

270 pointsbryanrasmussen62 comments

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.

Thanks for sharing this!

Edit: this is flabbergasting. West Papuans are resisting combined forces of Indonesia, US, UK, with some 300 guns.

Excuse my ignorance, but what does 'raising the West Papua' mean actually?

I think OP meant to say raising the West Papuan flag.

Yes, that's what I'm thinking.

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

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

Yes, thank you. As they say, "I a word"

*flag

sorry, too late to edit

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

No chance! West Papuans are being ethnically cleansed from the forest to make your chocolates cheaper (palm oil).

There is too much gold and copper in the ground to even consider deforestation and self determination

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.)

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

Same. Watching it, I was ping-ponging between being grateful that people with such possibly lunatic levels of enthusiasm exist, and fearful that he was definitely going to get himself killed.

From what I can find, that video only contains per-expedition video. So the likelihood that he actually went is itself under doubt.

Yeah, and the way the rest of the video is constructed, it doesn't seem like it was trying to claim anything other than being pre-expedition. That's why I'm inclined to interpret the ending "I went" as "by the time you see this video, I'll be in the skies and doing it".

He provided this response to one of several questions on instagram asking when the next video would be released:

> “trenton.edly 11w • @cianocadhla I would like to take my time to make this series as high quality as I can, however I have many incentives to release this as fast as possible. The 2nd video is getting closer to being finished but I will be waiting to release it once YouTube approves monetization shortly”

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

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.

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.

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

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.)

Yeah, it's a complicated mess. I'm just going to link some of the New Guinea wiki articles:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papua_New_Guinea (the Eastern half; an independent state, technically a realm of King Charles III)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_New_Guinea (Indonesian since 1962)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Papua_(province) (The province in Western New Guinea where that giant mine is)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grasberg_mine (see parent comment; tons of ore)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papua_conflict (still going on; horrific)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_West_Papua (proposal for independent state in place of Western New Guinea; likely a lot of politics and money involved in stopping it)

Probably still lots of people being killed to keep Indonesia (and commercial interests) in control of Western New Guinea. I don't even pretend to understand it all.

It also has a link to Austin, TX. The American company involved in the Grasberg mine is Freeport-McMoRan. In the 1980s-90s it also attempted to develop housing along the Barton Creek watershed. This lead to the ordinance and political group called "Save Our Springs." At the time many people tied the environmental degradation of Papua New Guinea with what the company planned for Austin.

https://www.austinchronicle.com/news/the-battle-for-barton-s...

The invisibility of non western colonialism and non white bad actors to the western left is all you need to know, to know all about them. A ecocidal catastrophe and its of course all about us.

West papua is basically indonesia colonizing and other economic groupies having a having a free for all feeding frenzy.

We do not have moral agency you see, so we cannot do anything bad.

We are just noble savages who need white saviours to save us from white baddies.

If we actually had choice and agency we might not even need white saviours to guide us.

Meanwhile the western right rapes and pillages and bombs with horrific grins on their faces while destroying the environment and denying climate change?

Just seems an interesting pointed critique when you see "the western left" basically completely collapsing on supporting the genocide in Gaza and is clearly much more willing to change its mind on you know... helping other people.

Do they really help though? Help implies improving and changing to adapt to new circumstances, to suffer less. But we had 3 generation of help and the "help" did nothing in africa or the middle east. Others helped themselves and have now better oportunities. China would still be stuck where it dependend on western help and into romantic revolution whorship instead of hard work. Your ideas are disjunct with reality, the world is filled with counter examples, now get going, get new ideas or be reduced to a greek theater choir.

If you would have helped.. the middle east would be like california and nobody would goto ghaza except for holidays. But you are not helping, because you can only emote, not analyse and help

Not enough for sure, not enough. I agree, new ideas are required, neoliberalism should die a speedy death.

> unspoiled by modern civilisation

Not for long. Tons of forests were burned to make way for more profitable crops

Crop, not crops. A palm oil monoculture as far as the eye can see.

This 48sec video (same island but across the border in PNG) is one of my favourite things. It shows the moment that a conservationist and scientist see video of a bird last documented 140yrs ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVSoZ-bAm9w

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

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

West/Indonesian Papua is not North Korea. Yes, travel in the interior requires permits (surat jalan) and you won't be let anywhere near the mine, but as a tourist you can fly in to any of the major cities with no questions asked and there's even an active tourism industry in the Baliem Valley.

Not as bad as North Korea is a pretty low bar.

How do the other countries come into it? its a (part) American owned mine. Are there British, Dutch, French or South korean troops there occupying West Papua?

They are US vassal states. SK's military in particular is formally under US command since the Korean War and have participated in every US conflict since.

What exactly are they doing in West Papua? The claim was that they were occupying West Papua.

South Korea just refused to help the US in Iran! https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/18/world/asia/south-korea-pr...

There's important nuance here. It's under US command within Korea in the event of a north Korean invasion to ensure a unified command structure. Last I heard when I lived there (10+ years ago), they were actively transitioning to Korean command in the event of war with North Korea, although I'm not sure if that was ever completed.

They're not a vassal military or state.

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.

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

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

Which is slightly larger than metropolitan France

Sorry I'm not familiar with these measurement units, how many football fields is that?

Papua, not Borneo. Different islands, and both of them are huge.

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

> thought extinct for 6000 years

Does this makes sense for an English speaker ?

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

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

"Possum considered extinct for 6,000 years"

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.

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

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.

Right. But, one says "X is thought extinct." or "X is thought to have been extinct for 6000 years" (or "gone extinct ... ago").

As written don't you think it begs the question (joke, fellow language pedant :) of who was doing the thinking that it was extinct over the course of those 6,000 years?

if it was written "is thought" that would be wrong because it is not thought to be extinct, if it was written "was thought" then one would have the same problem of wondering who was doing that thinking.

The phrasing is pretty normal, however it might have been better handled with a comma between glider and thought - my personal preference.

This is one of the aesthetic qualities of English (the dropping of helping infinitives) that makes things like "Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" or "Police Police police Police" possible

https://medium.com/luminasticity/cardinality-and-growth-rate...

I appreciate it as an example of the whimsical toleration of ambiguity common to English.

Although maybe it should have been "Tiny possum and glider thought: 'Extinct for 6,000 years!'"

To me as an American this sounds perfectly fine.

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

Sounds fine to me but I am Australian

There is still hope for the dodo.

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