Why didn't Austronesians/Polynesians settle New Guinea?They sailed way the fuck out to Madagascar and across the trackless Pacific to Hawaii and Easter Island (and to the South American coast) yet _deliberately_ avoided New Guinea (and Australia)?New Guinea in particular is a head scratcher, as it's literally right there and they settled all the surrounding islands and sailed back and forth past it for generations, yet for some reason they went out of their way to avoid settling the island?
>>18540297in new guinea there be monsters. the congo and the amozon have nothing on that place.
*amazon*
>>18540297They didn't avoid shit anon, your map says right there they colonized the coasts. It's just really hard to penetrate inland because it's a very dense jungle with a lot of mountains.
>>18540318headhunters with a taste for human flesh didn't help too much either.
>>18540318>It's just really hard to penetrate inland because it's a very dense jungle with a lot of mountains.
>Cook the iwi some fuckin' Papuans, bitch
>>18540297They prioritized empty islands, or at least nearly empty areas (hunter-gatherers) whose natives they could push asidePapua had people and agriculture so a decent population density, and Austronesians didn't have superweapons ala the later European colonizers
>>18540297Wait, Jungle de Ikou was Taiwanese anime/novel/manga all along?
But the polynesians also did that.>>18540324I'm not sure if it is known how quickly the austronesians colonized all of it. And as far as I know some parts of it are actually good for rice agriculture.
>>18540724>They prioritized empty islands
