00:00 More than 7,000 years ago, the highlands of New Guinea were home to an agricultural revolution that was just as impactful as anywhere else on the planet.

04:32 The highlands of New Guinea were home to an independent invention of agriculture that has been around for at least 7,000 years, and the people who developed it have been living there for a very long time.

08:46 The ancestors of today's aboriginal Australians, Popuans, and Melanesians interbred with archaic humans multiple times in the region of Southeast Asia, New Guinea, and Australia, which was a very different geography than it is today, with a significantly different series of environments and possible ways of life.

13:02 The ancestors of Aboriginal Australians and Papuans were living in the regions they occupy today no later than 45 or 50,000 years ago, while the ancestors of Melanesians went to the Bismarck and Solomon Islands no later than 20,000 years ago.

17:31 Around 10,000 years ago, evidence suggests intentional manipulation of the environment to cultivate plant foods at Cook Swamp in New Guinea, although there is disagreement among scholars on how to interpret this evidence.

21:36 Around 10,000 years ago at Cook Swamp in New Guinea, people cleared mountain forests using fire, created drainage channels, and cultivated plant foods such as taro, yams, and bananas, either by creating favorable conditions for their growth or by transplanting them from lower altitudes, and this process eventually evolved into shifting cultivation.

25:35 By around 6000 BC, people in the New Guinea Highlands were developing shifting cultivation practices using ground stone axes and adzes, eventually transitioning from patch-based foraging to intentional cultivation of plots, and by around 7000 years ago, agriculture had been invented in the New Guinea Highlands, but shifting cultivation around Cooke Swamp became no longer viable due to changes in the landscape.

29:57 Around 7,000 years ago, the people at Cooke Swamp in the New Guinea Highlands developed a system of agriculture that involved creating mounds, using wooden digging sticks, and cultivating crops such as bananas and taro, which were intentionally grown in large quantities and processed using grindstones, while also using controlled burning and drainage ditches to maintain the fertility of the soil, resulting in a long-lived and successful agricultural system.

33:47 The development of agriculture in the New Guinea Highlands did not lead to the expected societal changes and advancements typically associated with the transition from hunter-gatherer to farming societies, challenging the assumption that agriculture inevitably leads to the emergence of civilization.

37:40 The development of agriculture in the New Guinea Highlands eventually led to the colonization of the Pacific islands by Austronesian-speaking seafarers, who adopted the cultivation of taro and bananas from the local New Guineans and used these crops to colonize the furthest reaches of the Pacific.