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The Una: Welcome to the Stone Age!

Remarkably, the Una (and some other Papuan mountain tribes) could well be the inventors of gardening - a form of agriculture. They seem to have done so around 40,000 years ago, at a time when in ice-age Eurasia mammoth hunters were active and nobody had thought of cultivating plants yet. Agriculture was (re)invented in Africa and Eurasia less than 10,000 years ago.

Next to hunting and gathering, the Una cultivate vegetables and cereals, using very labour-intensive methods on terraces built a very long time ago on the steep mountain.

The tribesmen demonstrate how to make and sharpen stone tools from suitable local stones. Archaeologists do not have to scratch their heads anymore to find out how stone-age people made their tools and weapons tens of thousands of years ago. The Una can show us how.

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