Papua New Guinea is a country in Oceania, known for its tribal culture and rainforest biodiversity. It has a population of 10.8 million, making it the 90th largest country in the world. Its capital is Port Moresby. Papua New Guinea has a resource-based economy with mining and agriculture.
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Papua New Guinea, officially the Independent State of Papua New Guinea, is an Oceanian country that makes up the eastern half of the island of New Guinea and the offshore islands of Melanesia north of Australia.
Papua New Guinea is one of the most diverse countries in the world with 848 different languages spoken (12% of the world’s languages), of which 12 have no living speakers remaining. Most languages have fewer than 1,000 speakers. There are hundreds of ethnic groups indigenous to Papua New Guinea, although the largest is the Papuans, whose ancestors arrived in the area tens of thousands of years ago. Some remote Papuan tribes still have very little contact with the outside world.
Another large ethnic group is the Austronesians, whose ancestors arrived in the region less than 4,000 years ago. Today, people from around the world call Papua New Guinea home, including Polynesians, Micronesians, Filipinos, Australians, Europeans and Chinese.
Papua New Guinea is a very Christian nation, but the population is very spread out in terms of the denominations that they follow. 26% of people in Papua New Guinea are Catholic, 18.4% are Evangelical Lutheran, 12.9% are Seventh-day Adventists, 10.4% are Pentecostal, 10.3% belong to the United Church in Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, 5.9% belong to the Evangelical Alliance, 3.2% are Anglican, 2.8% are Baptist, 0.4% belong to the Salvation Army, 0.2% follow the Kwato Church, and 5.1% perform another form of Christianity. This is much more diverse a spread of beliefs within one religion than most countries have. 4.5% of the population either have no religion or are affiliated with one other than Christianity.
While Papua New Guinea is one of the world’s fastest growing economies, 30% of the population still lives below the international poverty line of $1.25 USD per day. Most people in Papua New Guinea still live on subsistence-based agriculture. The country has the highest incidence of HIV/AIDS in the Pacific and meets the criteria for a generalized HIV/AIDS epidemic. The leading cause of death is malaria, which affected about 1.7 million people in 2003 alone.
People have been known to populate the land now known as Papua New Guinea since roughly 50,000 BC, but any trends that far back are not at all documented. Just before the turn of the 19th century, the land quickly changed hands between Europeans and Australia. The Japanese temporarily occupied the territory during World War II.
In 1954, an aerial survey discovered land occupied by 100,000 people that had never before been documented. Papua New Guinea finally gained full independence in 1975. There was a drought in 1999 that killed over 1,000 people and put more than a million at risk of starvation. Three consecutive tsunamis in 1998 killed 3,000 people.