Just pitching in my two kina...
Biologists from Alfred Russel Wallace to Jared Diamond have worked with the Papuans when doing biological surveys.
What's interesting is that they report that the Papuans are more intelligent, on average, than the Malays they worked with (or most of the whites). They were observant, creative, inventive, and had great memories. Diamond uses this observation as the cornerstone of his Guns, Germs, and Steel. A PNG native inspired the book, because he asked Diamond, basically, why the white men had all this neat technology, when they were all so stupid, whereas his people were stuck with Stone Age kit. (Diamond's thesis, if you haven't read it, is that PNG is small, isolated, and quite hostile to civilized life, and that our ancestors had it easy, because of the large number of people trading across Europe and Asia for millenia. Even though the Papuans were smarter, they were limited by low numbers, limited resources, and by all the work they had to do just to survive.).
That said, I'm not surprised that the highlanders are making working guns out of whatever they can get their hands on. Good for them.
Best,
F
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