Mau Mau gun.

ausjulius · 15th February 2009, 07:55 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by freebooter

My two cents worth.

I have seen a good many images over the years from PNG on these weapons. Most often the captions that I remember stated them as home made shot guns made by "rebels"... my two cents.

Gav

i dont know if one could call them rebels, mostly in PNG these guns are used in tribal disputes and hunting..
in boganville they were used in the revolution but now modern guns are common ,

fearn · 15th February 2009, 05:43 PM

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

15th February 2009, 05:43 PM	#2
fearn Member Join Date: Dec 2004 Posts: 1,247	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