The Highlands of New Guinea are one of the most remote places on the planet, a maze of crosscutting valleys and enormous mountains that weren't reached by outsiders until the 1930s. Yet they're also one of the world's original centers of agriculture, a place responsible for domesticating crops like taro and the omnipresent banana. Crops on which millions of people rely today trace their origin all the way back to the isolated high valleys of New Guinea many thousands of years ago.

I wrote a book, and it comes out in July! You can preorder (in hard copy, e-book, or audiobook) The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World here.

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