ABSTRACT
The timing of the transition to agriculture in the highlands of New Guinea is ambiguous. Several food plants were domesticated in the highlands of New Guinea, some of which are grown only at higher altitudes. Various models have proposed how plant exploitation practices changed in the Upper Wahgi Valley around the Holocene-Pleistocene transition. On the basis of the limited ecological information available, bananas and yams were at the limits of their natural range during the early Holocene prior to the development of more robust cultivars. The ambiguous nature of the multidisciplinary evidence dating to c. 10,000 years ago at Kuk is argued to be consistent with transitions to nascent forms of cultivation, plausibly representing a novel form without modern analogue. The multidisciplinary evidence is insufficient to state that these practices together represent agriculture, that is, cultivation within a plot, as they may as equally represent incidental planting or management within a maintained patch.
