New Guinea is the heart of global linguistic diversity. New Guinea makes up 1% of the global land area as an island, containing less than

Dr. Sam Passmore is a computational anthropologist at the Australian National University, as part of the Evolution of Cultural Diversity Initiative (ECDI). His primary research focuses on the linguistic and cultural diversity of kinship practices, where he maintains the global kinship terminology database Kinbank (kinbank.net), but has a breadth of experience in the computational modelling of cultural evolution. He completed his PhD at the University of Bristol in 2020, before moving to Keio University (Japan) to study the cultural diversity of music, before arriving at ANU. His current research is interested in the cross-section of genetic and linguistic diversity, and the role that kinship plays in driving diversification in both domains.