- R.J. Wilkinson, "A Malay-English dictionary" (1903): pepuwah = curly, wooly, or frizzled, as the hair of a Papuan.
- "Encyclopaedie van Nederlandsch-Indie", 2e druck, met medewerking van W.C.B. Wintgens en E.M. Uhlenbeck, 3e deel (N-Soema), 's-Gravenhage: Nijhoff / Leiden: Brill (1919): "... Papoea's, een woord dat vermoed wordt door samentrekking uit het Maleisch poea-poea of "kroesharig" onstaan te zijn ..."
Papuas/Papuans, the indigenous people of Irian Jaya are Melanesians with black skin and curly hair. They generally have a root crop subsistence agriculture based on sweet potatoes and taros. People in the lowlands and swamps, however, obtain their starches from sago palm which gives an extremely generous yield for a remarkably little effort. Feral and domesticated pigs on the island of Irian Jaya from Southeast Asia was an event which has had vast cultural and ritual significance for its people. They are often treated as members of the family and sometimes suckled by women. In some places, they also accompany women to the gardens daily when they are weaned. From the discovery of a jawbone, archaeologists estimate they arrived about 6,500 years ago. While many other people of the world were still hunting and gathering, Irian people had begun gardening. After fairly recently, many of them lived within simple Stone Age culture wearing little clothing and decorating their bodies with paintings, shells, pig tusks, feathers, and skins. Some of the more remote groups still have virtually no contact with the outside world. In recent years, Indonesians from elsewhere in the country, such as: Java, Sumatra, and Sulawesi have come to the province.