This book has been concerned primarily with tracing continuities from the prehistoric and historic past into the ethnographic present. It has spurned synchronic or structural comparisons between societies in favour of an evolutionary one. The diversity of social forms evident in the ethnographic record of the highlands has been viewed as the outcome of the differing growth of productive forces, their utilisation and concomitant social relations bearing on them through time. Within this framework, I have argued that the western highlands of New Guinea was the scene of intensive agriculture and the surplus production of pigs at a very early date. The objectives of the economy did not remain narrow; wide-ranging exchange developed which in turn stimulated greater surplus production. These societies became and remained ‘high production’ societies, and this fact is the key to understanding configurations of leadership, warfare, social structure and male–female relations. These factors are all interrelated as has been stressed, and the connections between them have been amply demonstrated.