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posted by janrinok on Wednesday June 06 2018, @07:48AM   Printer-friendly
from the hats-off-to-them dept.

ArsTechnica has a story that suggests that Easter Island is not an allegory for a failed lifeboat-earth scenario that so many claim.

While trying to explain the "Hats" on some Easter Island statues, the article reveals that the scientific thinking has been slowly changing over the years, and the Islanders are probably not guilty of all the tragically foolish things we assumed, and the ssland was never as populated as some had surmised.

Along the way several key theories have changed:

  • Rats and wildfires, not human clearing, doomed the island's palm forests, while European diseases and slavery doomed its people.
  • Significant variation in Statutes and Hats suggests they were village size projects, rather than kingdom sized. Work crews were much smaller than imagined.
  • Stone hats were simply rolled on the ground from quarry to pedestal, and not with gangs of slave labor, and tree trunk rollers.
  • The statues themselves may have been rolled as well.
  • Statues were corner "walked" like a refrigerator by a few people with levers and stones.
  • Hats were rolled up and incline plane of rocks with ropes, (parbuckeling) by as few as just 15 people.

And if that's the case, then the Rapanui wouldn't actually have needed a workforce of thousands, under the direction of a powerful central ruling class, to install the hats. A few smaller communities could have done the job, which supports the argument that Easter Island's population was always small and didn't drive itself to collapse by building giant statues. Lipo and Hunt had previously come to the same conclusion about moving the actual statues.

That finding goes a long way to exonerate the ancient Rapanui in the case of their own population crash. The statues would have been a big project, but they clearly weren't ecocidally resource-intensive monuments to irrational cultural hubris, either.


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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 06 2018, @03:04PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 06 2018, @03:04PM (#689328)

    Ancient civilizations have always been the blank-enough canvas for us to project our own prejudices onto.
    Got something you think is a societal evil? Find "evidence" that it was what destroyed that ancient, poorly understood society OVER THERE.

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  • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday June 06 2018, @04:44PM (2 children)

    by bob_super (1357) on Wednesday June 06 2018, @04:44PM (#689379)

    "Hey, we have this problem and it's hurting us ... I wonder if those guys could have had the same problem, and that's what did them in?"
    Pretty standard way people think, really.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 06 2018, @05:09PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 06 2018, @05:09PM (#689396)

      It's actually closer to lazy thinking and not being able to step outside of yourself to take an objective look at things. In other words, BLINDERS and seeking a validation for your prejudices regarding your own society.

      People doing archaeology should do a better job at this than missionaries who encounter primitive tribes and ascribe their society's problems to a lack of Jesus, for example.

      • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday June 06 2018, @05:25PM

        by bob_super (1357) on Wednesday June 06 2018, @05:25PM (#689404)

        When all you have is a hammer, or a god, or a big army, every problem looks like a nail, a lack of faith, or a target.
        When all you have is the certainty you are the best, every problem comes from people different from you being the source of their own troubles.