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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.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 06 2018, @05:54PM (1 child)
The Great White Secret of Easter Island
For centuries, the stone statues on Easter Island in the Pacific Ocean have baffled
historians, but the great Scandinavian explorer and authority, Thor Heyerdahl, in his book Aku-Aku:
The Secret of Easter Island (George Allen & Unwin, London 1988), uncovered astonishing facts
about the island and the ancestors of the people on the island. Sadly, Heyerdahl’s discoveries have
been largely ignored by historians, primarily because of the racial implications they carry.
Heyerdahl discovered, as is detailed in the book mentioned above, that the leading family
on Easter Island to this day has a familial propensity for red hair, fair skin, and thin noses.
This is in stark contrast to the rest of the island’s population, who are for the greatest part
dark, flat-nosed, and black haired. The red-haired people on Easter Island today claim descent from
a white people known as the “long ears,” so called because they wore large earrings which
elongated their earlobes, and who arrived on the island by boat at some stage in history, the exactdate of which is unknown.
According to the oral tradition of the red-haired descendants on Easter Island—who are
now of mixed descent—these first red-haired white people on the island set up a kingdom under
one Hotu Matua.
These white settlers then created buildings and, as part of their construction work, carved
and set up the famous stone statues, which all have long ears and long noses—again in vivid
contrast to the flat-nosed natives. The stone statues have been dated at approximately 1,600 years
old, meaning that the settlement of the island by these mysterious red-haired whites must have
occurred around the year 500 AD.
EASTER ISLAND’S “RED-HEADS”
Many of the statues on Easter Island have separate hair pieces cut out of red rock from a different
part of the island. This supports the inhab itants’ tradition that red-haired people erected the statues.
The leading family on the island to this day have a propensity for red hair—evidence of an early
white migration to the region—a claim which they make in their oral history as well. The explorer
Thor Heyrdahl documented all this and more in his b ook, Aku-Aku, The Secret of Easter Island.
All the while, the tradition goes, the red-haired long ears used the dark-skinned native
inhabitants of the island, whom they called “short ears,” as labor. According to the legend, the white
long-eared people were: “[A]n energetic people who always wanted to work, and the short ears had
to moil and toil and help them make the walls and statues, which led to jealousy and dissatisfaction”
(Heyerdahl, ibid., page 122).
“The long ears’ last idea was to rid the whole of Easter Island of superfluous stone, so that
all the earth could b e cultivated. This work was b egun on the Poike plateau, the easternmost part of
the island, and the short ears had to carry every single loose stone to the edge of the cliff and fling it
into the sea. This is why there is not a single loose stone on the grassy peninsula of Poike today,
while the rest of the island is thickly covered with b lack and red scree and lava b locks.”Heyerdahl continues the narrative of the oral tradition on Easter Island: “Now things were
going too far for the short ears. They were tired of carrying stones for the long ears. They decided on
war. The long ears fled from every other part of the island and established themselves at the
easternmost end, on the cleared Poike peninsula. Under the command of their chief Iko, they dug a
trench nearly two miles long which separated the Poike plateau from the rest of the island.
“This trench they filled with a great quantity of b ranches and tree-trunks till it was like a
gigantic far flung pyre, ready to b e set on fire if the short ears on the plain b elow tried to storm the
slope leading to the plateau. But one of the long ears had a short ear wife—her name was Moko
Pingei and she was living up on Poike with her husb and. She was a traitor and had arranged a
signal with the short ears down on the plain. When they saw her sitting, plaiting a large b asket, the
short ears were to steal in a long line past the place where she sat.
“One night the short ears’ spies saw Moko Pingei sitting and plaiting a b asket right at one
end of Iko’s ditch, and the short ears stole one b y one past the place where she sat, at the very edge
of the cliff. They sneaked on along the outer edge of the plateau until they at last had completely
surrounded Poike.
“Another army of short ears down on the plain marched openly up towards the ditch: the
unsuspecting long ears lined up to face them and set fire to the whole pyre. Then the other short ears
rushed forward from their ambush, and in the bloody fight which followed, all the long ears were
burned in their own ditch.
“Only three of the long ears succeeded in leaping through the fire and escaping . . . One of
them is called Ororoina and another Vai, but the name of the third is forgotten. They hid in a cave
which the inhabitants can point out to this day.
“There they were found, and two of them were stab b ed to death with sharp stakes, while the
third and last, Ororoina, was allowed to remain alive as the only surviving long ear. Ororoina was
taken to the house of one of the short ears who was named Pipi Horeko.
“There he married a short ear of the Haoa family and had many descendants . . . the last of
which are still living on the island now” (Heyerdahl, ibid., pages 123–24).
This is the oral tradition, as recounted in Heyerdahl’s book. Most certainly it in some way
represents at least a partially accurate version of events as the easternmost part of Easter Island,
Poike, is indeed the only place on the island which is strangely clear of stones. It is also cut off from
the rest of the island by a ditch, in which evidence of a great fire has been found.
The fact that the leading family on the island to this day shows red hair and some
European features, even if they have been mixed to a certain degree with the nonwhite natives, is the
clearest sign that the “long ears” were indeed white people.
A photograph from Thor Heyerdahl's 1955 expedition to Easter Island, as reproduced on page 223
of his 1958 book, Aku-Aku, The Secret of Easter Island. The mayor of Easter Island, Hei, who
claimed to b e a "pure b red" long ear is seated second from the left, front row. Second from the right,
front row, is his son, Juan - who has distinct red hair. The one pure European in the group is sitting in
between the mayor and his son at the rear.
It was after this great race war on Easter Island that many of the long ears’ statues and
buildings were pulled down by the nonwhite natives. Some were simply too big to pull down, and it
is those which remain standing today.
“Red Haired” Statues—Colored Stone
Originally, many of the famous statues had separate sculptured hair pieces as well. Sadly,
many have been knocked off over the course of time, but some remain or have been restored by
modern archaeologists. The reason why the hair pieces were carved of separate pieces of rock lies
in their color. These hair pieces were cut of red-colored stone which was hewn from a part of the
island quite separate from the place where the main statues themselves were cut. The long ears
even cut the statues in their own image, with red hair (Heyerdahl, ibid., pages 88–91).
excerpt from March of the Titans by Arthur Kemp
(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Thursday June 07 2018, @02:24AM
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