Easter Island

The first settlers on Easter Island didn't arrive until the year 1200, up to 800 years later than previously thought, a new study suggests. The revised estimate is based on new radiocarbon dating of soil samples collected from one of oldest-known sites on the island, which is in the South Pacific west of Chile.The finding challenges the widely held notion that Easter Island's civilization experienced a sudden collapse after centuries of slow growth. If correct, the finding wouldmean that the island's irreversible deforestation and construction of its famous Moai statues began almost immediately after Polynesian settlers first set foot on the island.The study, conducted by Terry Hunt of the University of Hawaii, Manoa and Carl Lipo of California State University, Long Beach, is detailed Thursday in the online version of the journal Science.

The conventional story According to one widely held view, a small band of Polynesian settlers, perhaps no more than a few dozen people, arrived on the Easter Island sometime between A.D. 400 and 1000. The settlers lived in harmony with the environment for hundreds of years, and the population slowly grew.

Some scientists estimate that at its height, Easter Island's population may have beenas much as 20,000 people. Around 1200, the story goes, the inhabitants began cutting down the island's subtropical trees and giant palms in large numbers to build canoes and to transport the giant stone statues, which started going up around this time. The large-scale deforestation led to soil erosion, and over a span of several centuries, the island's ability to support wildlife and farming was compromised. People began to starve. In a last-ditch effort at survival, they became cannibals. The collapse of both the island's ecology and civilization was so complete that by the time the Dutch arrived in the 1700s, Easter Island was a sandy grassland void of nearly all its native wildlife; its human inhabitants were reduced to a starving population of 3,000 or less. This is the story pieced together byresearche......

Rats and Europeans are likely to blame for the mysterious demise of Easter Island, a team of anthropologists suggests.The fate of the people who built hundreds of 10-ton stone statues on the South Pacific island and then vanished has long been seen as a cautionary environmental tale. Natives deforested the island paradise to transport the statues, the story goes, triggering erosion that damaged farmlands. And then they supposedly bumped themselves off in a cannibalistic civil war in about 1650.But anthropologist Terry Hunt of the University of Hawaii at Manoa first blames the Polynesian rat. The rats probably deforested the 66-square-mile island's 16 million palm trees."Palm tree seeds are filet mignon to rats," Hunt says. Working with colleagues at the island's anthropology museum and elsewhere since 2001, Hunt's team has undertaken an extensive archaeological survey of the island: Charcoal remains show that Polynesians settled the island in 1200, much later than supposed from earlier, inaccurate dates of such deposits. Pollen and ash deposits show that the number of palm trees declined swiftly in the years before fires, the signature of human occupation, appeared on the island. Rat remains indicate that the rodent population spiked at 20 million from 1200 to 1300 and then dropped off to a mere 1 million after the trees were gone. Skeletal remains and digs of old homes show little or no evidence of early warfare. Instead,the disappearance of Easter Islanders probably was caused by visiting Dutch traders in the 1700s, who brought diseases and, later, slave raiding, says Hunt, who presented his findings at an American Anthropological Association meeting last week. Older explanations essentially blamed the victims for their demise, says archaeologist Patricia McAnany of Boston University.

The island still represents a cautionary tale, she says, but one of the dangers of invasive species. But New Zealand's John Flenley of Massey University calls the idea "most unlikely," saying rats didn't deforest other Polynesian islands. Hunt counters that deforestation of palm trees by Polynesian rats occurred on the Hawaiian islands. And the Easter Island palms were uniquely vulnerable because the rats had no predators and the trees didn't grow at......

Rats and Europeans are likely to blame for the mysterious demise of Easter Island, a team of anthropologists suggests. The fate of the people who built hundreds of 10-ton stone statues on the South Pacific island and then vanished has long been seen as a cautionary environmental tale. Natives deforested the island paradise to transport the statues, the story goes, triggering erosion that damaged farmlands. And then they supposedly bumped themselves off in a cannibalistic civil war in about 1650. But anthropologist Terry Hunt of the University of Hawaii at Manoafirst blames the Polynesian rat.

The rats probably deforested the 66-square-mile island's 16 million palm trees. "Palm tree seeds are filet mignon to rats," Hunt says.The disappearance of Easter Islanders probably was caused by visiting Dutch traders in the 1700s, who brought diseases and, later, slave raiding, says Hunt, who presented his findings at an American Anthropological Association meeting last week.Older explanations essentially blamed the victims for their demise, says archaeologist Patricia McAnany of Boston University. The island still represents a cautionary tale, she says, but one of the dangers of invasive species.But New Zealand's JohnFlenley of Massey University calls the idea "most unlikely," saying rats didn't deforest other Polynesian islands. Hunt counters that deforestation of palm trees by Polynesian rats occurred on the Hawaiian islands. And the Easter Island palms were uniquely vulnerable because the rats had no predators and the trees didn't grow at elevations too high for them to reach.

View: Full Article | Source: USA Today

Easter Island is the world's most isolated inhabited island. It is also one of the most mysterious. Easter Island is roughly midway between Chile and Tahiti. The triangular shaped island is made mostly of volcanic rock. Small coral formations exist along the shoreline, but the lack of a coral reef has allowed the sea to cut cliffs around much of the island. The coastline has many lava tubes and volcanic caves. The only sandy beaches are on the northeast coast.

The inhabitants of this charming and mysterious place called their land: Te Pito o TeHenua, 'the navel of the world.'

It sits in the South Pacific Ocean 2,300 miles west of South America, 2,500 miles southeast of Tahiti, 4,300 miles south of Hawaii, 3,700 miles north of Antarctica. The closest other inhabited island is 1,260 miles away - tiny Pitcairn Island where the mutineers of the H.M.S. Bounty settled in 1790.

Archaeological evidence indicates discovery of the island by Polynesians at about 400 AD.

In 1722, a Dutch explorer, Jacob Roggeveen, sighted and visited the island. This happened to be on a Sunday, Easter Sunday to be precise, and the name stuck: Easter Island (Isla de Pascua in Spanish). What he discovered on Easter Island were three distinct groups of people, Dark skinned, Red skinned, and very Pale skinned People with red hair".

The Polynesian name of the island is Rapanui, which is a name given by a Tahitian visitor in the 19th century who says that the island looked like the Tahitian island of 'Rapa,' but bigger, 'Nui.' Inhabitants are of Polynesian descent, but for decades anthropologists have argued the true origins of these people, some claiming that ancient South-American mariners settled the island first. What many early explorers who visited the island found, was a scattered population with almost no culture they could remember and without any links to the outside world. The Easter islanders were easy prey for 19th century slave traders which depreciated even more their precarious culture, knowledge of the past, and skills of the ancestors...