There are good reasons the story of Easter Island is often held up as a parable for planet Earth and humanity’s future. The tiny island was, for centuries, as isolated in the vast Pacific Ocean as is our little blue dot in the vastness of space. The people who lived there are legendary for scaling the heights of creativity and descending the depths of destruction.
The story of the island, which is also called Rapa Nui, has changed with time — especially the part about destruction — as new archeological evidence has come to light.
What is agreed upon is that Polynesian explorers discovered the island, and the first settlers arrived probably between 900 and 1200. They brought crops and chickens with them, knowing this was a one-way journey. What happened next is not exactly known.
Illustration: Yusha
The old story is that European explorers found hundreds of elaborate, monumental stone statues, known as Moai. This suggested a large civilization — but the Europeans encountered only a tiny population of people often described as half-starved stragglers. The long-held assumption was that by cutting down all the island’s trees, the once-massive population had caused its own collapse.
A newer version of the story is emerging, which holds that the population was always relatively small, at 3,000 to 5,000 people, and so had not collapsed by the time the first European explorers arrived in 1722. (Although it would collapse later, from smallpox.)
A paper from 2020 revealed clever techniques by which a small group of people could have constructed and moved the massive statues — the biggest of which measured about 21m.
This newer, more optimistic version got additional support from a new study published in last week’s Science Advances, which used satellite imagery to estimate how much of the island was used as farmland.
Easter Islanders had to use a special form of agriculture called rock gardening, in which they broke rocks into gravel which provided nutrients and protected their crops from wind and salt spray, said lead researcher Dylan Davis, a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University Climate School.
Past estimates of the island’s agricultural land might have overshot the mark by including natural rock formations or roads, he said.
His team used a specific band of wavelengths, shortwave infrared, which gives them a map not just of mineral composition, but also of moisture, which can help them distinguish abandoned rock gardens from other formations.
The new evidence does not dispute that people did cut down native forests and lost many important sources of food, but instead of collapsing, they adapted with a new form of agriculture.
The old narrative was most famously captured in Jared Diamond’s 2004 book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. The account is still worth reading — Diamond says up front that there is disagreement about the peak population, which can only be inferred from indirect clues.
Diamond also lays out the still-valid evidence that the island was richly forested and that the islanders had cut down all the trees — to clear farmland, build canoes, erect shelters and make fires to warm the cold nights.
Trees normally can renew themselves, but invasive rats were eating the tree seeds — rats that had hitched a ride with the Polynesian settlers.
The Europeans met starving people who had lost important parts of their food supply, Diamond said.
They no longer had the sturdy wooden canoes they had used to get fish, and they had destroyed the trees that provided wild fruits and nuts. They were driven to supplement their diets with rats — and cannibalism.
Davis’ contrasting narrative is one of ingenuity and adaptation. The rock gardening was an innovation which allowed the islanders to feed themselves when deforestation had degraded the soil and deprived them of some wild food sources.
“People find a way despite the odds,” Davis said, adding that the evidence points to a reasonably well-fed, happy and stable population at the time of first European contact.
“So rather than looking at it as a cautionary tale to avoid, I think we can actually learn quite a bit from the Rapa Nui people about how you can survive despite really limited resources,” Davis said.
The peak population is still subject to debate, but most scholars think it is under 20,000, University of Hawaii anthropologist Seth Quintus said.
In fact, “it’s probably less than 5,000,” Quintus said. He also said he agrees the narrative should be about adaptation and resilience.
There is a lot left to resolve, including the archeological evidence for cannibalism and clear evidence that some of the massive statues had been intentionally toppled — perhaps showing the destructive power of internal strife.
Everyone seems to spin the island’s story through the lens of their own culture.
The European explorers might have exaggerated the problems of the indigenous population to justify the destruction they, themselves brought on.
In the 20th century, experts saw the island through the lens of their own pessimism and fears about climate change and overpopulation.
Today, scholars are questioning the early European accounts of indigenous people, which were often tinged with racism.
The island’s true story, like the story of all of us, is one of courage, artistry, towering ambition, violent internal conflict, environmental destruction, adaptation, invention and resilience. Which one gets emphasized might depend on how we are feeling about ourselves.
F.D. Flam is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering science. She is host of the Follow the Science podcast.
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