
In shards of glass, a new sign of how the Easter Islanders met their demise - MarlonPro
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/02/17/in-shards-of-glass-a-new-sign-of-how-the-enigmatic-easter-islanders-met-their-demise/
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gyardley
When it comes to Easter Island, since the evidence is too sparse to be
overwhelmingly conclusive, whatever theory you lean towards is likely to be a
product of your own attitudes towards the environment, colonialism, and
indigenous society and culture.

Reading up on the debate, however, will make your Polynesian vacation even
more enjoyable - like you're the detective in an island-wide murder mystery.
Getting there is a pain in the ass, but it's so beautiful, so interesting, and
thanks to the remoteness it's not completely overwhelmed with tourists. I
can't recommend it enough.

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droithomme
I'm very happy to see a new narrative, but there have been so many of these
articles over the decades where someone announces they have found the real
reason for easter island's history. Would be really helpful in these articles
if they would have a large sidebar with photos of all the different people who
were heralded as the researcher that found the real reason, a brief
description of the claim, and the year the claim was released.

~~~
ktRolster
Then you'll love these quotes from the article:

    
    
      > “But as of now, you know, I like to think that as 
      > scientists we trust what the data tell us.......
      > “That’s the beauty of archaeology, 
      > is that it’s always changing.”

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weeksie
I was just in Easter Island/Rapa Nui in December. One of the most incredible
places I've ever been to. I have pretty much the exact photo as the one at the
top of the article (it's from the quarry where they carved the Moai).

I'm pretty suspect of any claims that Easter Islanders didn't engage in bloody
all-out war with one another. From my understanding all of the Moai on the
island had been toppled by inter clan warfare (any standing Moai on platforms
have been restored to their original positions, and most of them have had
their heads cemented back on since they generally snapped at the neck when
they toppled).

So yeah, the glass blades might have been tools, but I wouldn't draw a lot of
conclusions about the amount of conflict on the island based on that.

~~~
sandworm101
There is some evidence that they were not toppled violently. Specifically,
some of them are face-down but with noses intact. That suggests they may have
been lowered carefully, or at least tipped onto something soft, rather than
knocked over by man or quake.

But I still think there was plenty of violence to go around. Start reducing
the food supply and human beings get very violent very quickly. No population
has ever sat and quietly starved to death. We turn on each other in a battle
for resources.

~~~
weeksie
My understanding is that there is at least some oral record of clan violence
and/or toppling of the Moai, but perhaps I'm way off on that. The museum on
the island certainly presented it that way. But I'm no anthropologist.

As far as being broken at the nose, that doesn't make a ton of sense to me,
given that most of the Moai have broken necks, which wouldn't have occurred if
they were lowered slowly. And the break pattern on all of them is similar to
the ones that were broken in transit. The platforms that they would have
fallen on to are made of stones and grass so there's no reason to assume that
the noses would break.

But again, I'm only reporting on what I saw and what people told me when I was
there. I'm sure there are all sorts of plausible explanations.

------
pingou
"No longer able to fish, since they lacked the lumber to build canoes, the
islanders established a diet based on rat meat. Their soil degraded by the
rapid ecological change, they burned trees and planted gardens of broken rock
to enrich it;"

I don't get it, did they burn some trees that could not be transformed into
canoes?

~~~
chippy
The previous paragraph says that rats destroyed the trees. I'm not sure how
rats felled the trees though - perhaps they ate them?

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djloche
For those interested in further reading on Easter Island, Aku-Aku and the two
other books of archeological reports from the late 1950s are incredibly
fascinating and worth reading.

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dh997
GG&S: I had two separate MDs at a gym off campus and the head of my dept
(biomedical informatics) exclaim "that's the best book I ever read!"

~~~
kqr2
GGS has received a lot of criticisms from anthropologists.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAnthropology/comments/1rzm07/wha...](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAnthropology/comments/1rzm07/what_are_some_of_the_main_anthropological/)

Like Malcolm Gladwell, Jared Diamond is very skilled at weaving a narrative
that offers "aha" insight, however, it seems to come at the expense of cherry
picking facts and events from history.

~~~
ehudla
See this too:
[http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/books/2013/...](http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/books/2013/02/jared_diamond_the_world_until_yesterday_anthropologists_are_wary_of_lack.html)

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fsiefken
Great news, in my twenties all the mysteries of the world I cherished slowly
faded because of 'science'; the bermuda triangle, easter island statues, ufo's
- the mysteries explained away. Now science re-opens the sense of wonder about
the possible role of the statues in their sustainable microsociety

~~~
weeksie
The Easter Island statues were never really a mystery. They are just large
totems much like many others that are found throughout Polynesia. There was
never a question that they were built by the islanders. There were some
vagaries around how they were transported, but for the most part you can
likely put more blame on Peruvian slavers than any other one thing.

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azakai
> they say that stowaway rats that accompanied the original Polynesian
> settlers to the island were largely responsible for the rapid deforestation
> that happened there

How would rats cause deforestation, especially rapid deforestation?

~~~
INTPenis
And how could you miss a rat in a canoe for 1000 miles? In a european medieval
ship I can see it happening but there's no evidence that these people built
anything more than tree trunk canoes.

~~~
jvdh
That is the point, the rats would have been introduced by the Europeans when
they visited.

~~~
azakai
No, the quote says the original Polynesian settlers brought the rats, not the
much later-arriving Europeans in larger ships.

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cwkoss
Paywall. Can someone give a tl;dr?

~~~
PhasmaFelis
The "web" link under the article title does a Google search for the title;
arriving via Google usually bypasses paywalls. It's still a pain, but not as
much so.

~~~
jkldotio
>usually

Not for me this time, nor earlier this week. I believe the HN staff have
subscriptions to most of these, as they have argued I should get over it when
I complained, but that leaves the rest of us to do 3-4 pageloads before we
find out it's a hard paywall and not a soft paywall.

