
Easter Island statues may have 'walked' out of quarry (2012) - yashevde
https://www.nature.com/news/easter-island-statues-walked-out-of-quarry-1.11613
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skrebbel
This is relevant because Easter Island is often used as an example of how
human activity can totally destroy the environment.

I'm no expert so I probably have details wrong, but basically for decades the
scientific consensus was that for some mysterious "penis size contest" type of
reason, competing tribes of the Rapa Nui kept building more and more moais,
and they needed wood to move them because the moais were heavy. So they had to
roll them on tree trunks to their preferred location. They cut down all the
trees on the island to move the moais, and when the trees were gone the
ecology went to shit (no roots to hold the sand together, etc, lots of
trouble).

If the moais weren't moved using enormous amounts of trees, then:

    
    
        * It's not a given anymore that human activity ruined the ecology.
        * This is a bad analogy for how humans are currently ruining the planet.
    

In a weird way I find this a motivating result for humanity. If the Easter
Island thing wasn't human-caused, then maybe there's hope left for planet
Earth.

~~~
idoubtit
I think the "scientific consensus" you describe never existed.

I am no specialist myself, but I remember reading a long article about Easter
Island, signed by several archaeologists. They were really annoyed by the
charismatic people that propagated their romantic views on Easter Island and
ignored everything the archaeology proved. IIRC they especially blamed the
popular book "Collapses", though others non-historians neither archaeologists,
like the Kon-Tiki leader, had propagated other fantasies.

Studies proved the Rapa Nui inhabitants were better fed than inhabitants of
other Pacific islands, though the women were below the average and the men
above. They had developed technologies that palliated the lack of trees,
notably an atypical irrigation system: they scattered black stones in their
fields where water condensated at night. There are no remains of wars: no
heaps of bodies and no weapons. The moais were not brought down by conflicts,
they were laid down delicately when the funeral practices changed. At the same
time, the inhabitants stopped producing moais, but it was not abrupt, and no
statue was left unfinished because of this. No trace of a collapse until the
Europeans arrived.

~~~
weeksie
There are TONS of unfinished moai still in the quarry. I've seen plenty of
unfinished, half-carved statues there. Many of the broken and restored moai
were pulled down and broke at the neck, which would imply that they were not
set down gently.

I thought the rise of the birdman cult had something to do with giving up on
creating new moai. That would have been a fun contest: annual swim out to a
sharp rock where you have to steal a bird egg and bring it back to shore. But
the water was shark infested and your fellow competitors would try to stab you
to get the sharks riled up.

In any case, Rapa Nui/Easter Island is an amazing place with a fascinating
history.

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rebolek
Pavel Pavel was successfully testing this hypothesis in 1986.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavel_Pavel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavel_Pavel)

------
vfc1
This has been known for many years and it would match with the local legends
that literally say that the statues "walked" to their resting places.

It looks like the arrival of Europeans had a lot to do with the quick demise
of the Easter Island, by introducing diseases, rats and by enslaving the local
population.

This would match what happened on a much larger scale elsewhere, for example
in both South and North America.

~~~
dethswatch
rats had been there from the start and are a good (imo) explanation for what
happened-- the tree and their seeds were preyed upon.

[This explains explains it from an academic
standpoint.]([https://www.amazon.com/Questioning-Collapse-Resilience-
Ecolo...](https://www.amazon.com/Questioning-Collapse-Resilience-Ecological-
Vulnerability/dp/0521733669))

Saying that they killed all the trees to help the moai get into place (or
similar) is ridiculous.

In addition, the first reports from the 1720+ timeframe (first contact and
there abouts) estimated the population at a few hundred iirc, no trees,
toppled moai.

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King-Aaron
This is how I move my refrigerator when I need to clean behind it (albiet
without rope or a team of people), and it has occurred to me previously that
this is probably how people in the ancient world moved large objects such as
the moais. I was actually under the impression that this was previously
considered, and rebolek's answer above actually reinforces that.

------
kraftman
Needs [2012] in the title

~~~
Jaruzel
Also needs the part after # removed from the URL.

~~~
yashevde
hey folks, I'm fairly new here -- is there anything I messed up while
submitting? lmk so I can correct for next time.

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king_nothing
_Guns, Germs and Steel_ by Jared Diamond is a mind-expanding read.
Furthermore, it should be noted that many civilizations have problems roughly
around the 250 year / 10 generation time, and the US is quite close to that.
Combined with climate change and peak population, things gradually getting
more than unpleasant might be the understatement of the millennium. I
seriously doubt many civilizations went under quickly, and that most were
“frogs” boiled slowly. The time for a dramatic, practical course-correction is
now... not tomorrow, not soon and not later.

~~~
chx
Guns, Germs and Steel is... not a particularly scientific work. Read some of
the refutations linked
[https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/historians_views...](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/historians_views#wiki_historians.27_views_of_jared_diamond.27s_.22guns.2C_germs.2C_and_steel.22)
here. For example:

> in a world where conquistadors bested Aztecs with with guns and Spanish
> friars set up missions in communities devastated by plague, Diamond’s
> arguments would matter. But this is a world Tlaxcalans bested Aztecs, and
> Spanish friars set up many failed missions before gaining a foothold and
> witnessing entirely disrupted populations fall to disease afterwards.

> Mass resettlement into compact and unsanitary reduccion towns, disruption
> and destruction of traditional foodways, abusive forced labor in mines and
> hacienda plantations, and other factors all enabled diseases to assault an
> already weakened populace. [Germ] Resistance had little to do with.

> On a similar note, the most deadly diseases did not originate from
> domesticated mammals

This last one is repeated in another post:

> when I dived into the genetic and historic data, only two pathogens (maybe
> influenza and most likely measles) on his hand-picked All Star team could
> possibly have jumped to humans through domestication. The majority were
> already a part of the human disease load before the origin of agriculture,
> domestication, and sedentary population centers. Diamond ignored the
> evidence that didn't support his theory to explain conquest via disease
> spread to immunologically naive Native Americas.

~~~
mustacheemperor
Thank you. Having temporarily fallen for Diamond's all too "logical" fantasy
reasoning in the past, I always recoil a bit seeing it cited in intellectual
discussion.

