

Easter Island heads have bodies - timf
http://seeker401.wordpress.com/2011/10/29/easter-island-heads-have-bodies/

======
tripzilch
Of course they have bodies! How is this news to anyone? A good part of these
statues are well above ground _including_ their bodies, and we've known the
sunken ones have bodies below the ground for several decades already.

They've been excavating these statues for quite a while already.

Here, go read the Wikipedia article on Moai, it's way more interesting than
this article (which is just a copy of the first few paragraphs of
<http://www.eisp.org/3879/> with the commentary "wild stuff" added):

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moai>

Now excuse me while I go submit an article about the Great Pyramids having
five sides. Yes mind=blown, I know.

~~~
copper
I think the fact that they're referred to as Easter Island _heads_ , rather
than statues might have had something to do with it :)

More seriously, the iconic pictures of the heads are from Rano Raraku (IIRC),
and that is just heads and a bit of neck sticking out of the ground, isn't it?

~~~
gus_massa
According to Google Image Seach :) more than a half has body, and some have a
hat
[http://www.google.com.ar/search?hl=en&q=moai&gs_sm=e...](http://www.google.com.ar/search?hl=en&q=moai&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=9765l10312l0l10656l4l4l0l0l0l0l391l719l3-2l2l0&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.,cf.osb&biw=1024&bih=625&wrapid=tlif131998176684310&um=1&ie=UTF-8&tbm=isch&source=og&sa=N&tab=wi)

(IIRC, all most of them had had a hut, but in most of them the hat had fallen
an been lost.)

~~~
electromagnetic
Well IIRC most moai were placed at the shore or on the cliffs, and the hats
were generally rounded. So giant wheel + hill + ocean is definitely going to
end with the majority of the hats being lost.

------
GeneTraylor
Whenever I see an easter island head, I can't help but draw parallels between
our global civilization and theirs.

The eastern islanders consisted of around a dozen tribes, each competing for
resources with others. It's thought that all of these statues were put up in a
race by chieftains, competing with one another to put up the biggest, most
refined and the best statue.

I wouldn't be surprised if they competed in their standards of life too. ("I
eat X for breakfast, lunch and dinner!") I certainly wouldn't be surprised by
the fact that they might have had political factions, special interests and a
life rife with complicated political maneuvering. (it was certainly in the
short term interests of statue makers to be against conservation and egg
chieftains on)

After all we're the same species and they were just like us.

However what they failed to realize was the inescapable fact that they were
living on a small piece of land in the middle of a vast ocean. Their seemingly
inexhaustible resources were pitiful by any standards.

As time wore on and their population boomed, a point came when all of these
factors came together. Their squandering of resources combined with their
unsustainable way of life for a large population faced off with their limited
resources, and the result was ugly. Their entire civilization collapsed.

Most of the population was lost to famine. Their civilization descended to
cannibalism to survive. This degraded civilization became the perfect breeding
ground for disease and even more people died. This cycle went on and on until
their entire civilization was wiped out and the entire population nearly
eradicated.

I shudder to think what it must have been like to live in this world. It must
have been a nightmare.

Today like the eastern islanders with their statues, we keep on building
taller and taller structures, better and more lethal weapons, and crazier
systems. We compete with one another for status symbols at personal, regional
and national levels.

Today we are just as isolated on this tiny blue ball, with a finite amount of
resources, a booming population, combined with special interests and huge
egos.

Like the eastern islanders we have nowhere to go...

~~~
gbog
Ok, nice prose of your, but the tiny blue ball thing is bullshit. Any plane on
window seat will show you that the Earth is enormous and empty for most it's
parts, even in China.

Don't think I advocate more cars and buildings. It's just that the tiny
crowded ball argument is wrong, and dangerous, as it can be used to build a
nasty antihumanism.

~~~
GeneTraylor
>>> nice prose of your <<<

Thank you, but my prose is far from being nice. You should see my boss with a
red pen around my prose. :-)

>>>but the tiny blue ball thing is bullshit<<<

Carl Sagan has another take on the matter. :-)

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p86BPM1GV8M>

>>>Any plane on window seat will show you that the Earth is enormous and empty
for most it's parts, even in China.

Don't think I advocate more cars and buildings. It's just that the tiny
crowded ball argument is wrong, and dangerous, as it can be used to build a
nasty antihumanism.<<<

I would argue that treating our resources as essentially endless because of
the sheer size as compared to the individual fails to take into account that
there are now 7 Billion people on this earth. Each and every one of them
deserves a better life, they deserve to be able to have a luxurious bath,
flush toilets with water, wash hands with water, eat processed foods which
take a lot of water to make, wash their cars with water, drink pure water and
at the end of the day consume around 315 litres of it. Of course, today not
everyone lives like that except for wealthy countries (the statistic is based
upon the US) but I think everyone wants a standard of life like that. If
somehow, tomorrow 7 billion people started consuming water like that then we
would drink up 2 205 000 000 000 litres of fresh water in a day, but the total
possible water supply we can access (and this includes the glaciers) is only
3.5 × 10^19 litres...

That's quite an easy way to run out of water.

Now if you do the same with energy, with waste, with consumption and so on
what you have is a ticking time bomb waiting to explode. The way we live today
just can't last. I think that you can solve this problem using technology, but
its roots lie deep in our societies.

What's frightening over here is that there is no way out for us. Unlike our
ancestors we simply can't burn and move on. The earth is where we have to make
our stand. I really think that it's important for people to start taking the
gravity of the situation seriously. We need solutions, and we need them fast.
Our time is running out.

I think that there is no greater form of humanism than realizing that all of
these people need to be saved from such an horrible end and devoting your
entire life to creating a better future.

~~~
gbog
I see a demographic problem if and only if Americans continue spreading their
unhealthy way of life.

~~~
mooism2
It's not about Americans spreading their unhealthy way of life. It's about
non-Americans claiming that life (more or less) as their own.

~~~
gbog
Well, you know, I live in Chine since 8 years and, in some ways, there is a
profound influence of the "American way of life", mostly through the channel
of Holywood movies. The matter could be worse: Chinese have the weight on
their side, they can't change so fast as to lose their identity, but still,
they have an idea of what should be an happy life that is formatted by these f
__* movies (really hate then, sorry). For instance, they think everyone should
ought to live in an appartement in a tower, own a car, drink canned soda, eat
industrial food cooked in microwave, have only one overprotected child, work
in suits, go shopping each Saturday, watch baseball on a gigantic TV on
Sundays, etc.

They can't believe it when I tell them I am living in a cheap courtyard house,
rides a bike to work, never drinks soda, eat home cooked food, never watches
TV, know nothing about baseball, climbs mountains on the week-end. In fact, it
is the way their parent and grand-parents lives (eg. my neighbors) and the
younger generation don't want that, they want the "American way", the supposed
"comfort". Maybe a personal taste, but I think Chinese way is better, for me,
my family and even for the little big blue ball floating in the universe.

Don't get me wrong: I know US citizen do not live like described, and I tell
my friends and colleagues as much as I can. But the problematic part is,
again, those f __* Hollywood movies that have too much worldwide influence. (I
therefore welcome any other influence, Mangas, Bollywood, Hong-Kong kungfu,
anything _else_ is better.)

------
ComputerGuru
This blew my mind. I don't know why, I find it incredibly eye-opening that the
first thought that one might think of on seeing a head in the dirt (that
there's the rest of it underneath) has just simply never occurred to
generations of people because we were "told" by someone that they're just
heads.

How powerful words can be in casting an illusion, in defeating creativity, and
hiding the truth!

~~~
lisper
A Google Images search for "Easter Island" reveals many heads with above-
ground bodies, and a few heads buried up to their noses. That some of the
bodies are buried up to the neck should come as no surprise to anyone.

~~~
electromagnetic
What I wonder is, were these buried statues left like that by the islanders. I
mean to get the hat on the statue, the statue has to both be stable and you
have to access the head.

So was the easy method of doing this burying the statue? If so how fast did
the islanders die off that they couldn't dig out the statues back to their
intended state.

What's scary is what these peoples last days must have been like if they
abandoned so many of these before completion.

~~~
phpnode
I seriously doubt the easiest way to get the hat on is by digging a massive
hole, burying the statue, using the ground around it as a ramp, maneuvering
the head into position and then somehow either raising the statue in position
or digging out the ground around the hole so that it no longer looks like a
hole. I think it's more likely the statues were laid flat, their hats attached
and then raised with ropes and blocks of wood and a lot of man power.

Who knows why they were buried, perhaps their religions and customs changed
over time and they buried certain heads as a mark of denigration or respect.

~~~
lisper
My bet would be natural silting and settlement. Easter Island was deforested
at some point in its history. New groundwater patterns and a few hundred years
could easily sink a few stone statues up to their eyebrows.

------
alexwolfe
This is one of the most amazing discoveries I have seen recently. The sheer
weight of that stone is absolutely insane. I'm still a little stunned this was
just discovered.

I would love to know what the people who made this were thinking. To create a
work of art that detailed and massive just to bury 75% of it seems very odd.
I'm sure there was a good reason to do it (in their minds at least), I'd love
to know what that was.

~~~
Anti-Ratfish
Making stuff and burying it is very common in archeology according to my
(limited) knowledge. Chucking stuff as offerings into springs, holes etc as
offerings. Burin it with dead people (anyone under that stone is now 2
dimensional). But I do agree that this seems odd - half burying...

~~~
gedejong
Guess it could be a case of bad foundation, causing it to slowly sink into the
ground over many years. Judging the type of ground of the excavation site at
the photo, it seems to contain a rather high amount of clay, which is a
terrible foundation.

------
gregschlom
Like everybody, I've heard of the heads at Easter Island since childhood and
yet I never had a clue of where on Earth Easter Island migh be.

So here's a Google Maps link for geography-impaired folks like me:
[http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Easter+Island,+Isla+de+Pascua,...](http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Easter+Island,+Isla+de+Pascua,+Chile&hl=en&ll=-12.897489,-65.742187&spn=114.078688,227.988281&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=55.543096,113.994141&vpsrc=6&hnear=Easter+Island&t=m&z=3)

Answer: between Chile and Australia, closer to Chile.

------
josscrowcroft
That is phenomenal. Raises the question: did whoever built them bury them, or
were they buried by natural forces?

~~~
Osiris
I was thinking the same thing. Perhaps originally they weren't buried. Are
they designed in such as way as they could have stood upright by themselves?

I would guess that the people doing this work would be able to determine the
dirt they were digging into was newer or older than the rock itself.

~~~
redwood
Perhaps they couldn't turn these massive pieces of rock upright without the
aid of gravity

------
jamesladd
Anyone else wondering why it took so long to look below the surface?

~~~
AdamTReineke
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moai>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ahu_Tongariki.jpg>

The article has an image of excavated ones that have short bodies. Seems like
this one was unusually tall.

~~~
dalke
Relevant quote from that WP link:

"Though moai are whole-body statues, they are commonly referred to as "Easter
Island heads". This is partly because of the disproportionate size of most
moai heads and partly because, from the invention of photography until the
1950s, the only moai standing on the island were the statues on the slopes of
Rano Raraku, many of which are buried to their shoulders. Some of the "heads"
at Rano Raraku have been excavated and their bodies seen, and observed to have
markings that had been protected from erosion by their burial."

------
rafedb
ancient aliens!

~~~
ibisum
Read the book "Behold!! The Protong!" and you'll get an even more intriguing
explanation. These statues are a WARNING TO THE FUTURE that the great
CATACLYSM, which comes in cycles, will HAPPEN AGAIN.

Below the ground-line (which represents the flood survivors emerging from the
murk) these statues are holding the "Bi" - an iconic feature representative of
the grand CATACLYSM where the balance of water is tipped, and which you can
find in almost all ancient artwork, regardless of the culture that creates it
- an ocean-covering flood which occurs when the land masses move in reaction
to Solar activity.

Easter Island is a WARNING set up by an ancient civilization to protect us
from ignorance.

Let us never learn the extent to which SZUKALSKI was RIGHT!

~~~
lukifer
Setting aside the outlandish CONJECTURE which is the CONTENT of your post, the
arbitrary SHOUTING does not aid your CREDIBILITY.

~~~
ibisum
I would have thought quoting SZUKALSKI alone would have set that off, but okay
.. not that I'm a huge fan of Zermatism (a subject I would have thought at
least a few hackernews visitors might be familiar with) but the ideas of
SZUKALSKI are intriguing from the perspective of being able to look outside
the box. There is scientific analytical thought, and then there is artistic
motive desire, and if you apply both to the same subject you often get
surprising results.

In my opinion, the idea of Protong-as-a-warning has quite a bit of validity,
if only intelligent minds weren't so easily dissuaded from looking outside
their own little boxes now and then ...

~~~
dalke
"if you apply both to the same subject"

Where's the scientific thought?

If the world was covered with an ocean any time soon (call it the last million
years so we can include every human culture) then there would be obvious
physical traces, and salt-intolerant species, including plants, would have
died.

~~~
ibisum
The oceans move, was his point. I would investigate the science, but the
science-fiction of a language called Protong is far more intriguing and
worthwhile a pursuit. While I will always respect the mainstream desire to
discern the truth, a fiction about Easter Island may be just as valid.

~~~
dalke
Whenever I see "may" I have to remember that it's essentially meaningless, and
your text is equally valid changing it to "may not", as in "a fiction about
Easter Island may not be just as valid."

First you say "apply both to the same subject" and now you say that's fiction
may be "just as valid."

Szukalski's fiction is 30 volumes of text. You pick out that "the oceans
move"? (By which you mean "cover the Earth", not continental drift or tides.)
What about that human culture comes from a people on Easter Island, after
Noah's flood? How is that fiction at all valid? Races derive from
crossbreeding of species, again, after the flood? How is that at all valid?

If it's hard to pick the valid fiction from the invalid, then what's the
point? Isn't it like looking up the date by randomly picking a day from this
year's calendar?

------
dfc
Does anyone else have flashbacks of super mario brothers on gameboy when they
see the statues?

------
lurch00
This still a tech news aggregator? This is something that should be on reddit,
not hacker news...?

~~~
dfc
Read the FAQ and tell me how a story about art/discovery/paradigm-shifting is
OT...

tl;dr hn is not a technews aggregator.

~~~
tripzilch
> Read the FAQ and tell me how a story about art/discovery/paradigm-shifting
> is OT...

Art, okay. But how is this paradigm shifting?

We already knew they have bodies below surface for at least a couple of
decades. And a good deal of the statues are well above ground with their
bodies. They're just called "Easter Island Heads" because their heads are
often disproportionally large to their bodies. PARADIGM SHIFT!

If that's a paradigm shift to you, here, have some more!
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions>

Though, I do notice that "Easter Island Heads are in fact not merely heads" is
not among them. Maybe I should edit that, given the popularity of this story
among what are supposed to be a community of knowledgeable and intelligent
people :)

Finally, you say it's a story about "discovery". The posted article doesn't
really mention anything about a discovery. The _original_ article kind of
does: <http://www.eisp.org/3879/> Has the same pictures, nearly the same text,
maybe it's a bit TL;DR for this crowd given that you even had to summarize
your one-sentence post:

> tl;dr hn is not a technews aggregator.

In which case, congratulations to anybody who read this far.

~~~
dfc
Wow! I just finished reading though the list of common misconceptions. If you
were aware of all of those misconceptions am extremely impressed. That list
covers an enormous body of knowledge. To be honest I would not have imagined
that anyone would know all of those details, congratulations.

Did you really know all of those?

~~~
tripzilch
I don't know, it's a while back that I read the article.

I should check again, I suppose (or hope) the ones I don't know about, at
least I know I don't know about? :)

