In shards of glass, a new sign of how the Easter Islanders met their demise | Hacker News Reader

In shards of glass, a new sign of how the Easter Islanders met their demise

washingtonpost.com

61 pointsMarlonPro41 comments

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.

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.

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.”

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.

According to a video in the Ars Technica article linked in another post the Moai may have been toppled by an earthquake rather than inter clan warfare, so there may not have been war.

Perhaps. It would have been a hell of an earthquake to topple every single one, I reckon. (There are about 288 that were on platforms)

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.

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.

"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?

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

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.

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!"

Are you referring to Jared Diamonds 'Collapse'?

I suspect dh997 was referring to "Guns, Germs, and Steel".

GG&S == Guns, Germs, & Steel

I would say that he still glosses over some stuff. Like the fact that Bison have been domesticated now.

Successfully bred by people yes, but domesticated no.

Also helps that they have been interbred with domesticated cattle, and we have tons of tools to do it. Good luck rounding up Bison with just primitive tools.

They round them up perfectly fine. They just forced them off cliffs instead of into fenced areas. (Head Smashed in Buffalo Jump)

That's not going to domesticate them. You need to put them into a fenced in area for long periods of time, and control the population. Selecting the ones that are the tamest around humans, and killing the ones that are the most aggressive or uncontrollable.

The indians could not have accomplished this (easily.)

Go on and tell me why they couldn't?

See the later half of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEYh5WACqEk Starting about 6:40.

It's not like the cows weren't domesticated from something similar to a bison (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurochs). Bulls are still be very violent animals. That video also forgets alpacas.

GGS has received a lot of criticisms from anthropologists.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAnthropology/comments/1rzm07/wha...

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.

See this too: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/books/2013/...

Jared Diamond is the king of making money off of people's confirmation biases.

For the opposing viewpoint, see "Triumph of the West" by J.M. Roberts.

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

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.

> 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?

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.

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

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

They may well have been intentionally introduced. Here in New Zealand the Maori ate polynesian rats, and have a legend about how they were brought here [1]. Who knows whether the legend is based on an intentional introduction or not, but it seems likely.

1: http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/1966/rat-maori

Drua could be up to 30m long and could carry 200 people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drua

Polynesian rats eat palm seeds, roots, and sprouts. That's not going to kill a mature tree, but it'll keep trees from replenishing themselves.

According to the theory, when the rats were introduced to Easter Island, where they had no natural predators, the rat population did exactly what you'd expect.

Only issue I see with this theory - there were other types of trees on Easter Island, including trees Polynesian rats don't eat.

Paywall. Can someone give a tl;dr?

The Ars article on this is actually much better than the Washington Post one:

http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/02/new-evidence-easter-i...

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.

>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.

tl;dr =

There are little spearheads all over the island. An expert in spear-heads looked at them and said they aren't very practical as spearheads, and thy are probably not weapons at all.

The authors attribute deforestation to the arrival of rats, not to weird cult rituals.

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