Dried Lake Reveals New Statue on Easter Island | Hacker News Reader

Dried Lake Reveals New Statue on Easter Island

smithsonianmag.com

77 pointsBrajeshwar65 comments

Conspiracy theories are really entertaining to me, however true or false they are. And there is no shortage surrounding Rapa Nui and the moai. The latest I've heard is that there is a connection between Gobekli Tepe and Rapa Nui.

not to be instantly dismissive, but how could ruins in Turkey have any connection whatsoever to statues built on an island in the middle of the Pacific 10,000 years later, besides, you know, being built by humans?

The connection would have to be truly ancient. We all ultimately came from the same population in Africa, and things like fire making and stone tool making are cultural ideas that date back even further than that time. So maybe other cultural things that pop up in widely different places are really old too.

Not that I am promoting the theory as true, but to steel man it: the same way that you find evidence of Vikings in Italy, or Tamils in Australia before colonization from Europe. I.e. that people traveled and we don't at this time have a clear idea exactly when and where they traveled, but more and more we are understanding that our modern perspective has grossly underestimated people of the past.

evidence of Vikings in Italy is not comparable. that's a seafaring society, known for migration, unbound by a time period. now if you found evidence of some connection between the Vikings and the big pyramid at Giza, then that would be more comparable, but still geographically and temporally closer, by at least double.

by Tamils in Australia, do you mean the bell they found in New Zealand? I couldn't find anything significant pointing to evidence of Tamils in Australia from a search, but I'd be interested to read about it if there is?

>more and more we are understanding that our modern perspective has grossly underestimated people of the past.

while I completely agree with the sentiment, this is such a classic pseudo-archaeological buzzphrase. even the way you phrased it specifically sounds like it's coming from someone trying to sell me books. the connotations of it are off-the-charts levels of off-putting

> Northern Aboriginal Australians can trace as much as 11% of their genomes to migrants who reached the island around 4,000 years ago from India, a new study suggests.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2013.12219

ASI (Ancestral South Indian) population wasn’t necessarily Tamil (but rather ancestors of Tamil) if they were before Dravidian speakers/Elamites migrated to India. Probably more akin to Sri Lankan Veddas.

I could believe residents of Anatolia ended up in the Polynesian Islands somehow. I find it hard to believe a cultural statue pose survived all those years without having a massive historical record littered throughout Asia. Ten thousand years is a really long time to secretly keep some custom going.

There is absolutely no connection. Carbon dating and genetics alone disprove any such connection.

Inorganic materials can't be dated using radiocarbon analysis and genetics don't account for civilization collapses.

After all, I'm in America with 0 percent of my genes attributed to Native American.

I'm going off memory here, but I believe the link is that some moai have arms and hands still visible, with the hands holding the belly. This same detail is also visible on some other ancient statues, including some at Gobekli Tepe. It's a specific detail that you wouldn't expect to find so similarly in carvings so unrelated.

That doesn't seem so specific to imply a connection. For most of human history we spent our time trying to not starve. Hands holding a contented belly seems like a universal symbol.

Also could be a pregnancy/fertility motif?

An off the cuff plausible explanation is that sticking out arms are challenging because they would easily break off due to gravity etc, whereas arms touching the body are straightforward. So we end up with statues that are very vertical all over the world because it’s easier.

As entertaining as they are, unfortunately these conspiracy theories are usually a bit racist since they deny agency to the actual cultures that have made this monumental architecture. Which is to say, the implicit comment in many of these ridiculous theories (including ancient aliens or whatever) is: "there's no way Polynesian culture could accomplish this".

Of course, there is plenty of archeological evidence of precisely how the moai were built, and why they were later toppled.

I haven't come across that at all. And actually it's the opposite. That the conventional view is that the ancient culture is very primitive, while the alternative ("conspiracy theorist") views are that the people were more technologically advanced than given credit for.

It's not always opposite; "aliens built the pyramids" theories often rest on "the Egyptians couldn't have built it this big/precise", for example.

What are these conspiracy theories? If I'm on the same page as you, these discussions are all around trying to reason about forgotten history. No conspiracy required.

That ism logic has always tickled me.

Thing X is popular. Therefore disassociating group Y from X is rude to Y. But never a thought that X might not actually be so cool.

It says something about the way our minds work.

Did I miss it or is there no photo of the new statue?

It looks like a stone jutting out of the ground: https://twitter.com/GMA/status/1630195005569523714

I wonder if, at the height of Rapa Nui civilization, their average citizen knew that there were vast continents full of unfathomable numbers of varied people out there, or if that seemed like hokey myth and most of them believed their island was the entirety of the world, or at least a significant portion thereof.

Well, Rapa Nui mythology speaks of the original settlers coming to the island, so one presumes they mostly believed that they came to the island from another, named location, so presumably they believed that there were or at least had once been other people somewhere.

My understanding is that they believed they simply came from another, similar island. I wonder if they knew that the world consisted of more than just a handful of tiny islands in a vast ocean.

I wonder how much it would cost today to erect an Easter Island style statue (either there or anywhere).

It would depend if you had to use traditional methods or if you could use modern tools. In particular if you could pour it from concrete.

No that's cheating. You get a 6.5x1.75x1.75m block of granite and a small chisel, that's it

Lol. They weren't carving granite though, it was some very soft volcanic rock.

Yeah, I'd consider carving something out of stone to be the minimum, "building" one out of cast concrete or whatever seems a different project.

I wouldn't consider the Bass Pro Shops Pyramid to be the "same thing" as the Pyramids at Giza, for the same reasons.

I may be dating myself a bit here, but when I was growing up I used to go see Disney on Ice shows at the Memphis Pyramid rather than it being a Bass Pro Shop...

It's a different style of work, but check out Opus 40. An artist bought an old slate quarry north of New York and spent nearly 40 years turning it into a drystone sculpture garden.

One person can make something fairly impressive given enough time.

There are giant CNCs [1] that can cut marble and other stone so between the machine and transportation to Easter island, in the ballpark of a few hundred thousand dollars. Most of that is setup cost for the first one though, since a block of stone is significantly cheaper than a CNC.

[1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=iI8OmfEK8cE

I'm genuinely curious what would cost the most; the stone, transport, or the sculptor?

The only cost is the time it takes you to sculpt it out of the rock.

The statues differ a lot in size so you can't easily answer that question. The biggest are very close to the quarry. Many didn't even make it to their final destination, they got abandoned or broke on the way. The picture in the article which is very common is just below the quarry, some 400 statues got left there and approximately 1000 exist in total.

On the other side of the island some statues are only standing about 1m tall while the tallest (but unfinished) statues measures around 20m in height.

Putting the Pukao (hat) on some of the statues is also an additional complexity, they were made in a different quarry.

Transport would also be a major cost. I don't think they are entirely sure how they were moved around, but one suggestion is a team of approx 20-30 men rocked/walked them to their final positions (i.e. upright, two teams on either side alternating pulling on ropes etc) over a period of days.

UK minimum wage is £10.42/h so:

10.42 * 30 men * 8 hours * 5 days = £12,500 just for delivery. That doesn't include installation costs.

UK minimum wage takes into account the current supply of labor and many layers of politics / economic theory. This is not comparable to the cost of labor wrt supply in ancient Maori culture.

And disregarding the fundamental error in comparison, the currency needs to be converted to the present Easter Island conversion rate -- does that even exist?

Additionally, total cost is probably not the bottleneck. These were allegedly hunter gatherer's, so TIME was more precious than cost because current theory is hunter/gatherer's didn't have spare time to spend on statues until agriculture.

The question was how much it would cost to do it today, and anywhere.

Question was not how much it cost to do it then. Please do try to keep up.

It would be interesting to try to recreate it "as period-perfectly accurate as possible" but yeah, I was thinking using modern equipment, but the same materials, how hard would it be.

A crane can be obtained that can lift one, probably no more than $10k a day maximum, heavy-haul trucks probably similar, so it's really the materials and the workmanship.

What would cause the stone statues to shrink as they move further from the quarry?

They don't shrink, it's just that moving them was harder the bigger they were, so the smallest ones got moved the furthest (at least easiest).

Smaller statues can be carried further without herniation?

> 2000 miles off the coast of Chilli.

I wonder how did the ancient people get there? I find it hard to believe that they just got on boats heading east deep into the largest ocean on the planet hoping that they would find an island? Unless of course, they were already there and humans' history dates way back (i.e., before the island shifted east due to tectonic plates movements)?

The island does not have much resources either, so how could they survive? Did they cut down all the trees to use and rails for these huge pieces of stone? And why can we only see the heads, not the entire body buried under the ground?

The Austronesian people (kinda) had ocean sailing tech before the foundation of Rome (753 BC), as they settled fiji and Samoa at that time. If i rember correctly they mapped the sea using weaved twigs and stones in correlation to the stars.

Easter island is home of an ecological collapse as all trees and most fauna were extinguished resulting in (necessary) cannibalism

Everything suggests this is what happened. Polynesian people had for centuries boats that could make such voyages. It’s possible the original settlers got lucky/unlucky but the technology needed for it existed for them.

There’s also plenty of history showing smaller pacific islands that are colonized, so it looks like living of fish and the sea is possible and not a problem.

There’s plenty of information about this in Wikipedia. Alternatively, you can watch Moana.

> I find it hard to believe that they just got on boats heading east deep into the largest ocean on the planet hoping that they would find an island?

At that point they would have known the island was there. People with boats usually used them for fishing first.

> I find it hard to believe that they just got on boats heading east deep into the largest ocean on the planet hoping that they would find an island?

Considering that they did exactly that in order to colonize all of Polynesia, it wasn't a belief without solid priors. They had gotten pretty good at picking up signs of land, like by watching migrating birds. Also, many of them probably tried and failed to find new land. We can only see the successes in what were likely many attempts.

It's not 'exactly that' though, as they had clues to where there might be land, star bases navigation systems etc

In a sense it's still based on luck but it's far removed from choosing a direction and hoping for the best.

Polynesians are Asian in origin.

Easter Islanders are believed to be Polynesian.

Here's a strange thing: there's some Asian-origin DNA in some of the indigenous people of Latin American. For some strange reason this is not discussed much.

It is discussed though, people write articles about it and very recently more evidence seems to support it. The sweet potato could also be supporting evidence for some contact.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Columbian_trans-oceanic_co...

Datura metel is another one.

I suppose the fact that "native americans" were also from Siberia/Asia makes it complicated to separate Polynesian/Asian DNA from "native american" DNA.

The Mapuche people look stunningly Polynesian/Asian: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mapuche

What's strange about that? It seems pretty likely(i'm not even saying it's true, just intuitive), that indigenous american and south america peoples are more closely related with east Asian folk than with indo European or African folk. Due to visual similarities as well as conceivable migration routes.

> I find it hard to believe that they just got on boats heading east deep into the largest ocean on the planet hoping that they would find an island?

Considering the historic transgressions of humans done unto other humans, I find it rather easy to envision situations where escaping by boat into the unknown is the most attractive option.

>Unless of course, they were already there and humans' history dates way back (i.e., before the island shifted east due to tectonic plates movements)?

this hypothesis' timeline is way way way off. modern humans have been around on the scale of hundreds of thousands of years. significant tectonic shifts are on the scale of tens of millions

sea level changes? maybe. tectonic shifts? definitely not

The first settlers most likely made it to Rapa Nui from East Polynesia, this trip has been done in 19 days in a replica canoe in 1975.

The island used to be almost completely covered by a forest, it got deforested over time. Initially it wouldn't have been hard to survive, there are lakes and caves with drinkable water and you can easily catch fish, there were also several species of land and sea birds.

You can only see the heads in this picture because they were carved out of stone hundreds of years ago and got buried by sand and soil over time. Winds are very strong on the island and they blow directly towards this place most afternoons, it is also situated right under the crater wall of the volcano so material will naturally accumulate there. If you walk down a few minutes from the quarry statues lay in the ground almost completely uncovered. This only happens at the quarry location, many statues stand erected (or toppled over) all over the island.

Polynesians made it to what is now Chile in the early 1300s. They left chickens there the bones were discovered in archaeological digs. Chickens are are native to SE Asia. And they took back sweet potatoes native to S. America which appeared in SE Asia a few decades later.

You could just look this up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_Island - it's all pretty well understood at this point.

Rapa Nui arrived between 300 and 1200CE, from eastern Polynesian islands (Cook and/or Marquesas). Both genetics and cultural similarities confirm this. Tectonic plate movements take (hundreds of) millennia more to have a meaningful impact here.

I think they reference Chili because that is who claims ownership of the island. The island closest to it is only 250 miles away.

Islands may be detectable from 100+ miles away, based on how they affect wave, wildlife, and cloud patterns. Rapa Nui is 2000 mi from Chile, but "only" 1000 mi from Pitcairn islands, which were occupied by Polynesians in ~1000AD.

Also, consider how many expeditions probably went out into the Pacific and everyone died there. Calories are relatively easy to harvest in many polynesian islands, leading cultures to send excess people on expeditions to discover and colonize new islands.

Seriously? Those heads have bodies?

I never knew.

So did they build them and then plant them? Or did they dig a pit and then build it in the pit and then filled in the pit.

I suspect they were built. Then lots of time passed. Sea levels changed. Sediment collected, partially burying them.

So ya, tons of time.

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Also, yr reply got strange downvotes. Maybe you hit a dogma nerve.

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