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Comment by triyambakam | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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