The Invention of Writing on Rapa Nui (Easter Island)

I did some reading into rongorongo a few years ago and I came away with two conclusions:

1. It is very likely the scripts developed after contact with Europeans. That is, the islanders saw Europeans writing things down and then over the years (ships stopping on rapa nui were quite infrequent) began to do likewise.

2. The script found on rongorongo articacts …doesn't really seem to be much of a script at all. No one has ever been able to decipher anything, none of the natives of the 19th century could ever shed any light on their meaning, and the glyphs don't seem to be present in the ratios one would expect from language / writing. They are script similar to the way Aztec (not Mayan) codices are script. Perhaps they had meaning to one person, or a handful of people, but they probably weren't standardized in any significant way.

The paper doesn't directly contradict either, but it has quite the title and the authors do sort of equivocate on both points and present this and that as equally likely even though I don't think that's the consensus.

In any case, it seems the thread running through a lot of writing on the topic is the implication that it would be more interesting or culturally important if the islanders had developed writing on their own. Perhaps that's true, but I find the more likely sequence of events fascinating enough -- because of the implications. If Rapa Nui had been left alone, it's entirely possible that rongorongo would have developed into a fully fledged writing system. That is, only the seed of seeing some infrequent visitors writing on parchment is required for a very small and isolated community to begin to develop writing. (The Rapa Nui died off / were genocided.)

Consider: Egyptian heiroglyphs appear in the archeaological record on the order of 100 years after writing in mesopotamia. That these heiroglyphs share no DNA with cuneiform is generally used as strong evidence that the two civilizations developed writing independently. I've seen that version of history taught and written as fact in the past, although I don't know what the consensus is now. Learning about rongo rongo has colored my view of that. Perhaps some itenerant Egyptian genius made his way back from the East and began to experiment with making symbols which have meaning and seem to give those who wield them power.