More evidence against the "ecocide" theory of Easter Island
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Wait, so the thesis here is that they never actually collapsed, that the 3,000 person population noted by Europeans was always the stable population of the island?
It also suggests that they did cut down all their trees, but they did so not to build Moai statues, but to sort of kickstart their lithic agriculture.
I don't know enough to know whether cutting all your trees down and not being able to grow them back counts as an ecological collapse, or whether that was the only way they could sustain even three thousand people.
I'd love to hear the other side of this argument. I'm no expert, but this sounds weird to me.
Imagine paving over the entire Amazon and replacing it with monocrop greenhouses. It would be massive ecological collapse, but in terms of producing food calories for humans it might become more productive.
They have also toppled the statues and gave up on their gods so there must have been some major societal shift.
Some Dude: We went cow tipping last night, it was hilarious
Me: So, you actually tipped a 1300 lbs cow over?
Some Dude: Well...I didn't, but Jake did.
Me: So you saw Jake tip a cow over?
Some Dude: Well...no, but Jake told me that he did it and I believed him.
The Moai statues were made in a quarry inland and transported to the coastline, where they were set on stone platforms (called ahu) fully above ground.
When the Europeans first visited there were hundreds of them standing all around the coastline, always looking outward at the sea. It is believed that they were meant to protect the island.
The Rapa Nui people later toppled _all_ of the statues and destroyed them.
The only ones that were spared are the ones that were lost in transport from the quarry -> and these are the ones that are often partially buried and are so well known today.
The buried ones are the Moai that were abandoned during transport and they were buried by shifting soils, etc.
The islanders have not buried them. The statues the islanders managed to transport were placed on stone pedestals. Then, later, they've toppled them all, but only after Europeans visited.
The statues that were successfully placed were not buried and they were all toppled by 1868. The buried ones you know were never transported to their destination.
Boats come to mind.
Knowing the genus of those palms is essential to answer this question
The real deal were in the Paschalococos palms.
As I suspected those were included in the tribu Cocoseae so they were the most important plant in the island for humans.
When the palms went extinct in 1650 the society entered in a whirlwind extinction situation. Rapa nui inhabitants commit ecological suicide to themselves and the rats and foreigners carrying diseases give them the final blow. If you replace Paschalococos with Sophora there is a hidden big collateral effect. Even if the island is still covered in luscious green is not the same family of green.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCyzrie_les&list=PLR7yrLMHm1...
Takeaway: Jared Diamond’s Easter Island collapse theory seem remarkably out of touch.
and the thesis:
> Rapa Nui (Easter Island) is often used as an example of how overexploitation of limited resources resulted in a catastrophic population collapse. A vital component of this narrative is that the rapid rise and fall of pre-contact Rapanui population growth rates was driven by the construction and overexploitation of once extensive rock gardens. However, the extent of island-wide rock gardening, while key for understanding food systems and demography, must be better understood ... We show that the extent of this agricultural infrastructure is substantially less than previously claimed and likely could not have supported the large population sizes that have been assumed.
Tl;dr - Any argument about population collapse doesn't make sense as the maximum population is overestimated.
Easter Island is the closer situation that we have to a Mars colony. Ecocide don't needs people deliberately chopping every single tree. Just triggering an irreversible process that can slowly evolve for a couple generations.
Human stupidity started the process, but rats alone would be more than capable to finish it and kill every single inhabitant on the island by thirst or diseases
It seems that they are distributed in coastal areas. It seems also that many moai were built or moved to those areas. Therefore there must be a place, somewhere in the island with a lot of accumulated rubble, but this place will not be just a lot of tuff gravel.
To cut a rock, you need something harder. Egyptians used metals, quarz sand and granite but you can't always find rhyolite in a volcanic island. I assume that there is not a source of granite on Eastern Island and that mining metals or diamonds is out of the table.
We could speculate that antique sculptors learned soon that basalt was the most convenient source of polishing moai. Can be found everywhere in a volcanic island, and is harder than tuff.
If we don't find art carved in basalt in that culture, that would suggest that the culture was restricted to carve soft rocks only, by lack of a source of tools harder than basalt in a significant amount.
Is also logical to assume that after a while the polishing material gets worn and must be discarded and replaced after shrinking to a size too small to be manageable.
If this size is the same of the gravel found in the stone gardens, we have a theory here about the origin of this rubble accumulations, even if they were recycled later for culturing sweet potato wines.
>To increase yields, the natives initially cut down the island's trees to get nutrients back into the soil.
>When there were no more trees, they engaged in...
That sounds to me like the theory is correct, at least to the extent of the islanders using up their trees unsustainably. The fact that they then found other methods of surviving and their population didn't go down after using up the trees doesn't mean that they didn't permanently damage the environment.
If survival is the metric for success, then they didn't permanently damage their environment. As much as we love trees that's hard to imagine, but that's my interpretation of the study.
No, because the theory posits that this led to a collapse.
What this article is arguing is that there was no collapse -- the population hadn't been higher when there were trees.
You can argue that the environmental damage was bad for other reasons, but then you're talking about something totally different.
But that is not the definition of ecocide. Ecocide is only about the destruction of the ecosystem, and the article itself says that it happened.
What is disproven is the theory that after the environmental destruction the population collapsed. I don't know what this theory should be named, but I think "ecocide theory" is a poor choice.
Although if it continued to support the same human population, is it really fair to call it ecocide? The environment was transformed but certainly not "killed" as the "-cide" would require.
I mean I guess it really depends on whether you would call cutting down forests in New York State to grow fields of corn "ecocide". Yes you eliminated one environment but those fields of corn are very much alive. So I don't think many people would call that "ecocide".
Humans are resilient, but what about other animals ? Easter Island fauna was probably not varied at the time, but there may have been some animals depending on the presence of trees (e.g. birds nesting on trees) that disappeared together with them.
Obviously wherever you draw the line of ecocide is going to be blurry, but I don't think it applies to the situation here -- or else it would apply virtually everywhere humans live and grow crops, and would cease to have meaning.