How did Easter Island decline?

Residents on Easter Island may not have destroyed the beautiful island by themselves with their giant statues. Instead, the culprit may be European.

A recent study said that until 1200, Easter Island (located in western Chile in the South Pacific Ocean) welcomed the first settlers, 800 years later than the previous view.

Some famous statues on Easter Island are 15 meters tall and weigh up to 82 tons.( Photo: LiveScience )

This review is based on the analysis of carbon samples obtained from one of the oldest areas on the island. The finding has challenged a long-standing popular view: that the civilization on Easter Island experienced a sudden collapse after centuries of slow development.

If so, the new discovery also means that the destruction of forests to exhaustion and the construction of giant Moai statues began almost immediately after the Polynesian inhabitants first set foot on the island.

The study was published by Terry Hunt from Hawaii's Manoa University and Carl Lipo from Long Beach University, California (USA).

Controversial story

From a long-standing popular point of view, a small branch of Polynesian residents, perhaps less than a few dozen people, set foot on Easter Island sometime between 400 and 1000. They lived in harmony with the environment for hundreds of years and population slowly grows. Some scientists predict that at the peak time, the island was home to about 20,000 people.

Around 1200, the story began when residents cut a series of giant palm trees and subtropical forests to build boats, to transport giant statues (which also began to be manipulated around that time). ).

Large-scale deforestation has led to soil erosion and in just a few centuries, the island has been unable to provide food and support wildlife. People start starving. In a final attempt to survive, they become cannibals.

The collapse of both things - civilization and ecology on the island-so so that by the time the Dutch arrived here in the 1700s, Easter Island was only an empty sandy meadow with Indigenous ecosystems almost disappear, the population has declined to become a hungry population with about 3,000 people.

This story has been pieced together by researchers for decades, but Hunt and Lipo now think it's wrong.

There is no glorious period on Easter Island

The key to calculating the milestones on Easter Island is the time when the first people arrived. If the settlement on the island did not start in 1200, then the island's population would not have enough time to swell tens of thousands of people.

"You can't have this glorious period in just 400 to 800 years ," Hunt said. "Instead , it was not until 1200 that people arrived here and had an immediate impact ."

In the same way, for the first time to know Easter Island, several thousand Europeans may have encountered not the ruins of a mighty and mighty civilization as one might expect. "Within 500 years, there is no reason to believe that there has been a large population explosion," and thus, "there may not be any collapse," Lipo said.

Scientists believe that a few thousand Europeans seem to have caused the island to suffer.

The culprits are Europeans and mice

The team also suspected the claim that Easter Island residents were responsible for their decline. Instead, they believe that the culprit could be Europeans - who brought diseases as well as brought the island into slavery, and rats - animals that have flourished quickly after coming here with first Polynesi residents.

In a scientific conference last year, Hunt provided evidence that rats on the island had increased to 20 million from 1200 to 1300. Here, they had no enemies other than humans and were quick to contribute. Palm seeding part on the island. After the palm trees grow, the population of mice drops to about 1 million.

Lipo argues that the view of civilization on Easter Island is responsible for its decline, which may be the best mirror of the psychological baggage of our society, not archaeological evidence. . "We have undoubtedly destroyed the ecosystem's horrors, but blamed it for the past, it's unfair."

T. An