‘Ecocide’ of Easter Island did not happen, new studies claim
New studies have cast doubt on the widely held belief that Easter Island’s indigenous population collapsed after committing “ecocide”.
Scientists have long debated the riddles of the island, known for its huge stone statues called “moai” but also the theory that its inhabitants deforested the island, triggering their own demographic collapse in the 1600s.
But a study, published in Nature this week, found there was no evidence of a DNA bottleneck among the island’s Polynesian residents before the arrival of Europeans in 1722.
It examined genomes from the remains of 15 Rapa Nui (the indigenous name of the island and its population) who lived between 1670 and 1950 and found no signs of a sudden loss of genetic diversity.
“Our genetic analysis shows a stably growing population from the 13th century through to European contact,” said Barbara Sousa da Mota, the study author from the University of Lausanne.
“This stability is critical because it directly contradicts the idea of a dramatic pre-contact population collapse.”
The research bolsters the conclusion of another study, published in June in Science Advances, that used satellite images to map rock gardens on the island, a territory of Chile that lies 2,300 miles off South America’s Pacific coast.
Rock gardening is an ancient agricultural technique in which stones are mixed into the soil to boost harvests by maintaining nutrients and moisture.
Previously, it had been thought that 12 per cent of the island’s 63 square miles had been turned into rock gardens, enough to maintain a population of 15,000 people. But the new US-led research found that the real figure was less than one per cent.
Together, the two studies undercut the theory, popularised by the Pulitzer Prize-winning anthropologist and geographer Jared Diamond, that Easter Island once had a booming population of 15,000 whose environmental mismanagement resulted in a self-inflicted catastrophe.
Prof Diamond claimed that the Rapa Nui people deforested the island, which had been densely blanketed with endemic palms. The lack of resources then triggered famine, war and even cannibalism, he concluded.
His writings, which have also explored demographic and ecological collapses from Viking settlers in Greenland to the tribes of Papua New Guinea, have often been cited as a warning for humanity’s current ravaging of the natural environment.
The two new studies, however, paint a very different story, suggesting the population grew steadily from when Polynesians first populated Rapa Nui, believed to be around the 10th century, to the estimated 4,000 residents when Europeans arrived some 800 years later.
Today, only 3,000 Rapa Nui inhabitants remain on the island.
“When we label an entire culture as an example of bad choices, or as a cautionary tale of what not to do, we had better be right, otherwise we feed stereotypes,” said Dylan Davis, an environmental archaeologist at Columbia University and co-author of the Science Advances study.
“In this case, the Rapa Nui managed to survive in one of the most remote places on Earth and did so fairly sustainably until European contact. This suggests we can learn something from them about how to manage limited resources.”