Welcome back to the Deep Dive, where we take
your custom stack of sources, the articles, the
research, the historical accounts, and we really
extract the essential knowledge you need to be
truly informed. And today we are heading to one
of the most remote and I think one of the most
fascinating inhabited places on the entire planet.
That's right. We're going to Easter Island, or
as it's known to its people. It's just this tiny
speck of land in the southeastern Pacific. So,
so isolated. And yet its fame is just immense,
isn't it? And it all comes down to these nearly
1 ,000 colossal silent statues, the Moai, that
are just standing there watching over the coastline.
Exactly. And that image has really fueled this,
you know, this global cautionary tale. The idea
that this was a society that destroyed itself.
Right. The classic ecocide collapse hypothesis.
And that's really our mission for you today.
We're going to use your source material. to move
beyond that simplified story. Okay, so what's
the counter -narrative? Well, we have a huge
amount of recent archaeological genetic and historical
data that paints a, well... a much more complex
picture it's a story of incredible cultural resilience
of adaptation right up until they faced these
catastrophic external pressures so we're not
just going to talk about how they moved the giant
statues no we're going to explore how the civilization
thrived in total isolation how they navigated
massive environmental change and then what really
happened what truly drove their society to the
brink. Okay, so let's ground ourselves first
because the geography, the isolation, it's just
paramount to understanding everything else. It
really is. Rapa Nui is the southeasternmost point
of the Polynesian Triangle. And when we say isolation,
I mean the distances are staggering. Like hard
to even comprehend. Completely. The nearest inhabited
land is Pitcairn Island, and that's over 2 ,000
kilometers away. And the nearest continent. Central
Chile. And that's over 3 ,500 kilometers away.
So you have to... imagine this culture developing
for centuries with absolutely no outside influence.
So where did the name Easter Island even come
from? That was from the first recorded European
visitor, a Dutch explorer named Jacob Roggeveen.
He just happened to land there on Easter Sunday,
April 5th, 1722. So a total accident of timing.
A total accident. The indigenous name, Rapa Nui,
which means Big Rapa, is actually much more recent.
It was coined after the 1860s slave raids. Why
then? Apparently because the island's shape resemble
another island called Rapa Iti, but there are
older names like Te Pito o Te Henwo. Which is
the navel of the world, right? Sounds very poetic.
It does, though some linguists argue it might
just mean something more practical, like Land's
End. But even the shifting names, you know, they
tell a story of a complex and often tragic history.
Okay, so let's start at the very beginning. Who
were these people, the ones who built this credible
stone civilization? And maybe more importantly,
when did they get there? The timeline seems to
be a huge point of debate. A huge point. And
your sources show a really significant shift
in thinking in just the last few years. So the
old theories are out. Pretty much. We used to
think, based on earlier work, that they arrived
around 800 CE. But with modern, high -precision
radiocarbon dating, well, the science has been
rectified. And what's the new date? The best
estimates now all cluster around 1200 CE. Wow,
that's 400 years later. That changes things.
It changes everything. It means Rapa Nuri was
likely settled in the same final, rapid wave
of expansion that populated Hawaii and New Zealand.
It wasn't some lone, ancient outlier. Who are
these navigators? Where did they come from? They
were Southeast Polynesians. The oral traditions
are very clear that the first chief was a man
named Hotu Matua. And archaeologically, can we
pinpoint an origin? The most likely candidates
are the Gambier Islands, specifically Mangareva,
which is about 2 ,600 kilometers away, or maybe
the Marquesas, which are even further. I just
can't get over that. Navigating that distance
against the winds with no modern instruments.
It's one of the greatest feats of exploration
in human history. And that brings us to a...
another mystery, one that hints at even more
incredible contact. The sweet potato debate.
Right. Because the sweet potato, the kumara,
it's a South American plant. Exactly. But it
was a staple crop all across Polynesia, including
on Rapa Nui, long before any Europeans arrived.
For decades, that's been the big question. How
did it get there? And the linguistic clue is
pretty strong. It's very strong. The Rapa Nui
word, kumara, is almost identical to the word
in Quechua and Aymara, languages from the Andes,
kumar, kumara. It seems too close to be a coincidence.
It does. Of course, the old founder argument
was, you know, maybe it just drifted across the
ocean on its own. Long distance dispersal. But
your sources point to something much more definitive
now. Yes. The genetic evidence is the game changer.
And we're not talking about plant genetics. We're
talking about human DNA. So they found a link.
A direct link. Recent studies confirm contact
and interbreeding between Polynesian and Native
American populations happened about 800 years
ago. Wait, 800 years ago? That's before Rapa
Nui was even settled. Precisely. It means the
ancestors of the people who settled Rapa Nui
had already been to South America or had encountered
South Americans and brought the sweet potato
back with them. It completely upends the idea
of a purely isolated Polynesia. So once they're
on the island, how did they organize themselves?
What was this society like? It was very hierarchical,
but also intensely spiritual. The island was
divided up between nine clans, the Mata, who
were all said to be descendants of that first
chief, Hotumatua. And at the top was a high chief.
The Ariki. He held both worldly and sacred power.
But the entire system, especially the statue
building, was driven by one core belief. The
ancestor cult. Okay, break that down. What did
they believe? It was a symbiotic relationship.
The living would provide offerings and build
these monuments for their ancestors. The Moai.
The Moai. And in return, the spirits of the dead
were believed to control everything. Your health,
the fertility of the crops, success in fishing,
all of it. And that's why the statues face inland.
They aren't looking out to sea. Exactly. They
were built on these coastal platforms, the Ahu,
with their backs to the sea, which was the spirit
world. They faced inward to watch over their
descendants, to protect their villages, and to
project their spiritual power, their mana, over
the land. It was basically a physical contract
with the ancestors. A monumental one. Okay, let's
talk about the sheer scale of that work. I mean,
nearly 900 of these statues. 887 have been inventoried.
And what's amazing is the efficiency of it. Your
sources show that almost 95 % of them were carved
from the exact same material. Which was? A type
of compressed volcanic ash, a tuff, that was
relatively easy to work. And it all came from
one single quarry. Rano or Raku. That quarry
was the engine room of the entire island. And
they're carving this with, what, stone tools?
Just simple handheld stone chisels called toki.
They were made from basalt, a much harder rock
they'd get from other small quarries. And they
had this ingenious technique of constantly pouring
water on the tuft to keep it soft while they
carved. How long would it take to make one? We
estimate a team of about five or six carvers
could finish a large moai in about a year. It
was a massive societal commitment. Which brings
us to the question that has launched a thousand
documentaries. Yeah. How on earth did they move
them? Some of these things are enormous. It's
one of the great debates. The largest one they
successfully put on a platform, a moai named
Paro, weighed 82 tons. 82. And it was almost
10 meters long. And they had no wheels, no draft
animals, just human ingenuity. Okay, let's unpack
the two main theories. Let's start with theory
one, the one that ties directly into that ecocide
narrative. Right. Theory one is the rollers and
sledges idea. It suggests they laid the Moai
down on these Y -shaped wooden sledges and then
rolled them over log tracks. Which would require
a ton of wood. A catastrophic amount of wood
and a lot of people. To move Poro that way would
have taken maybe 250 men. pulling on heavy ropes
made from tree bark. This theory directly links
statue moving to deforestation. But the evidence
for that theory is a bit thin on the ground,
isn't it? It is. But the evidence for the second
theory, the walker's hypothesis, is growing.
And what's so compelling is that it actually
aligns with the Rapa Nui oral history. The legend
that the statues walked. Yes. The legend says
they moved using mana, spiritual power. The scientific
theory is that they were walked upright. How
do you walk an 80 -ton statue? By rocking it.
The idea is that a team would use three ropes,
one on each side, one on the back, for stability,
and they'd pull back and forth, rocking the statue
from side to side and inching it forward, like
moving a giant refrigerator. That seems incredibly
unstable. It would be, except for one thing.
The Rapa Nui engineered the statue specifically
for transport. What do you mean? Well, the moai
you find abandoned along the ancient roads, they're
different from the ones on the platforms. They
have much wider, flatter bases for stability
during that rocking motion. So they were built
to be waddled across the island. Pretty much.
And there's another clue. The heads of the statues
still in the quarry are tilted forward. This
design shifts the center of gravity down and
forward, making them much more stable to move
upright. Once they got to their final platform,
the Ahu, they would finish carving the base and
head into their final shape. So they weren't
just statues. They were brilliant pieces of engineering
designed for transport. Exactly. And it means
they could have been moved by a much smaller
team, maybe 15 or 20 people, and without needing
all that timber. It really complicates that simple
story of self -destruction. All right, let's
dive right into that. Section 2, the Great Collapse
Debate. This is the heart of the Rapa Nui mystery,
isn't it? This narrative that has captured the
world's imagination. It really has. And it's
important to understand the classic version first,
the one popularized by people like Jared Diamond.
The ecocide hypothesis. The ecocide hypothesis.
And it's a powerful story. You have the successful
advanced society on a lush island. It was lush
originally. Oh, yes. Your sources confirm that
when the Polynesians arrived, it was covered
in forest with at least 21 species of trees,
including this massive palm tree, Paschalococos,
that might have been the biggest palm in the
world. And according to this narrative, they
just chopped it all down. It's a bit more complex.
Yes, they cleared land for farming, but a huge
and maybe deciding factor was the Polynesian
rat they brought with them. The rat. Rattus exilens.
Archaeologists have found tons of gnawed palm
seed shells. With no natural predators, the rat
population exploded and they ate the seeds before
they could ever grow into new trees. So it's
a combination of human clearing and rat predation.
It's a perfect storm. And by about 350 years
ago, the island was almost completely treeless.
And this had huge downstream effects. Catastrophic
effects. The biggest one was the loss of timber
for building large seaworthy canoes. Which means
they couldn't go deep sea fishing anymore. Exactly.
We see it in the archaeological record. The fish
bones found in their rubbish pits shift from
large deep sea species like tuna to small inshore
fish. Their main source of protein was dwindling.
And the hypothesis links this resource scarcity
directly to a societal breakdown. Directly. The
theory goes, soil erosion, failing crops, protein
shortages. This leads to starvation, internal
conflict, and war. And the population crashes.
Right. From a supposed high of maybe 15 ,000
down to just a couple of thousand by the time
Europeans arrive in 1722. In this chaos, the
warrior class, the metatoa, takes over from the
priests. And the ultimate proof. of this collapse
is that they started tearing down the statues.
The Hurri Moai, the statue toppling. In this
narrative, it's seen as the ultimate act of desecration.
Rival clans, in their desperation, are literally
toppling the symbols of their enemies' ancestors
to destroy their mana. A complete societal meltdown.
That's the story. By the time the missionaries
showed up in the 1860s, basically every single
Moai that had been on a platform had been knocked
over. But now we have to turn the page. Because
recent research, a lot of what's in your sources,
offers a powerful counter -argument, the resilience
narrative. This is where it gets really interesting.
Because field archaeologists are finding that
the evidence on the ground just doesn't fully
support that classic ecocide story. So let's
start with the population. Did it really boom
and bust? It seems not. Recent demographic models
suggest the population grew steadily and was
probably never more than a few thousand people.
It didn't spiral out of control and then crash
before Europeans arrived. So steady growth, not
a catastrophic decline. Which suggests they were
actually managing their resources and adapting,
not just collapsing. What about the evidence
for all this? widespread, brutal warfare. That's
another major point of contention. It seems to
be remarkably thin. If you have a society tearing
itself apart in civil war, you'd expect to see
it in the skeletons. Battle injuries, things
like that. Right. But skeletal studies show that
only about 2 .5 % of skulls have evidence of
fractures. That's actually very low for a pre
-modern society and not consistent with endemic
warfare. But what about all the spearheads? The
thousands of obsidian triangular points? The
mata that are found everywhere? Ah, yes. For
years, everyone just assumed they were weapons,
but that assumption is now being seriously challenged.
So what else could they be? Well, think about
their design. Most of them are pretty flimsy,
and obsidian is brittle. They wouldn't make very
effective spearheads for killing people. But
toolware analysis suggests they were perfect
for something else. Agriculture. Agriculture.
Peeling tough root vegetables, digging, processing
plant fibers, their shape and the wear patterns
on them are much more consistent with being an
all -purpose farming tool. So what we might be
seeing isn't evidence of war, but evidence of
an intensified focus on farming. Okay, what about
the most shocking claim, cannibalism? The story
goes they were so starved they ate each other.
The evidence for that is also highly ambiguous.
The folklore is certainly dramatic. There was
a famous insult. The flesh of your mother sticks
between my teeth. That's pretty vivid. It is.
But archaeologically, there's no evidence of
widespread starvation driven cannibalism. The
few human bones that are found in cooking pits
are almost always near the religious platforms,
the Ahu. Which suggests. That if it did happen,
it was likely ritualistic. Perhaps part of the
power struggle as the old ancestor cult was breaking
down, but not a sign that everyone was starting.
So if Rapa Nui society was actually quite resilient,
adapting and innovating right up until contact.
What caused the collapse? Because the population
did collapse, catastrophically. It absolutely
did. And the evidence points overwhelmingly to
one thing, external factors. The real documented
collapse of Rapa Nui society happens after 1722.
So after the Europeans arrived. Yes. The population
went from maybe 3 ,000 or 4 ,000 at contact down
to a low of just 111 people by 1877. 111. That's...
Near total annihilation. It's a 97 % population
loss. And it was driven by two things the islanders
had no defense against, disease and slavery.
The Peruvian slave raids. The so -called black
birding raids of the early 1860s. They were the
critical blow. In just a few months, Peruvian
ships abducted or killed about 1 ,500 people,
half of the remaining population. And they didn't
just take anyone. No. They specifically targeted
the island's elite, the chiefs, the priests,
the scribes, the Maori, all the people who held
the Isler's collective knowledge and history.
Including the people who could read the Rongorongo
script. Exactly. And when a few survivors were
eventually repatriated due to international pressure,
they brought smallpox back with them, which then
tore through the devastated population that remained.
The collapse wasn't environmental ecocide. It
was imported genocide. Let's track those early
European encounters then, starting with that
first visit in 1722. Jacob Raghavine's arrival.
And it was unfortunately violent from the start.
His crew canicked or, you know, there was a misunderstanding
and they opened fire. And they killed several
islanders. About a dozen, including one of the
elders. It was a terrible first impression and
really set a dark precedent. Then, decades later,
the Spanish arrive. And their visit gives us
a crucial piece of the puzzle. A vital snapshot
in time. This was in 1770. And the Spanish expedition
reported that they found all of the statues on
the platform still standing. Every single one.
So the mass statue toppling, the Hurimoay, hadn't
happened yet. It must have started after 1770,
which it's confirmed just... four years later
in 1774 when captain james cook arrives and what
do you see he reported that some of the statues
were now toppled so that period the late 1770s
seems to be when the internal turmoil really
escalated and the ancestor cult finally began
to break down what's fascinating about these
reports though is that they don't describe a
barren starving island Especially the French
expedition in 1786. La Perouse's visit. This
is so important for the resilience argument.
He had an agricultural expert with him who described
the island as exceptionally fertile. And he estimated
the islanders barely had to work to feed themselves.
His estimate was three days work a year. Now,
that's probably an exaggeration. But the point
is, he saw a successful agricultural society,
not one on the brink of starvation. And that
was due to their ingenuity. You're talking about
lithic mulching. Lithic mulching. It's this incredible,
low -tech farming technique. They would cover
their garden plots with a layer of volcanic rock.
Which seems counterintuitive. It does, but it's
brilliant. The rock layer did three things. First,
it protected the thin topsoil from wind erosion.
Second, it acted like an insulator, keeping the
soil cool and reducing water evaporation. And
the third thing is the most clever. It's genius.
The rocks would cool down overnight and in the
morning the humid air would condense on them.
That dew would then trickle down and water the
plants. It's a way of harvesting water directly
from the air. So they weren't just passively
watching their environment degrade. They were
actively engineering solutions to survive in
it. Exactly. They were innovating. But no amount
of innovation could prepare them for what came
in the 19th century. The atrocities. This is
where the story shifts from environmental pressure
to just human -driven catastrophe. The slave
raids of 1862 and 1863 were the primary event.
We mentioned they took the elites. The loss must
have been profound. It was irreparable. Imagine
if in our society, in a single year, you lost
every scientist, every historian, every leader,
the entire knowledge base just gone. And then
came the diseases. Smallpox from the repatriated
survivors and tuberculosis, which was probably
introduced earlier by whalers. The combination
was lethal for a population with no immunity.
This created a vacuum, right? Socially and spiritually.
A huge vacuum. And the Christian missionaries
moved right into it. The first one arrived in
1864. And in that atmosphere of chaos and death,
conversion was rapid. By 1868, almost the entire
surviving population was Roman Catholic. And
then we get to that devastating number. The demographic
low point. By 1877, after land seizures by settlers
and evacuations, only 111 native Rapa Nui were
left on the island. 111. And what's truly mind
-blowing is that every single Rapa Nui person
alive today can trace their ancestry back to
just 36 of those survivors. It was the narrowest
of bottlenecks. And it was in this state of extreme
vulnerability that Chile formally annexed the
island. In 1888, A Chilean naval captain negotiated
what was called the acuerdo de voluntades or
agreement of wills. But there's a huge dispute
over what that agreement actually meant. The
Rapa Nui say they ceded sovereignty, but not
their land. Correct. They saw it as a partnership,
a protectorate. The Chilean state, however, saw
it as an acquisition. And they acted on that
interpretation immediately. They did. They leased
almost the entire island to a British sheep farming
company. And what happened to the Rapa Nui people?
For the next 70 years, they were confined. They
were forced into the single settlement of Hangaroa,
literally fenced in, and had to work for the
company just to get food on the very land that
had been theirs for centuries. And they did resist
that. They did. There was a major uprising in
1914 led by a woman named Maria Angata Veryvery,
but it was suppressed. The confinement didn't
end until the 1960s. It's an incredible story
of survival against just overwhelming odds. Let's
look at the culture and the technology that allowed
them to thrive for so long before all this. The
architecture beyond just the Moai is stunning.
The platforms themselves, the Ahu, are masterpieces.
They evolved from the traditional Polynesian
ceremonial space, the marar, but the Rapa Nui
took the stonework to another level. And the
stonework at one site, Ahu Vinapu, is so precise
people have compared it to the Inca. They have.
The mortarless basalt walls are just that good.
Now there are technical differences, but the
level of skill is absolutely comparable to what
you see in Peru. It shows an incredible understanding
of lithic engineering. So when a moai was on
its ahu, what completed the ritual? It was when
they were given eyes. The final act was to place
eyes made of white coral. with irises of red
scoria or black obsidian into the sockets. That
was the moment the statue was activated when
its mana could flow out and protect the people.
And some of them had hats, the pukau. Yes, these
big red cylinders. They were carved from a different,
much lighter, porous red stone called scoria
from a different quarry called punapau. They
were a sign of high status. We mentioned the
ancestor cult failed. What replaced it? This
is a key part of the resilience story. It is.
They didn't just descend into chaos. They invented
a new... religion, the Tangata Manu, or the Birdman
Cult. Okay, what was that about? It was a way
to solve the problem of political succession
without constant war. It was centered on a competition.
Each year, the chiefs of the clans would choose
a champion. And what did the champion have to
do? An incredibly dangerous task. They had to
climb down a massive sea cliff at a village called
Orongo, swim through shark -infested waters to
a tiny offshore islet, and retrieve the first
egg of the sooty -turned bird for the season.
The first one to bring back an egg won. And his
sponsor, his chief, would then become the Tangata
Manu, the birdman, and rule the island for the
next year. It was a brilliant cultural innovation
to maintain stability. And the village where
this happened, Orongo, is architecturally unique.
It's spectacular. It's built right on the rim
of the Ranoko Volcano Crater. And the houses
are these low stone slab structures built to
withstand the incredible winds up there. You
literally have to crawl into them. It's architecture
built for a specific extreme. purpose. A perfect
example of their adaptability. Let's talk about
the island's greatest intellectual mystery and
maybe its greatest loss. The Rongorongo script.
The only known original script in all of Polynesia.
It's completely enigmatic. We're still not even
sure if it's true writing or a complex memory
aid. What does it look like? It's these beautiful
pictographic glyphs carved into wooden tablets.
And it's written in a unique system called reverse
booster fidon. Which means you read a line one
way. You read the first line left to right. Then
you have to physically turn the tablet 180 degrees
and read the next line right to left and so on.
And we just can't read it. We can't. The slave
raids took the last of the literate priests and
elites. The knowledge vanished with them. We
only have about two dozen texts left in museums
around the world, and they are completely silent.
It's heartbreaking. But even with wood being
so scarce, they had this amazing tradition of
wood carving. They used every precious scrap
of wood they had, usually from the native Toromero
tree. The carvings are so distinctive. Like the
Ramiro, the crescent -shaped ornament on their
flag. Exactly. Or the famous ancestor figures,
the Moai Cavaca. They're these grotesque, emaciated
figures, all ribs and sunken eyes, so different
from the powerful stone Moai. They might represent
the suffering of that post -contact period. Okay,
let's touch on the geology and the environment
that shapes all of this. It's a purely volcanic
island. Entirely. It's basically the tips of
three extinct volcanoes that have merged together
to form this triangular shape. It's the top of
a massive underwater mountain. And a huge challenge
for them was a lack of fresh water. No rivers,
no permanent streams. Right. They relied on the
three freshwater crater lakes and on rainwater.
But they also had another ingenious solution,
which modern science has only recently verified.
They were getting water from the coast. Yes.
The fresh groundwater, being less dense, seeps
out through the porous volcanic rock and kind
of floats on top of the saltwater along the shore.
The Rapa Nui knew this, and they built small
wells right in the intertidal zone to capture
that fresh water. That's incredible. They found
a resource that was basically invisible. They
understood their geology perfectly. And one final
note on their climate. It's tropical, but they
never had to worry about one specific kind of
disaster. Hurricanes. Or cyclones. The island's
location puts it outside the major storm tracks,
so they face deforestation, disease, slavery,
but never a catastrophic hurricane. Okay, let's
jump forward to the modern era, the long road
back for the Rapa Nui people in the 20th century.
The big turning point was 1966. That's when they
were finally granted full Chilean citizenship
under the Pascua law. The sheep farm era was
over and they could elect their own mayor and
council. And then their isolation was shattered
for good by the airport. The Mataveri International
Airport. It was massively extended in the 1980s
as an emergency landing strip for the US space
shuttle, of all things. That opened the door
to tourism, which is now the entire basis of
the island's economy. And politically, they have
a special status now, right? Since 2007, it's
been a special territory of Chile, which acknowledges
its unique Polynesian identity. But the exact
terms of that autonomy are still being worked
out, which is a source of tension. Which brings
us to contemporary issues. And the biggest one
seems to still be land rights. It's the central
conflict. The land that was taken from them is
still a major issue. A famous example was in
2010 when the Hidiranchi clan occupied a luxury
eco -hotel built on land they said was illegally
taken from their ancestors during the Pinochet
regime. And that dispute went on for years. A
full decade. It was finally settled in 2020,
but it shows how these historical wounds are
still very, very raw. And now the island faces
new environmental strains, this time from tourism.
A different kind of pressure. Illegal fishing
is a problem, and the sheer number of visitors
puts a huge strain on freshwater and waste management.
So they've had to take steps to limit it. They
have. In 2018, the government cut the maximum
stay for tourists from 90 days down to just 30.
It's a direct recognition that the island has
a carrying capacity. And tragically, the heritage
itself is still under threat. The fire in 2022.
That was awful. A fire suspected to be arson
swept through the Rano Raraku quarry and caused
irreparable heat damage to some of the Moai.
It's a reminder of how fragile these monuments
still are. What does the population look like
today? There are about 4 ,800 people on the island
now. And what's really important is that almost
60 % identify as indigenous Rapa Nui. The culture
survived that bottleneck. But the language is
in trouble. It is. Spanish is the dominant language.
While many people still speak or understand the
Rapa Nui language, it's officially classified
as threatened. Keeping it alive is a major focus.
But the culture itself is celebrated in a huge
way. Well, that's a potty festival. It's this
amazing two -week event every year where they
revive all the traditions, carving, canoeing,
body painting. The clans compete, and it's a
powerful living display of cultural survival.
So we started this deep dive with these iconic
silent giants. We peeled back the layers of that
simple environmental morality tale. We did. And
we found a story that is so much richer, more
complex. ultimately more tragic. It's a story
defined by incredible resilience against just,
well, genocide. Exactly. The narrative is so
often simplified to, they cut down all their
trees, a cautionary tale. But what the sources
show is a people who were constantly innovating.
Engineering statues to walk, developing advanced
dry land farming. Reinventing their entire political
and spiritual system with the Birdman cult. They
adapted to a radically changed environment. The
true catastrophic collapse wasn't internal. It
was triggered by the shock of disease, slavery,
and colonization. So what does this all mean
for you as you think about this history? we know
they adapted their technology their beliefs their
entire way of life to survive on the most remote
inhabited place on earth given this overwhelming
evidence of innovation and endurance consider
this if we focus so much on the mystery of how
the moai walked or how the society supposedly
collapsed before contact or we may be overlooking
the even greater puzzle Which is how this determined,
ingenious population managed to endure for centuries,
constantly creating solutions, only to be brought
down by forces completely beyond their control.
That is the enduring legacy and the profound
question that Rapa Nui leaves us with. A deep
dive for you to chew on until our next exploration.