Posted on 03/09/2006 5:21:22 PM PST by blam
Did humans decimate Easter Island on arrival?
19:00 09 March 2006
NewScientist.com news service
Bob Holmes
Early settlers to the remote Easter Island stripped the island’s natural resources to erect towering stone statues (Image: Terry L Hunt)
The first humans may have arrived on Easter Island several centuries later than previously supposed, suggests a new study. If so, these Polynesian settlers must have begun destroying the island's forests almost immediately after their arrival.
Easter Island has often been cited as the classic example of a human-induced ecological catastrophe. The island – one of the most remote places on Earth – was once richly forested, but settlers cut the forests, partly to use the wood in construction of the massive stone statues and temples for which the island is famous. When Dutch sailors arrived in 1722, they found a starving population on a barren island.
Archaeologists had thought that humans first arrived at the island around 800 AD, based on radiocarbon dating of kitchen scraps and cooking fires. Since the first signs of severe deforestation do not appear until the 13th century, this suggests the Easter Islanders lived several centuries without serious impact on their environment.
Not so, says Terry Hunt, an archaeologist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Hunt and Carl Lipo of California State University at Long Beach, US, radiocarbon-dated charcoal from the earliest human traces in a new excavation on the island. The site, Anakena, is Easter Island's only sandy beach and has long been regarded as the likeliest spot for first colonists to settle. To their surprise, the wood dated no earlier than 1200 AD – several hundred years more recent than they had expected.
Chop chop
"I got those results back and I was sceptical," says Hunt. "I thought, something's wrong with these." When repeated samples yielded the same date, he and Lipo re-examined the existing evidence. After throwing out any studies that lacked replicate samples or had other methodological problems, the 11 studies that remained all pointed to the same date – roughly 1200 AD.
Such a late arrival date means that the new inhabitants of Easter Island must have begun hacking down trees almost immediately, building the gigantic monuments and stone heads that make the island so distinctive, says Hunt.
And the new civilisation's ecological footprint must have been heavy from the start. "There isn't a period of ecological stability. There was almost immediate impact," says Hunt. "It isn't a two-part story any more. There's really just one chapter."
Broader context
Not everyone is convinced, however. A first arrival on Easter Island around 900 AD would fit well with Polynesians' first arrival on the nearest neighbouring islands of Mangareva, Henderson and Pitcairn, says Patrick Kirch, an archaeologist at the University of California at Berkeley, US.
Kirch thinks Hunt and Lipo may have been too free in discarding studies for minor methodological problems, thus rejecting valid dates in this range. "For me, they don't make a convincing argument that we can eliminate the earlier dates, especially in light of the broader regional context," he says.
And their new excavation may have simply sampled a relatively young settlement while missing nearby, older sites. To resolve the issue, researchers will need to date charcoal from many more excavations to see what pattern emerges. "Then we may be able to say we have the answer," says Kirch.
Journal reference: Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.1121879)
GGG Ping.
25 September 2004
From New Scientist Print Edition.
THE mysterious inhabitants of Easter Island in the Pacific Ocean did not wreck their pristine environment and so ruin their chances of survival. They were the victims of circumstance and were probably doomed to perish.
Easter Island has long been a mystery: a wind-blasted and treeless landscape dominated by giant stone statues set by its long-since-departed Polynesian inhabitants. Because it was once forested, it has become an emblem of environmental and social decline.
But a detailed study of 70 Pacific islands pinpoints nine environmental predictors of Pacific deforestation before the arrival of Europeans, and comes to a different conclusion (Nature, vol 431, p 443). "Easter's collapse was not because its people were especially improvident, but because they faced one of the Pacific's most fragile environments," says geographer Jared Diamond of the University of California, Los Angeles.
The island's remoteness in the eastern Pacific meant it rarely, if ever, benefited from fertile volcanic dust brought on the winds from eruptions in Asia. It is also low-lying, small and dry. And the island is distant from the equator, so the Polynesians' favourite trees, such as breadfruit and Tahitian chestnut, would not grow there. These factors would have made it difficult for the island's inhabitants to grow new trees to replace those they used.
From issue 2466 of New Scientist magazine, 25 September 2004, page 17
George Bush's fault.
Are they making this stuff up as they go along ping???
If Gray Davis or Al Gore had been running things, this never would have happened.
I heard it was immigration from muslim lands and gun control
What I love about the Easter Island story is that is debunks the benign native impact on the environment myth we have been fed by the shovel full for years.
I read years ago that someone calculated it only took 34 generations for the original population to die out. (680 years)
My guess is that it was the first, and maybe only, successful prison colony.
Bush's fault.
I saw an analysis recently that said that the land-ownership system in E.I. was to blame, that had anyone had an incentive to think about the future (as they do in, for example, modern tree farms), the forests would've been more than adequately preserved.
Prof. Diamond is an ecologic determinist who believes that biologists are the primary experts worth listening to, so I suspect he wouldn't have much time for that view.
Like Haiti but with fancier statuary.
Yup. I just completed reading his book, Collapse. He did compare Haiti to Easter Island.
The thought that the people intelligent enough to create and erect the monuments were so stupid as to render their existence obsolete is a real stretch.
It's not hard to conceive at all. Also they were not one happy tribe, there was serious internal strife with vandalism of rival clan statues
I don't think we know how it was done. I saw a documentary where some people erected a rock about 1/20th the size of an actual statue, and proclaimed the mystery solved. I had a good laugh over that one.
Don't you mean, "Ancestors of George Bush's fault"?;)))
Yeah, yeah, we know, humans bad, humans destroy, we should all just die, the world would be better, blah, blah, blah, Zzzzzzz
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