Free Republic

Several theories have suggested a link between the inhabitants of Easter Island and Native South Americans, fueled by similarities in agricultural practices, linguistic ties, and genetic studies. Thor Heyerdahl's mid-20th-century Kon-Tiki expedition famously posited that Polynesians, including those on Easter Island, could have originated from South America, based on the capability of ancient peoples to navigate vast ocean distances. Recent DNA evidence supports the notion of pre-European contact between these populations, indicating some level of interaction and exchange, thereby enriching the cultural and genetic tapestry of the Rapa Nui people.

Model of Easter Island Collapse Might Reveal Message for Today By Lisa ZygaGraphs based on the researchers’ model, showing the population (top) and resources (bottom). The decline of resources coincides with a sharp population increase, followed by a sharp decrease. Image credit: M. Bologna and J. C. Flores. When a thriving civilization suddenly collapses, it’s often a mystery – and an ominous one, at that. For Easter Island circa 1000-1400 AD, experts believe it was a case of humans overexploiting their natural resources – mostly, the palm tree. But exactly where did the culturally rich Rapanui society go too far?...

Easter Islanders wonder how many statues are enough By Larry Rohter Published: January 4, 2007 RANU RARAKU, Easter Island: As remnants of a vanished culture and a lure to tourists, the mysterious giant statues that stand as mute sentinels along the rocky coast here are the greatest treasure of this remote island. For local people, though, they also present a problem: What should be done about the hundreds of other stone icons, many of them damaged or still embedded in the ground, that are scattered around the island? Commercial and political interests, as well as some archaeologists, would like nothing...

Carved from sharp volcanic rock and more than 700 years old, the stone formations can weigh upwards of 13 tons. Archaeologists have long wondered how these stone hats, which sit atop the heads of the famous Easter Island statues, were put into place with 13th-century technology... Rapa Nui, or Easter Island, rises from the waves about 2,000 miles from Chile. The island's famous statues have been studied by various teams of archaeologists and geologists since the 18th century. Previous studies determined that the statues are made of from one quarry on the island, while the hats come from a different...

A wooden tablet discovered on Easter Island may pre-date European colonization of the region, researchers revealed in early February. Less than 30 wooden tablets containing an undeciphered script called “Rongorongo” were found on the island of Rapa Nui (Easter Island), four of which were removed in 1869 by Catholic Missionaries, according to a study published in the journal Nature. Those wooden tablets were analyzed using radiocarbon dating, and one of them was found to pre-date European settlement on the island, the study said. Easter Island was “discovered” by Europeans in the 1720s, and absolutely decimated in the years following, the...

Archaeologists working on the famed Easter Island have unearthed a previously unknown statue while excavating a dry lake bed. The newly discovered statue is one of the Moai, the well-known megalithic statues believed to have been carved by Polynesian tribes between the 10th and 16th centuries. “We think we know all the moai, but then a new one turns up, a new discovery,” archaeologist Dr. Terry Hunt told Good Morning America (GMA) Feb. 25. Hunt teaches archaeology at the University of Arizona and has been studying the statues and the Rapa Nui for 20 years. “The moai are important because...

Fire has damaged Easter Island's iconic megalith statues known as moai. An unknown number of the nearly 1,000 stone-carved statues were affected. Ariki Tepano, director of the Ma'u Henua community in charge of management and maintenance at the UNESCO heritage site Rapa Nui Natural Park, said the damage is "irreparable and with consequences beyond what your eyes can see." "The moai are totally charred and you can see the effect of the fire upon them," Tepano said in a social media post. The city of Rapa Nui said in the post that the site is closed to visitors while investigations...

Through deep genetic analyses, Stanford Medicine scientists and their collaborators have found conclusive scientific evidence of contact between ancient Polynesians and Native Americans from the region that is now Colombia—something that's been hotly contested in the historic and archaeological world for decades. (snip) Before the study brought scientific evidence to the debate, the idea that Native Americans and Polynesians had crossed paths originated from a complex—both in its structure and origins—carbohydrate: the sweet potato. It turns out the sweet potato, which was originally domesticated in South and Central America, has also been known to grow in one other place prior...

A Frenchman has set off to cross the Atlantic Ocean in a barrel-shaped orange capsule, using ocean currents alone to propel him. Jean-Jacques Savin, 71, left El Hierro in Spain's Canary Islands and hopes to reach the Caribbean in as little as three months. His reinforced capsule contains a sleeping bunk, kitchen and storage. He will drop markers along the way to help oceanographers study Atlantic currents. Updates on the journey are being posted on a Facebook page and the latest message said the barrel was "behaving well". In a telephone interview with AFP news agency, he said: "The weather...

As the director of the Easter Island Statue Project — the longest-continuous collaborative artifact inventory ever conducted on the Polynesian island that belongs to Chile — Van Tilburg has opened a window on one of the greatest achievements of Pacific prehistory on one of the most remote inhabited islands in the world. She and her team of resident Rapa Nui have spent nine years locating and meticulously documenting the nearly 1,000 statues on the island, determining their symbolic meaning and function, and conserving them using state-of-the-art techniques. After spending four months over the last two years excavating two of the...

Solar Impulse is a Swiss long-range experimental solar-powered aircraft project, The privately financed project is led by Swiss engineer and businessman André Borschberg and Swiss psychiatrist and aeronaut Bertrand Piccard, who co-piloted Breitling Orbiter 3, the first balloon to circle the world non-stop. The Solar Impulse will to achieve the first circumnavigation of the Earth by a piloted fixed-wing aircraft using captured energy rather than recovered fuel. In March 2015, Piccard and Borschberg began to circumnavigate the globe with Solar Impulse 2, departing from Abu Dhabi. By June 2015, SI2 had traversed Asia, and notably, by July 2015, it completed...

Voyage to prove pharaohs traded cocaine By Tom Leonard in New York Last Updated: 2:21am BST 30/05/2007 An adventurer who believes that ancient man regularly crossed the Atlantic Ocean 14,000 years ago plans to recreate such a voyage in a 41ft raft made of reeds and eucalyptus tree branches. Basing his theory on the thinnest of historical evidence, Dominique Gorlitz believes that the discovery of traces of tobacco and cocaine in the tomb of the pharaoh Rameses II proves that there was trade between the Old and New Worlds. He also claims that 14,000-year-old cave paintings in Spain show that,...

Ancient Navigators Could Have Measured Longitude -- in Egypt in 232 B.C. !by Rick Sanders Around the year 232 B.C., Captain Rata and Navigator Maui set out with a flotilla of ships from Egypt in an attempt to circumnavigate the Earth. On the night of August 6-7, 2001, between the hours of 11 PM and 3 AM, this writer, and fellow amateur astronomer Bert Cooper, proved in principle that Captain Rata and Navigator Maui could have known and charted their location, by longitude, most of the time during that voyage. The Maui expedition was under the guidance of Eratosthenes, the...

From the paper: In 1808 the Portuguese Crown declared “Just War” (Bellumiustum) against all Indian tribes that did not accept European laws (23). The fierce Botocudo were targeted in such wars and, in consequence, became virtually extinct by the end of the 19th century (24). Their importance for the history of the peopling of the Americas was revealed by studies reporting that the Botocudo had cranial features that consistently were described as intermediate between the polar Paleoamerican and Mongoloid morphologies (25, 26). Multivariate analyses of the cranial measures of different Amerindian and Paleoamerican groups from Brazil indeed concluded that the...

For a long time, scientists had assumed a gradual expansion of African people through Sinai into both Europe and Asia. Then, bizarrely, it became clear from both genetics and archaeology that Europe was peopled later (after 40,000 years ago) than Australia (before 50,000 years ago). Meanwhile, the geneticists were beginning to insist that many Africans and all non-Africans shared closely related DNA sequences that originated only after about 70,000-60,000 years ago in Africa. So a new idea was born, sometimes called the "beachcomber express," in which the first ex-Africans were seashore dwellers who spread rapidly around the coast of the...

New genetic research in BMC Evolutionary Biology found telltale mutations in modern-day Indian populations that are exclusively shared by Aborigines. The new study indicates that Australian Aborigines initially arrived via south Asia. Dr Raghavendra Rao worked with a team of researchers from the Anthropological Survey of India to sequence 966 complete mitochondrial DNA genomes from Indian 'relic populations'. He said, "Mitochondrial DNA is inherited only from the mother and so allows us to accurately trace ancestry. We found certain mutations in the DNA sequences of the Indian tribes we sampled that are specific to Australian Aborigines. This shared ancestry suggests...

Chicken bones show Polynesians went to Chile By MAGGIE FOX - Reuters | Tuesday, 5 June 2007 A chicken bone found in Chile provides solid evidence to settle a debate over whether Polynesians travelling on rafts visited South America thousands of years ago – or vice versa, New Zealand researchers have said. The DNA in the bone carries a rare mutation that links it to chickens in Tonga and Samoa, and radiocarbon dating shows it is around 600 years old – meaning it predates the arrival of Spanish conquerors in South America. "These chickens are related to hens from Polynesia,"...

Polynesians beat Columbus to the Americas 22:00 04 June 2007 NewScientist.com news service Emma Young Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Prehistoric Polynesians beat Europeans to the Americas, according to a new analysis of chicken bones. The work provides the first firm evidence that ancient Polynesians voyaged as far as South America, and also strongly suggests that they were responsible for the introduction of chickens to the continent - a question that has been hotly debated for more than 30 years. Chilean archaeologists working at the site of El Arenal-1, on the Arauco Peninsula in south-central Chile, discovered what...

Kon-Tiki Replica to Sail, Study Pacific in 2005 Sept. 6, 2004 — By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent OSLO (Reuters) - A replica of the Kon-Tiki balsa raft will sail the Pacific in 2005 to study mounting environmental threats to the oceans since Thor Heyerdahl made his daredevil 1947 voyage, organizers said on Monday. One of Heyerdahl's grandsons will be among the six-strong crew for the trip from Peru aiming to reach Tahiti, about 310 miles west of the Raroia atoll where the Kon-Tiki ran aground after traveling 4,970 miles in 101 days. Heyerdahl's original voyage defied many experts' predictions that...

By DOUG MELLGREN, Associated Press Writer April 19, 2002, 4:42 AM EDT OSLO, Norway -- Thor Heyerdahl, the Norwegian explorer who crossed the Pacific on a balsa log raft to prove his theories of human migration, has died at 87. Heyerdahl, whose book "Kon-Tiki" on the daring 101-day voyage sold millions of copies, stopped taking food, water or medication in early April after being diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor. He died Thursday night in his sleep at home in Colla Michari, Italy, said his son, Thor Heyerdahl Jr. Heyerdahl had been hospitalized near there in late March when he...