Posted on 02/10/2024 4:29:59 AM PST by george76
I was watching something on PBS about Easter Island, just the other day. A couple of archeologists surveyed and carbon-14 dated fire pits throughout the island. What they concluded was that the population was stable at around 2000 people from the 13th century (it was settled from other Polynesian islands around 1210) until the arrival of Europeans. The problem with Europeans was they brought with them diseases that Polynesians had not developed immunity to, not warfare, slavery or anything deliberate.
There is an island off the coast of India to which travel by outsiders is prohibited because its stone age isolated population almost certainly has no immunity to modern diseases.
The problem with Whitey was the same problem with anyone from the outside world: diseases to which they had not inherited resistance and immunity. We are the descendants of the survivors of several millennia of worldwide plagues and pandemics that never touched isolated populations, or the Americas until Columbus. In return, apparently, syphilis came from the new world to the old.
Please don’t use/buy into that racist/woke term “whitey/white-white is a color-Caucasian is a race-skin color is variable-woke people are badly educated and do not see that...
Those Easter Islanders-who were racially mixed Polynesians-had already ruined the place before Europeans got there by cutting down all the timber to build their canoes, cooking food, etc and hunted out most of the game-with the help of the rats they had brought over. Apparently they forgot that they were on an island, with canoes/rafts being the only way to go off and find more resources someplace else-and without being able to build new canoes, they were stranded-not very smart. That wooden tablet probably says says these people are a special kind of stupid-or something similar.....
I believe that the world faces today an unprecedented global environmental crisis, and I see the usefulness of historical examples of the pitfalls of environmental destruction. So it was with some unease that I concluded that Rapa Nui does not provide such a model. But as a scientist I cannot ignore the problems with the accepted narrative of the island's prehistory. Mistakes or exaggerations in arguments for protecting the environment only lead to oversimplified answers and hurt the cause of environmentalism. We will end up wondering why our simple answers were not enough to make a difference in confronting today's problems.The guy could have just fooled around with the numbers and posted a picture of a hockey stick instead.
[sorry to go off topic, but...
did Aunt Dory call you “Froggy The Gremlim” ? ]
So ancient tablets on a remote island hold the secrets of the ancient world? Okay.....more likely they hold the secret to a really good pina colada.
It's a long story. Buy me a couple of drinks and I'll tell you about it.
Haha! I’d love to!
"A series of devastating events killed or removed most of the population in the 1860s. In December 1862, Peruvian slave raiders struck. Violent abductions continued for several months, eventually capturing around 1,500 men and women, half of the island's population. Among those captured were the island's paramount chief, his heir, and those who knew how to read and write the rongorongo script, the only Polynesian script to have been found to date, although debate exists about whether this is proto-writing or true writing.
When the slave raiders were forced to repatriate the people they had kidnapped, carriers of smallpox disembarked together with a few survivors on each of the islands. This created devastating epidemics from Easter Island to the Marquesas islands. Easter Island's population was reduced to the point where some of the dead were not even buried."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_Island
"When the slave raiders were forced to repatriate the people". The repatriation was championed by the Catholic Church.
How can something so Rongo be so write?..................
No, Rongo Rongo from Oingo Boingo..................
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