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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...

A Chaunax, a genus of bony fish in the sea toad family Chaunacidae, is seen at a depth of 1,388 meters (4,553 feet) on a seamount inside the Nazca-Desventuradas Marine Park. Image credit: Schmidt Ocean Institute ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ More than 100 new species have been discovered on an underwater mountain range off the coast of Chile. Among the never-before-seen critters seen on the expedition are corals, glass sponges, sea urchins, amphipods, lobsters, plus a gaggle of peculiar fish and squid that are already known to science (but no less strange). The discoveries come from an international group of scientists who recently...

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...

The people of Easter Island appeared to drink directly from the sea, European explorers reported in the late 1700s. And today, you can see animals—most famously horses—do the same thing. What's going on? While surrounded by a vast ocean, fresh water is a scarce commodity on Rapa Nui, as the island is known to its native inhabitants. No rivers or streams cross its surface, and it sports only three small crater lakes that can dry up during periodic droughts. Due to a quirk of geology, rainwater immediately sinks down through the porous bedrock, where it feeds an underground aquifer, explained...

The giant heads, carved centuries ago by the island’s inhabitants, represent the living ancestors of Easter Island’s Polynesian people - the Rapa Nui - and have brought it UNESCO World Heritage Site status. Dozens of giant “Moai” statues dominate the hillsides surrounding the island’s Rano Raraku wetland, but they are facing the threat of what locals describe as a kind of leprosy, white spots that are appearing on their iconic facades.

The process of coastal groundwater discharge makes it possible for humans to collect drinkable freshwater directly where it emerges at the coast of the island... "The porous volcanic soils quickly absorb rain, resulting in a lack of streams and rivers," Lipo said. "Fortunately, water beneath the ground flows downhill and ultimately exits the ground directly at the point at which the porous subterranean rock meets the ocean. When tides are low, this results in the flow of freshwater directly into the sea. Humans can thus take advantage of these sources of freshwater by capturing the water at these points." ...He...

The first people arrived on Easter Island (or, in the local language, Rapa Nui) about 900 years ago. "The founding population, according to oral tradition, was two canoes led by the island's first chief, Hotu Matu'a," says Simpson, who is currently on the faculty of the College of DuPage... These statues, or moai, often referred to as "Easter Island heads," are actually full-body figures that became partially buried over time. The moai, which represent important Rapa Nui ancestors, number nearly a thousand, and the largest one is over seventy feet tall... Recent excavations of four statues in the inner region...

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...

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...

SCIENTISTS say they have discovered a wonder drug that could help people live up to ten years longer. Rapamycin is a bacterial product found in soil samples on remote Easter Island in the South Pacific. It works by inhibiting a protein called TOR that plays a key role in cell growth. Rapamycin is widely used to stop transplant patients rejecting their new organs.

A new study contradicts the idea that the prehistoric Rapa Nui people of Easter Island suffered a demographic collapse brought on by poor environmental stewardship. Scholars had theorized that unchecked agricultural growth after the first settlers arrived around A.D. 1200 strained the island's fragile ecosystem to the breaking point, leading to the erosion of topsoil and the eventual death by starvation of many members of Rapa Nui society. But prehistoric demographics are notoriously difficult to determine with precision. Phys.org reports that an international research team has evaluated the claim that the population of Easter Island collapsed by studying how land...

Known to its Polynesian inhabitants as Rapa Nui, Easter Island is thought to have been colonised around the 13th Century and is famed for its mysterious large stone statues or moai. Otago Anatomy PhD student Monica Tromp and Idaho State University’s Dr John Dudgeon have just published new research clearing up their previous puzzling finding that suggested palm may have been a staple plant food for Rapa Nui’s population over several centuries. However, no other line of archaeological or ethnohistoric evidence supports palm having a dietary role on Easter Island; in fact evidence points to the palm becoming extinct soon...

WITH ALL THE WAR NEWS blaring from our TV sets, few Americans found time last week to mark the passing of 87-year-old Thor Heyerdahl. Yet his death haunts and accuses us, like a dagger pointed at our hearts. The great Norwegian explorer lived as few men dare to live in this effeminate age. Heyerdahl roamed the seas in primitive, handmade craft, as intimate with death as his Viking forebears had been. In 1947, he sailed more than 4,000 miles across the Pacific Ocean in a balsa-log raft named Kon-Tiki. He crossed the Atlantic in 1970, in a ship of reeds,...

WHEN THOR HEYERDAHL died in April, the mass media fell oddly mute. Some readers told me that they learned of the great Norwegian explorer’s death only a week later, by reading my eulogy on the Internet. Such apathy seems hard to fathom. Every schoolboy once read Kon-Tiki and dreamed of conquering the waves as Heyerdahl had done. Perhaps, imbued with the modern philosophy of "safety first," today’s journalists no longer wish to encourage such dreams. Media apathy has likewise greeted Dominique Goerlitz – Heyerdahl’s apprentice and heir apparent. On July 20, this 35-year-old German schoolteacher landed in Alexandria, Egypt, after...

In the Footsteps of Heyerdahl By Richard Poe August 16, 2002 WHEN THOR HEYERDAHL died in April, the mass media fell oddly mute. Some readers told me that they learned of the great Norwegian explorer’s death only a week later, by reading my eulogy on the Internet. Such apathy seems hard to fathom. Every schoolboy once read Kon-Tiki and dreamed of conquering the waves as Heyerdahl had done. Perhaps, imbued with the modern philosophy of "safety first," today’s journalists no longer wish to encourage such dreams. Media apathy has likewise greeted Dominique Goerlitz – Heyerdahl’s apprentice and heir apparent. On...

Floating A Big Idea: Ancient Use Of Rafts To Transport Goods DemonstratedMIT students built a small-scale replica of an ancient oceangoing sailing raft to study its seaworthiness and handling. (Credit: Donna Coveney/MIT) ScienceDaily (Mar. 22, 2008) — Oceangoing sailing rafts plied the waters of the equatorial Pacific long before Europeans arrived in the Americas, and carried tradegoods for thousands of miles all the way from modern-day Chile to western Mexico, according to new findings by MIT researchers in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. Details of how the ancient trading system worked more than 1,000 years ago were reconstructed...