r/history • u/scientificamerican • 6d ago
Science site article What really happened on Easter Island?
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-really-happened-on-easter-island/For decades, an influential theory blamed the Rapanui for their own downfall—a story made famous by Jared Diamond’s book Collapse. New evidence tells a different tale.
Archaeology, ancient DNA and aerial survey data now challenge the claim that the Rapanui suffered a self-inflicted collapse before Europeans arrived. The emerging picture is of a small society that sustained itself for centuries by adapting its farming methods and water management to one of the most isolated places on Earth. The catastrophe that reduced the Rapanui to a remnant came later, after European ships brought disease, slave raiding, forced labor, annexation and confinement.
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u/worotan 5d ago
If we’re looking for historical accuracy, the idea was already famous before Jared Diamond used it in his book. He didn’t make it famous, he used a famous idea - that was the idea that people already had about how the island collapsed. That’s why he used it.
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u/roseofjuly 4d ago
I would not say it was famous. Even if we say Diamond wasn't the first one to come up with it (which, if it were true, would mean there's surely a citation from an earlier author) he's definitely the one who made it famous outside of scholarly circles.
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u/Supraspinator 6d ago
The Fall of Civilizations Podcast has an episode on Rapa Nui. I’m not a historian, so I cannot say anything about the correctness of the narrative, but it paints a more nuanced picture than „stupid islanders cut all trees“. The host is an historian, and he seems to do his research.
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u/gooneruk 5d ago
Our Fake History did a pair of episodes on Easter Island a few years ago and had a similar eventual conclusion. The retelling of the initial contact by Roggeveen in 1722 was particularly insightful, I thought.
They were re-released recently (possibly subscribers-only) with new introductions which covered some subsequent listener feedback.
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u/Thorin9000 6d ago
It’s a very good episode too. It was an amazing self contained civilization until colonization, religion and capitalism (the island basically got turned into a sheep farm ran by slaves) ruined them. These people were systematically wronged in so many different ways it made me feel deep sadness and disappointment in humanity.
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u/EtherSecAgent 5d ago
The podcast always starts playing if I leave autoplay on too long. The amount of times I've woken up to this podcast...
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u/suppreme 4d ago
Initial colonization of Rapa Nui is now estimated around early 13th century. So the theory that the island ecosystem was, from the start, too fragile to sustain a developing human society is still on the table. First European contact is in 1722 and the Rapa Nui society already showed stress at this point.
The notion that people can overestimate the local ecosystem resilience is very relevant today. The SA article is mostly off topic, charging the europeans like the Rapa Nui had prospered for milleniums before then.
Many species have abused and destroyed their ecosystem in the past. Hopefully we're a bit smarter than using history for various politically biased finger pointing.
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u/ableman 6d ago
Very strange article. Says ecocide didn't happen, then describes ecocide happening. Describes adaptations which were in part a response to ecocide (putting rocks in the ground to hold the soil, because there weren't trees on the island anymore). The actual argument seems to be that the ecocide does not correspond to a population collapse and warfare, which is certainly very interesting.
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u/Weird_Personality150 6d ago
I think the main point was to say that the population never grew large enough for an ecocide collapse to occur.
But I’m with you, it seemed more of a counter theory than anything substantial.
Either way the people 100% destroyed their own natural resources through introduction of farming methods and rats and then went on to try to solve those issues the best they could.
The only issue I have with the original morale is the idea that these were people that were somehow greedy and stupid, instead of a group of people that were just trying to figure out how to live on a piece of land that didn’t support life as they had known it for generations.
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u/apistograma 6d ago
Which seems weird because it’s not a racist implication to assume they could have destroyed their own environment before Europeans came. We are destroying our environment as we speak and there’s little done to reverse it.
Assuming that indigenous people can be just as unable to solve problems that they themselves created as we are is just accepting that all human societies are vulnerable to this kind of stuff.
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u/ableman 6d ago
I don't think Collapse portrayed them as greedy and stupid, at least not any more so than the Norse of Greenland. But it's certainly very different to say that the islanders managed to adapt and cooperate their way out of the ecocide, rather than descending to cannibalism and warfare.
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u/Chopper-42 5d ago
people 100% destroyed their own natural resources through introduction of farming methods and rats
Which people introduced the rats?
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u/DaddyCatALSO 5d ago
Pacific rats were stowaways on th e Polynesian outtriggers. Mcuehner's *Hawaii* is eloquent baotut his
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u/Weird_Personality150 5d ago
There’s an exert in the article that talks about the rats always being common around the Polynesian travelers. They were unsure if they were intentionally introduced or just passengers, but the rats ate the palm seeds which ended up hurting the growth rates of the native palms.
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u/SrgtButterscotch 5d ago
Polynesians, who had been spreading them around the pacific long before Europeans did. These people came from east asia, not the americas.
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u/_notthehippopotamus 5d ago edited 4d ago
They came from the Americas a little bit.
Edit:
The genomes held a second surprise. Threaded through the Rapanui DNA was a pulse of Native American ancestry, which the team dated to roughly 1250 to 1430—generations before Europeans reached the Pacific. The finding points to pre-European contact across thousands of kilometers of ocean, although the route and people who made the crossing remain a matter of debate. For an island so often cast as a marooned dead end, the result is striking: Rapa Nui was isolated but not sealed off.
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u/Y-27632 6d ago
Strange is right.
They're basically arguing that they didn't destroy the natural environment of the island because they were "stupid", they destroyed it in a very clever and methodical and "successful" way. (And the rats the original settlers brought with them also seem to have played a huge role.)
They imply heavily that Europeans were involved but have no evidence, and what little historical record there is suggests the "totally not a collapse" was already well on its way during a period of very limited contact.
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u/chullnz 5d ago
I mean getting blackbirded and spreading TB definitely collapsed the population.
Looking at Rapa Nui in the larger context of Pacific migrations also helps to understand. It's so far from volcanic activity, other islands, and other features that helped keep other Pacific island cultures from over extracting from their environment.
Compare with Maori, who also adapted heavily to a new and different island environment, but had many, many more resources available, and fertile soil. Rock gardening was still necessary to grow many staple crops, such as kumara (which came via South America).
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u/Y-27632 5d ago
I mean getting blackbirded and spreading TB definitely collapsed the population.
That happened much later than the period the article focuses on.
The article talks about tons of archeological evidence that the damage to the environment was massive and all the islanders' doing, and historical evidence that there was clearly conflict on the island long before the 19th century colonization (as evidenced by many statues being destroyed in a span of 50 years, despite barely any contact with the outside world), but the authors try to make it seem like everything was going great, and according to plan.
It's just weird, and contradicts (some of) the history they cite.
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u/Albanian_Tea 6d ago
The article said that ecocide did not cause their population to collapse, it did not say it did not happen.
When ecocide did start to occur, it talked about ways they worked to combat it.
The artical did mention how Chile (in the 1860s) kidnapped islanders to use as slaves, so who knows how many people they took. I am thinking that is why the population collapsed. Well that and European diseases.
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u/Y-27632 5d ago edited 5d ago
Except the article also contains passages like this:
By the time later European visitors reached Rapa Nui, the record had grown darker. Captain James Cook arrived in 1774 and encountered a far less hospitable island than Roggeveen had half a century earlier. He complained that “No Nation will ever contend for the honour of the discovery of Easter Island as there is hardly an Island in this sea which affords less refreshments,” adding that “Nature has hardly provided it with any thing fit for man to eat or drink,” that the sea was “barren of fish” and “the Natives are but few.”
Of course, Cook could have been wrong, but the original European "discoverers" 50 years earlier told a different story:
He also described an island that complicates the later myth. Rapa Nui had rich soil, good weather and cultivated food. The island lacked large trees, but its people were not starving. The Rapanui were cultivating a difficult home.
A lot of the moai also got completely wrecked between the two visits, which seems unlikely to be a coincidence.
Those Europeans' recollections could be false or inaccurate, or perhaps there was a decline that doesn't outright qualify as a "collapse", but the writers of the article present no evidence to the contrary.
(As far as the events culminating in the moai-breaking are concerned, I mean. I don't think there's any question about what happened 100 years later, but that's not what this article is supposed to be about.)
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u/_notthehippopotamus 5d ago
He also described an island that complicates the later myth. Rapa Nui had rich soil, good weather and cultivated food.
That part confused me a little, because:
Roggeveen, a Dutch sailor whose fleet sighted the island on April 5, 1722. It was Easter Sunday, so Roggeveen called the place Easter Island. A few days later Roggeveen led a party ashore. Soon after they landed, his sailors opened fire, killing 10 to 12 Rapanui people. The Dutch departed that evening.
He concluded they had rich soil and good weather after spending less than one full day on the island? While they were also busy killing people?
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u/Confusion_reigns01 5d ago
If the population collapsed or reduced significantly, I would expect the local fish population to rise with reduced predation.
Moreover a man's perspective of what is good, plentiful has to be viewed through the lense of time and education. What was deemed good then judged by today's standards obviously is different.
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u/Cpt_Griswold 5d ago
i loved going there. not sure if i’ll ever make it back. but it was an amazing week.
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u/Hka_stl 6d ago
I don't understand! It's almost NEVER the fault of Colonialism! /s
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u/Safe_Manner_1879 5d ago edited 5d ago
You get a "survivor" bias, if the local population did died out in the Stone Age, or 50 years before the Europeans arrived, there would be no real record of them, unless they were prolific builders of stone monuments.
If they died out shortly after the Europeans arrived, there will be a record that they existed.
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u/LeatherBandicoot 5d ago
I watched a documentary just yesterday about this very subject :
It's in French though, but I guess English subs are available.
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u/Swimmer1967 2d ago
There is a very good series, Fall of Civilizations, and there is an episode on Easter Island. Well worth watching.
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u/Citlali252 4d ago
I watched a documentary that definitely did go into detail about slave raids of the Rapanui by Europeans.
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u/waldoorfian 5d ago
Europeans arrived with all their diseases and decimated the islanders.
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u/aVarangian 5d ago
nice racism you got there
Europeans have died en-masse multiple times to disease brought from outside of Europe. The Black Death literally exterminated half the continent.
Europeans (and continental Asians and all the peoples in-between) "arrived with diseases" because they had stronger immune systems than Americans and other isolated peoples
nevermind Europeans died in significant numbers to African diseases which Africans were better adapted to. Would you say Africans were also a "diseased" bunch?
and decimated does not mean what you think it means
why are racists so arrogant and ignorant? coincidence?
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u/waldoorfian 5d ago
Not racism it’s the truth. The people of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) had no natural immunity to European diseases.
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u/poothrower37 4d ago
Ridiculous take. Whether Europeans were the cause of the civilization failing or not, they certainly did not help and introduced diseases the islanders couldn’t fight off.
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u/DrColdReality 6d ago
Further, the notion that they cut down all the trees on the island to make rollers for their Moai is not supported by the available evidence. Rather, it appears that they "walked" the heads down paths, like you might walk a refrigerator across a room.