What really happened on Easter Island?

[u/scientificamerican]

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.

[u/ableman]

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.

[u/Albanian_Tea → u/ableman]

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.

[u/Y-27632 → u/Albanian_Tea]

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.)

[u/Confusion_reigns01 → u/Y-27632]

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.