Easter Island
The stone heads are part of the Polynesian tradition of ancestor worship. We know they were polynesian due to genetic evidence taken from buried bones containing a specific sequence of DNA that is exclusive to Polynesians.
Easter Island, today, is treeless. It is covered in grasses for the most part but no trees. This is unusual as most of the Pacific Islands are brimming with trees. So, they did some digging, and found that as little as 400 years ago, the island had palm trees on it. In fact, the further back they examined, the more palm tree spores they found, leading to the conclusion that the trees had been destroyed by something or someone.
Let's go back to those heads. The rock they were cut from is not local to where the statues stand. These blocks (in some cases 40 tons a piece) were moved across the island to their current locations. How did they move them? They cut down and used trees.
It seems in their furore to worship their ancestors they cut down every tree on the island in order to move those damned statues around! Mad as that seems there can be no other conclusion. The palm trees disappeared very quickly, and there is no evidence of illness.
This brought a lot of problems to the islanders. Examination of settlements on the island show that when they first landed their diet consisted majorly of birds and fish. This is evidenced by the huge amounts of bird and fish bones found in these settlements. However, over time the diet changes. Less and less bird and fish remains are found.
The birds, of course, had nowhere to land on the island once the trees had gone, so they stopped coming, and thus disappeared as a food source for the islanders. Also, as there were no trees left they had nothing to make boats with and couldn't go fishing anymore. These also disappeared as a food source. Of course, having no boats also meant they were trapped on the island; trapped on the most remote spot on earth.
There are many carvings that testify to what happened next on the island. They depict emaciated figures writhing in pain. They began to starve to death due to the ecological collapse they themselves had caused. This led to bloody battles between peoples on the island for the dwnidling resources.
However, these carving are eventually superceded by different ones that depict men with human bodies and birds heads (frigate birds in fact). This period is dubbed as the "Cult of the Bird man". It invloved a yearly competition where islanders raced to a nearby island in order to obtain frigate bird eggs. Whoever was first to get back with an egg was given the power over the resources and it was then down to them to decide how to allot the resources. To a large degree this saved the islanders from total destruction.
However, the then modern world arrived in the shape of Dutch explorers, and this modern world brought along something that even the hardy islanders couldn't deal with: disease. From the first date that the Dutch arrived there is increasing evidence of syphilis running rife through the islanders. Before the dutch they had no illnesses of this kind.
But this was not all. Even though they were decimated by the illnesses that the Dutch brought, to add insult to injury, a third of the islanders (who by then numbered about 1500) were captured by Peruvians and taken as slaves to work in mines in Peru (I think it was Peru - again I am working entirely from memory here).
Within one year only 7, yes, seven, remained of the slaves, and they were returned to the island.
Once again the modern world came along (I can't remember who but it may have been Cook) and they brought small pox with them. This basically was the final straw for the islanders and it killed off most of the remaining population.
kind regards
Paul
What evidence? That's precisely the point I was alluding to when I mentioned "lost worlds" that no one can find.
There was a very interesting program on BBC a couple of weeks back.
The stone heads are part of the Polynesian tradition of ancestor worship. We know they were polynesian due to genetic evidence taken from buried bones containing a specific sequence of DNA that is exclusive to Polynesians.
Easter Island, today, is treeless. It is covered in grasses for the most part but no trees. This is unusual as most of the Pacific Islands are brimming with trees. So, they did some digging, and found that as little as 400 years ago, the island had palm trees on it. In fact, the further back they examined, the more palm tree spores they found, leading to the conclusion that the trees had been destroyed by something or someone.
Let's go back to those heads. The rock they were cut from is not local to where the statues stand. These blocks (in some cases 40 tons a piece) were moved across the island to their current locations. How did they move them? They cut down and used trees.
It seems in their furore to worship their ancestors they cut down every tree on the island in order to move those damned statues around! Mad as that seems there can be no other conclusion. The palm trees disappeared very quickly, and there is no evidence of illness.
This brought a lot of problems to the islanders. Examination of settlements on the island show that when they first landed their diet consisted majorly of birds and fish. This is evidenced by the huge amounts of bird and fish bones found in these settlements. However, over time the diet changes. Less and less bird and fish remains are found.
The birds, of course, had nowhere to land on the island once the trees had gone, so they stopped coming, and thus disappeared as a food source for the islanders. Also, as there were no trees left they had nothing to make boats with and couldn't go fishing anymore. These also disappeared as a food source. Of course, having no boats also meant they were trapped on the island; trapped on the most remote spot on earth.
There are many carvings that testify to what happened next on the island. They depict emaciated figures writhing in pain. They began to starve to death due to the ecological collapse they themselves had caused. This led to bloody battles between peoples on the island for the dwnidling resources.
However, these carving are eventually superceded by different ones that depict men with human bodies and birds heads (frigate birds in fact). This period is dubbed as the "Cult of the Bird man". It invloved a yearly competition where islanders raced to a nearby island in order to obtain frigate bird eggs. Whoever was first to get back with an egg was given the power over the resources and it was then down to them to decide how to allot the resources. To a large degree this saved the islanders from total destruction.
However, the then modern world arrived in the shape of Dutch explorers, and this modern world brought along something that even the hardy islanders couldn't deal with: disease. From the first date that the Dutch arrived there is increasing evidence of syphilis running rife through the islanders. Before the dutch they had no illnesses of this kind.
But this was not all. Even though they were decimated by the illnesses that the Dutch brought, to add insult to injury, a third of the islanders (who by then numbered about 1500) were captured by Peruvians and taken as slaves to work in mines in Peru (I think it was Peru - again I am working entirely from memory here).
Within one year only 7, yes, seven, remained of the slaves, and they were returned to the island.
Once again the modern world came along (I can't remember who but it may have been Cook) and they brought small pox with them. This basically was the final straw for the islanders and it killed off most of the remaining population.
kind regards
Paul