Why Did Easter Island's Civilization Collapse?

you go. Barney Fife on holiday to Eastern Island, or Rapa Nui. Mr Limpett yeah, boy, that ages or Mr Chicken the Ghost of Mr Chicken another good one. I'd say. S of our listeners are like, who is Barney five? Who was Mr Limpett? It was Mr Chicken. Go look it up. You'll be delighted. Yeah, man, don yeah. He He also did great turns on Scooby Doo oh sure in three Company. Yeah. Man, he had a great career. I love that guy. R I p don knots is he not with us? Oh? Yeah yeah. I think he

died like in the last five, six, ten years. I think you never know, man, you know some of those people. You're like, oh, sure, like a Vagoda. People thought he was dead for years. It was like a part of pop culture that he was dead. He just died this year. I think that's the way. Yeah, it's very sad. Yeah, he's like, fine, here we go. I think that maybe that's a good Is that the ultimate compliment or the ultimate sign of disrespect that when he passed, everyone's like

I thought they were already dead. Disrespect. Okay, Um, we're on East Tryland, that's where we were, That's right, which means the big rappa in Polynesian. Yeah in Rapa Nui language. Did you know that? Are you alluding to Joe versus the volcano? Okay, that's the pony wos. Yeah, the big Wou was the volcano. I just thought you were playing on that. No. I was looking high and low for what rapa Nui translates into English, and all I could see where jackass As you said that it translates to

Eastern Island. Like, that's not what I mean? Internet? Um did you punch the Internet? But it turned out it was just my last Um. No, the the closest I found was that rapa Nui means big Rappa r A p A no idea what rappa means? Did you see the movie rap? No? Kevin Reynolds movie? Is that? Who made it? Yeah? I think he wrote and directed it. I know he directed it. I'm pretty sure he wrote it too. And who is he? What do I know that name? Oh, he's done all sorts of stuff, the

water World. No, that's Kevin Um. Well, no, he was in it, but I think he directed to um. Kevin Reynolds and Kevin Costner's UM careers were very much intertwined. May I think got confused a lot. He's done a lot of great stuff. But we you didn't see Revenue. No. I assume it's a a story, fictional story wrapped in the events of probably the decline of the island would be my guest. Yes, civil war, strife, possibly cannibalism. What's interesting, though,

is that that fictional story wrapped in the true life events. Yeah, it turns out the true life events are probably fictional as well. Yeah. This actually and maybe I should give our own article a break because most people have been telling the same story for years, which is basically the story that author Jared Diamond told in his book In two thousand five called collapse. Right, he popularized it. He

wasn't the first one to come up with this interpretation. No, but he's he's the one that really he's the gun germs and the old guy, right, one of one of my heroes. You wrote one of the greatest things I've ever read, um, the worst mistake in the history of the human race. But like a one word book, but her. Yeah, I was trying to think of something. But that's better

than anything I could have thought of. No, he was saying that he made the case that moving from hunting and gathering to agriculture was the worst mistake humans have ever made. Great, it's all over the internet if you want to go read it. Really great easy read. Um and life changing change my life? Is that why you stalk buffalo today? By hand? Raise my own crops? You come home, You're like, you mean skin that thing? I need a pelt. She's like, I just got done skinning

the last one from me yesterday. Uh, you skin it and you go okay. Um, where were we We were talking about Kevin Reynolds rep New Week and there we were saying that um. And by the way, Kevin Reynolds did direct water World. It did Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves, a lot of Kevin Costner movies with the Postman too. No, he did Fandango. That was a good one. Um, he's done a bunch of stuff, all right. So I think I remember where I was, which is, um, we should

take it easy on our article a little bit. I was a little annoyed that this article didn't say theorized things like that. It kind of just said, like, no, this is what happened, and and it was really judgy, Like the thing that it bought into is an extremely judgy interpretation of things, and it bought it as fact. It's the judgest article on the whole site. Well what about the one I sent you earlier today? Yeah, how did you deal with brown Nosers? Yeah? An article on

our site called how the Deal with Brown Nosers? Four pages? Yep, if you're looking for advice, go check it out. Good miss me, um, weird times my friend. Uh so, Yeah, I was a little annoyed that it kind of treated us all as absolute scientific fact when it certainly isn't. Um. It just seems like one of those things that like someone said it, someone else wrote a popular book, and then everyone's like, oh, well, that's what happened, right, and

that's really unusual for anthropology and archaeology. Frankly, Jared Diamond should have known better. Um, he's really taken a lot of heat. Um, his star was pretty high at the time. He had like a neat geo show. I think he wrote guns, Germs and Steel. He wrote this book Collapse, How civilizations decide to choose or choose to succeed or fail, And like even the wording in that title, like how is a society chooses to fail? You know, it's really

judging in and of itself. So his he he definitely you know fell There are a lot of um plays on the word collapse and Jared Diamond collapsing as a result. So now he goes in that geo and knocks on the door and like everyone's like, light up, No, if

we turn it off, 'll see that, right. But Yeah, the point is is that there is a a set of fact related to Rappannui to Easter Island that when you put together, form a mystery, a mystery that's basically been around since the first Europeans set foot fann Easter Island then came back and brought news of this place

to the rest of the world. People have puzzled over what happened there, and Um the problem is, is the oral traditions that came along or that that came from Rapanui from Easter Island, Um came along in like the eighteen eighties, a good hundred and fifty years after Europeans came and christianized everybody, when the population had been down

to like a hundred people. And even today anthropologists and archaeologists say like, we don't really trust the oral tradition from Rapanui at all, Like it's not a they don't it's not a trustworthy source of information, even like in a folkloric way. We're saying, like the basics of it might not even be correct. So they're having to go back, which is very weird. That's a very unusual position to be in UM, both for the people from the indigenous culture and the people who are trying to figure out

what happened UM. But so the challenges to take what we do know for a fact about Rapa Nui and then interpret it correctly and not in a way that's like this is it. This is the end all, be all explanations, which seems to be this weird thing that rapa Nui has over academics who should know better. They say,

this is it. And the part about Jared Diamond, the reason he felt so hard is that his interpretation, or the interpretation that he glomped onto and like popularized in his book was really really judge, really judgey, really like these people screwed up with their stupid faith and some wacky tiki god and um and look what brought him. And now we all need to learn the lesson because we're going down the same road and that's just not thought and you're not supposed to do that, all right,

So why don't we do it this way? We'll we'll give you the story as has been theorized and popularized for many years, and then we'll hold off till the end for some new insights. They give away too much. No, I don't think so just judge, I was judge? No, okay uh. Just because you say the word judge doesn't make you judge, is that right? I think? So? Okay uh? And also just want to tease us. We have a

very special listener mail later too. How about that? Lots of reasons to stick around, all right, so you keep saying these words like Easter Island and Rapa Nui like they're the same thing, because they are. Rapa Nui also called East the Pasqua, which means Easter Island in Spanish. Right, that's right, Easter Island. It's actually named, of course, when

it doesn't matter what your islands called. When the Dutch or the British or the Spaniards would come a call and they would say, oh no, no, no, here's what we'll call. It doesn't matter what you say. So we'll call it Easter Island. Because I'm a Dutch admiral name uh, Jacob rogue Vine, And um, it's Easter when I landed here in seventeen two, So what a great name. Obviously it's Easter Island. Rogue Vine also gets credit for discovering

Easter Island. Um. Actually he was looking for an island that was Easter Island that had been described by a pirate named Edward Davis in seven Davis didn't come ashore, but um, even rogue Vine was convinced that Easter Island was the island that Davis had described. Did he say they're large stone heads? No, he didn't. He didn't mention the heads at all. Well, of course, weird Easter Island is I'm sure everybody knows this, but we should say right away that they are very well known and most

well known for their mo i m o ai. These um beautiful, enormous carved stone statues, not just stone heads and that whole boy, it's annoying the internet thing. It still pops up like once a year when people like, look, there were bodies too. It's not just heads. They've discovered their bodies are buried underground, like they've known that since

like the early nineteen hundreds. But its this, it's this weird look up snopes, like, it's this weird internet thing where every couple of years, the same stinking article gets shared the shows all these archaeologists like have dug down and discovered their bodies beneath the earth, even though we've known this forever. So anyway, these beautiful, beautiful statues, which we're gonna talk about in greater detail, but let's talk a little bit about the how the original island was,

uh well what it was like. They're who these people were, the originally calling yeah, the Wapoos, which to the island is Rappa Newi towards and the inhabitants of the island are called the Rapa Nui clean simple, I love it, right, So the rap and we they think we're probably a single family. Um that was headed up by a guy who was considered the first chief of the island um His name was Hotu Matua or the great parent. Hold on.

You know what just occurred to me. Vagoda was the leader of the Yeah, all right, God, was there a better movie than that one. It's one of my faiths. We've talked about it a lot. Yeah, it's Kevin reynolds masterpiece. So Hotu Matua is originally the first chief of um A Repnue, and he allegedly came with just his family.

They don't know exactly what they were doing out in their canoes, but they had seaworthy canoes because they hailed from Polynesia and they were great, great sailors, very experienced

and hardy at sea. Yes, so I mean and they this would have been a longstanding edition trying out setting out for new unknown islands because they believe that Polynesians are descended from Southeast Asians who somewhere between thirty four thousand years ago left Southeast Asia started moving eastward um toward the western coast of South America in that general direction, and would come across an island, stay there, popular populated, move on to another one populated, And that's how Polynesia

got populated. Rapa Nui I believe is the easternmost island in Polynesia. So they think that that was settled last. Yeah, go to Google Earth if you're in front of your computer and just type in Easter Island and then it'll pop up this little triangular shaped island and uh then just start zooming out and keep zooming out and you'll see a lot of blue. And it's amazing to think

that people got there in a canoe. Yeah, yeah, because it's like through eight thousand or thirty five hundred miles from from Tahiti, right, Yeah, like miles from right but Chile is not where they came from, so they would have traveled by canoe. But that's the closest land that right is still away. It's amazing, Yeah, our remote, but they traveled like three thousand thirty miles in a canoe. Unbelievable to get from one one island to another, and

probably less. I think there's probably islands between Tahiti and Easter Island. But even still they traveled a very substantial distance. And then they clearly were intending to either make it to another island or to colonize Rapanui because they brought with them supplies, right, they brought with them plants to plant, like the Tarot route, which is like, I believe a cousin of the sweet potato. It's like a purple sweet potato. That is correct, uh, Nanners and Tarot and this whole

sweet potato thing too. Was there was somebody who put out there that thor hired All, Yeah, maybe they came from South America because that's that's where the sweet potato comes from. And then other people have since said, no, there's a lot of evidence that suggests us not true. Right, well, Thorie, Yeah, thor hired All said, hey, they're sweet potatoes here. Sweet

potatoes are indigenous to South America, therefore they're from South America. Yeah, he didn't really put a lot of thought into that. And well, he was an explorer, you know, that's what he did. He explored. He built a raft contiki and saled it himself from South America to Eastern Island back in the fifties. I mean it was cool, but he was a doer, a little more than a thinker. Right, And I believe they've concluded that the sweet potato actually

originated in Southeast Asia, which just lends support even more. Um. But yeah, so they came here, they settled this island, they landed on. The shore it's tiny, it is. It's about three times the size of Manhattan. Yeah, it's a sixty four square miles. Like I said, it's triangular. And it was created, like a lot of the islands, um from volcanic eruptions, which also come to play with these statues,

as we will see. Yea and uh. When they landed, his family said, well, we're family, but we better get to populating the place. So here's some wine, here's some taro root, let's get to it. Right. The island they landed on, though, was potentially, they think, much different than the island that we know today. Um, if you go there today, it's it's you're gonna see some white sandy beaches and not a lot of trees. Um. They believed that there could have been as many a sixteen million

palm trees at first, just like rife with palm trees. Yeah, like so many of the islands, like god damn with the palm trees whenever another one grows. Yeah, And it wasn't the most Uh, it wasn't the friendliest. I mean I say friendly. It was friendly, but it wasn't hospitable. Yeah, that's the word. There wasn't like just food everywhere, and like tons of seafood. Like apparently the waters around there are lower nutrients, so no coral reefs, and that means

not a lot of fish. So you had some lizards, you had some molluski, had some insects, and there was if you went fishing, you had to go deep sea fishing, like away from the island. But again like get a dolphin, right dolphin, that's um, which which they could do because they had really great canoes. Um. But they they it was it was, it was in ordeal. They had a lot of vegetables basically, and a lot of those they planted, so, um,

they're living this way. This article says they settled about four sea right um, which was what years ago I saw elsewhere from are reliable sources. Most people think it was about a thousand years ago instead of six hundred, so about one thousand. See, they settled the island and the population starts to grow pretty quickly. Apparently having six toes was a fairly normal trait among Rapa Nui originally because they might be in bread sure um and uh,

everything was going kind of honky dorry. They started they started ostensibly slashing and burning trees to clear land for fields, um and uh they made they made their way. Yeah. They were very spiritual people. They believed in the idea of mana, a sense of mana, which is uh, this spiritual and political authority. And they uh they instilled this through their arts, through cave drawings and through these statues which still haven't really gotten to and through carvings, music, dance,

and it was it was a big deal. At meant a lot to them, right. So they the Repanuians followed the traditional Polynesian um structure of governance, which was there was a different clans right um and then there was one head chief, one tribal leader um that was in charge of everybody, right basically like a vogoda. Who else would you want? And the authority of that chief came from de sease ancestors, other chiefs that had lived and died and were now venerated as basically idol, supernatural idols

by the people who lived on the island. And this power came through the came from these ancestors to the living chiefs in the form of this manner the spiritual power and one of the most um but one of the most focused, laser focused ways Manna was emanated was through the moai. That's a great place to take a break, my friend. Hey, Chuck, Blue Apron is an amazing way to cook at home, using amazing fresh, amazingly great ingredients, and they're on a mission to bring it to as

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making it even easier to give him a try. You can check out this week's menu and get your first three meals for free with free shipping by going to blue Apron dot com slash stuff. You'll love how good it feels and tastes to create incredible home cooked meals with Blue Apron. So don't wait, that's blue Apron dot com slash s t U f F blue Apron a better way to cook? All right? These mo i, which you refer to as heads because you believe that internet mean well, it's not so much that it's a lot

ahead to the body. Yes, proportionately speaking, it's almost all ahead, that's right. Which some people think that one of the reasons is because they were meant to be a fallast. Yeah, and of course that's taken as literal fact by the how stuff Works article. That's right. All right, So um, these uh moai, these beautiful statues that it's not something that you will only find on Easter Island. If you

go to Hawaii or Tahiti, you will see similar type things. Uh. And this was, like you said, this was like the purest expression of that mana and how they felt about their ancestors. I think that what they how they understood it was that the man of this divine energy or divine power literally transmitted through the um. Moi man, I'm gonna have trouble with that the whole time. So it's a lot of vowels together. Moi, it is m a O m o ai. I think that's a mistake you're making.

You're thinking a moi, you're thinking maori. Right? Maybe not? Yes, you're exactly correct. And um. So these things were built. There's a volcano. They're called Reino Ra Roku and uh. In the pits of this volcano they have this volcanic ash, this rock that's very lightweight. Even though these things still weigh a lot, doesn't weigh as much as you know, like granite would let's say lightweight rock. It's very porous, it's malleable, it's very hard, and it's originally it's tinted

in like orange and ochre and um. At first, they would start around you know, twelve a D or what do you say now? But even that is um kind of a nod to that whole thing. Uh. Instead, I think in scientists just say years ago okay, oh I like that, so they'd be like eight hundred years ago that's clean, or or they say X years before present, so y bp okay, that's not as clean, but I still like it. Yeah, um I'm done with hye bp yeah you know me so um terrible. Uh. They started

off kind of small. They were not as big as they would eventually get because they were just kind of learning and teaching themselves how to do this. Uh. They were they were still large though, but um, they weren't as large as like later on they would find something that they couldn't even move and we'll get to this, but they would eventually move these things. But like L Gigante was the largest one they found, and that was

like almost seventy two ft tall. Yeah. Um, I think up to a hundred and sixty five tons is how much they estimate L Gigante ways yeah, but the the initial ones that they started with were much much smaller, and so like let's go with ten feet or so and five or six tons Yeah, even that's still nothing to sneeze at though, you know, correct, um, no matter

how big your head is. So um l L gigante specifically though, it is representative of I think one of the late um the late moi be because it's still there. It's still left in its volcanic kit. It was never even excavated. Fully. Yeah, it's just laying there, I think, um horizontally to the ground. Because you know that, like they would go in and be like, this area is going to be the moi, and they would carve it out.

They carve out the outline of it, and then they'd start carving down around it and start carving out the features, carve out beneath it um or if it was standing up, they would carve out around it and then just leave a little pedestal yeah, called the keel. Uh. This article says it was flat, but as we'll see later, that

may or may not be true. And then they would separate it from its keel and then bring it down the mountains somehow, maybe rope something like that to their aho, which would be the platform on which the mo i would eventually stand, and they would line them up on the island's perimeter facing in into the island, not out to the sea. Yeah, which it says here, possibly they were you know, guarding, watchfully guarding the islands. I would think that they would be looking out towards the sea

if that were the case. I don't know who knows, um, But yeah, that that point though, where they were brought down the mountain and brought to their ahu. I mean, like this this island was again it's three times the size of Manhattan. That was not a just a quick thing necessarily. And that's actually like a huge mystery. How did they get these things that? Again some like the small ones weighed six tons um. Big ones weighed you know, scores of tons. How many How did they get these

things from one place to another? Um, especially considering that all they had were palm trees. Palm trees are not the sturdiest trees on the on the planet, and the kind of rope you can make from like palm is not the strongest rope. So um, it's been a longstanding mystery of how they did this. Yeah, And here's one prevailing theory that from many years and a lot of people still believe this is how they moved them. Was

that they would finish the statue. Uh, like we said, cut it from the keel, uh, lower it down with ropes from the area in the volcano, and then uh put it on these palm logs and use those as like a conveyor system, essentially rolling these things along very slowly over great distances, even though, like you said, to small island, to the whole one of these things was no easy task. Right. So that's the prevailing theory, and

it's actually been tested um more than once. Um an archaeologist named Joe and von Tilburg who um said, you know what if you took one of these things and you laid it on its back on top of some logs, like basically make a sled out of logs facing say in north south direction, uh, and then you roll them over logs that are in east west alignment right perpendicular

to it. That that could probably work. And they tested out her theory and apparently it took twelve people to move like a six or eight ton uh MOI a hundred and fifty feet took him two minutes. Yeah, so that is a theory. Um. There's this other guy that we're going to talk about a little bit later who has some theories that just smack diamond right in the face. His name is Carl LiPo or Lippo l I p

O of a cal State Long Beach. Um, go bananas lugs. No, No, that's San Jose State, right, cal State Long Beach, the Longshoreman. We're gonna hear from them, the cal State Long Beach Port Authority. I like that. Uh so Terry Hunt of the University of Hawaii. No, well we're yeah, yeah, Carl Lippo and Terry Hunt, right, yeah, these two dudes, um

who have their own theories about the other stuff. Like I said, but they said and tested, they said, you know what, these things they had broader shoulder I'm sorry, broader bases than shoulders, and it wasn't exactly flat on the bottom. You could actually walk these dudes. Stand them upright, get three ropes, get people on the side on each side of this, and one person in the back holding it up and just kind of rock it back and forth and it sort of waddles forward. It's amazing to see.

There's this really cool there's a National Geographic video on YouTube that um shows all these different ways that they were tried, all these different theories tried out done with the anima action figures or something. Yeah, well you can see the real thing too. Right at the end, they show these guys trying out the real thing. And this thing is like walking down the road. It's really neat um. And it actually jibes with the Rapa Nui oral tradition

that the the moai walked to their aho their pedestals. Yeah, they actually said we tied rope and walked them. Well, supposedly they whoever had a lot of manna, was in charge of making these things walk, and they did it with their manna. But that the idea that you could make these things walk with some rope and the I and and tying into you know, the oral tradition that

they walked him, that's pretty fascinating, agreed. Uh. And in their real tests they only used eighteen people, so that ties in with their theories about how many people lived there, which we'll get too later. But a few ropes eighteen people and they maneuver to ten foot five time replica a few hundred yards. Uh. People poo poo this and say, you know what, not all these bases were larger than the shoulders first of all, and second of all, you basically carved a runway to do this, and it wasn't

like that for them. They were taking this over terrain. There's no way you could have walked these dudes, let's see. But maybe they did both, you know, well, there's there's plenty of other theories this. Um. This Czechoslaw Slovakian engineer named Pavel Pavel great name, right, Yes, the magicians so nice you had to right he said that, um, and the same magician because I assume he's gonna say magic, yeah right, I don't think so. No, No, that's Eric

van Dakin who said that it was UFOs that did it. Um. No, Pavel Pavlo said it was kind of like it was similar to that walking thing, but rather than the thing actually like kind of wobbling down the road, he uh postulated a um, a twisting motion. Right, so it's it's kind of like walking, but no part of the base actually leaves the ground, just like one part twist four and then you twist the other side forward and it

slowly makes its way forward kind of the same. Um. And then there's a big debate over okay, if you had him on a sled that was rolling over logs. Were they standing up or were they laying down? Um. The key thing to remember whenever you're talking about, or hearing somebody else more importantly talk about Rapa Nui is

that no one knows for certain anything. No, but they're making their that's not assumptions, but they're theories, hypotheses at bestes at best, and and they're they're all their interpretations of the few facts that we do know. Right And and one of the one of the things that has long been debated to is um the idea of the population collapse that must have happened on Rapa Nui. Right.

So when Admiral rogue Vine showed up, uh he he he was the first European to see the um the moi in person, and he's like, these things are amazing, they're huge. But I estimate there's something like maybe three thousand people living on this island. So something must have led to this population declined, because it would have taken ten thousand or twenty thousand people to build and construct and move these things down the volcano, construct their ahu,

their pedestals and get them up there. Um. So what happened to the Rapa Nui and it from the moment he got back to Europe and shared this story about Easter Island. This mystery has plagued archaeology in the West. What led to this population decline among the Rapa Nui? What happened on Easter Island. It's one of the great mysteries of archaeology. All right, buddy, we let's take a final break here and we will come back and talk

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dot com. All you gotta do is enter our offer code s t U f F you're gonna get off your first purchase that squarespace dot com offer code stuff squares Space. So chuckers were back, um and again just to go over Jacob Rogevine admiral landed on the island. By the way. First thing he did was killed twelve Repnuians who apparently, no, I didn't see anywhere we're posing any threat whatsoever. Well, that's what you do to say

we mean business. And I'm sure they were thinking could have killed a couple of us, And we get the picture, even one that would have done it one and then make eye contact for an extended period of time does the same thing as killing a dozen people, or just fire your boomstick in the air. Um. So rogue Vine shows up and it's like something really bad happened here. The people have built I think it's something like almost nine hundred moai on the island, um, but only a

couple of hundred are on there. A who and we didn't say they're a who. Um. Actually, these platforms, according to revenue tradition, were burial grounds, the burial the tombs for the um chiefs that the Moai represent, so very much the same way. It's very much the same way that like the Egyptians UM built uh statues or edifices that were likenesses of the person who was buried there. This is basically the same thing. Yeah, their ancestors. Uh wow,

let's said Rice, you did said it right right? So he so he shows up and he's like, there's hundreds of these things. A lot of them are abandoned en route from the mountain down to the Ahu. Some of them are left in the pit um. This place doesn't have any trees and there's only three thousand people living here. Something really bad took place, and everyone wants to know what. Yeah,

so that's um. Like we said, Jared Diamond did not invent this, but the theory that he popularized in two thousand five was that what they did was they basically decimated the island's resources because they used all these palm trees. They burned them down, they cleared pass they built huts, they built canoes, they used them to roll the the moi with. Yeah, so they basically took away and didn't

understand what the outcome of this would be. So they took all these trees out, made these pathways, and then what happened was the there were no roots to keep and we I think the we do want on erosion or yeah, so if you don't have tree roots, just the rain is just gonna wash away all the top soil, the land's gonna erode. You're not gonna be able to

plant anything. And they were relying because, like we said earlier, they didn't have like tons and tons of fish and food everywhere, so they were relying on the vegetation for their food food source, plus the few animals that they did rely on, like uh, lizards, birds. When they cut down the trees, they were um ruining the those animals habitats, so they affected their food supply and that they stripped

the land and couldn't grow crops. But they also got rid of the birds and the lizards that we're living on the island as well. That's right. So the populations declining because of essentially starvation, people then begin to turn on one another. The head chief they split into a couple of different factions. Uh, I don't think a couple like several factions and then started fighting each other for

the small bits of land that we're still fertile. Right. Yeah, the the chief definitely lost control of the island, um, and apparently warfare broke out, which is evidenced by these things called matta supposedly evidenced. Right. So these are like very very sharp obsidian spears that Rogue Vine even mentions in his chronicle, um, that are supposedly implements of war. And if you scour Rapanui, you're gonna find these things everywhere.

So but not the very sharp there's. Right. So there's evidence of like these spear like implements all over the island, which further suggests that there was a lot of warfare there. And then um also this motif pops up, this birdman motif. Yeah, I love this. So a birdman cult popped up in the power vacuum that formed when the chief lost control in the face of this ecological crisis, and the birdman cult actually um created like a parallel government government I

guess based on this uh this god Makimaki. Yeah, so there's a power vacuum. Birdman cult forms because they need to, you know, feel the leadership void. Uh. There was an idea that if the first person it was basically a contest um, whoever finds the first egg of this turn um of the year, gets to be the birdman, the leader of the bird men. Right, And so they would go scrounging around, climbing up the volcanoes in the in

the mountainous areas. So okay that this article says that I saw elsewhere that they went down the cliff, swam to it offshore island and rated some turn nests. Yeah, well they're way egg. Yeah, they're looking for the Sudi Turn Egg. It's a great band name. Yeah, that's not bad. Or maybe Birdman Cult. That's a good one with the album title Sudi Turn You know the cult, the band the Cult, they were originally called Southern Death Cult. Yeah, that's true. Uh so whoever, like I said, found this

would be the the leader of the cult. Yeah. And um, second prize said a steake knives. Third prize, you're fired. Actually, second prize was you would stab yourself with a spear supposedly. Supposedly again, not a lot of evidence to suggest, no, but this how stuff works article takes it as fact. That's right, and it sounds like something like a six year old telling the story you through into and if you if you didn't find the first day, you had

to stab yourself with your own spear. So the Birdman cult supposedly in this prevailing theory and I don't even know if I can say prevailing anymore. And this one theory put forward was um, they were responsible for building back up the population and the culture of Easter Island. Uh. They started seeing all these cave drawings of birds and things, which kind of makes sense, and life on Easter Island was starting to pick back up again supposedly when the

Dutch came in seventeen twenty two. Yeah, so all of this, this this collapse um that led to famine and warfare and cannibalism supposedly supposedly, um, all took place right before the Europeans showed up. Um. And then as the Europeans came first, it was the Dutch in seventeen twenty two, the Spanish showed up in seventeen seventy two, Captain Cook James Cook. Uh, he showed up in seventeen seventy four.

And as when when James Cook showed up, um. After that, the missionaries started to come I think the Spanish actually annexed Easter Island. Yeah, in a very sneaky way. They said, oh, look at this, this is a writing tool, and this is something you can write on. You should practice by just doing whatever you can do with this right here on this dotted line. And they said, oh, well, thank you. You just signed over the rights of the island to the Spanish. Right yeah, this scribble that you just put

down that works for us. And I think in the eighteen eighties eight Chile um annexed Easter Island, and today Easter Islanders are Chilean citizens still. Um. But by this time, by the late nineteenth century, the population of Easter Island, it dwindled down to like a hundred and ten people, right yeah, thanks to the influence of what the Westerners brought. Well, okay, so that's basically the prevailing legend that we just went over, that they they overused the resources available to them in

this greed and competition. Um. The there there is apparently evidence that there was a lot of competitiveness among the carvers of the moi. Um. I guess the idea was that the bigger and better your moi, the more opportunity the mana had to flow from it, right um, which meant the more powerful you were in practical terms on the island. Um. And that they were just using up all of these resources heedlessly, carelessly, and they brought along

this ecological collapse right um. And then you can throw in that they probably would have been totally wiped off the face of the earth had the Westerners not shown up and stabilized their society further. Right So, I mean they christianized them. They taught them how to read, um, they taught them how to raise cattle and lie of stock. And today if you go to Rapa Nui there are plenty of Rapa Nuians still living on the island today.

I think the populations back to about two thousand, three thousand, right. So um. All of that is the narrative that stood for many many years until UM. I think about two thousand ten, maybe two thousand eleven. There was a an archaeologist and her name is Dr Marrow Mulrooney. UM. She's from uh Honolulu. She works for the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum. I have trouble with Polynesian words, um in Honolulu, and she did a study at Rapa Nui um, and said,

I think this interpretation is wrong. I don't think there was a collapse, a population collapse at all. That's right. Uh. This is published in the journal Antiquity. Uh, and some other research as have gotten on board this train that basically said, you know what, there, we're just going on this. There must have been ten people there just because someone said, well there had to be look at these statues, right, and there really wasn't any archaeological evidence to prove anything,

no scientific evidence. So their theory is that no, the population when the Dutch showed up two to three thousand was kind of about right. That was a normal, stable population, and that it hadn't been a bunch of people before that. It had probably been about the same. Yeah. And that LiPo guy that I talked about earlier, he was in on this and um, he has demonstrated through evidence how those mo I like I said, could have been moved, constructed,

built in, moved without twenty thousand people. Um. He said they had plenty of food, they weren't starving like when the Dutch showed up. They even offered the Dutch food and said I would like your hats, not like, oh my god, I'm starving. You gotta help us, Yeah, give me food. So there's a lot of evidence there that that you know that they were doing just fine basically. Right. The thing was is that, I mean, like there was

evidence that some sort of collapse had happened. It's just the idea that there was a population collapses, like you said, based on rogue Vine's idea that there must have been more people before. Right. Um, there, they're pretty much everyone agrees that there was in an ecological collapse, that there used to be way more trees and that this huge loss of trees led to a loss of cropland of arable soil. Um. But exactly how that happened is what's

really an issue. And it's a really big distinction because the Jared Diamond camp says that the Rapa Nui went crazy and buck wild, building their idols to their gods and chopped down all the trees and shot themselves in the feet. Right. Uh. The newer interpretation, led by people like mulrooney and Hunt and LiPo say we think it was rats. Actually yeah, so here's the idea. Uh, these rats stow away on the canoes, they can reproduce at

what they say in this article furious rate. Uh, Polynesian rat population can double in forty seven days in a lab setting. There are no predators on the island, plenty of food these tree roots, so if they multiplied, they said that there could have been as many as two to three million rats on this island. And you hit it on the head. They eat trees, they eat little tree shoots, they eat tree seeds, so they keep trees that have been cut down from being replaced. That's right,

So the rats are eating all this. There's also evidence that they were potentially eating these rats as a food source. Uh. So it all is kind of lining up that it was not necessarily a mystery of population decimation. But they call it a success story that these people learn to adapt to their new environment, do things like eat rats

and kind of maintain a stable population. Right. And then somewhere along the the way, as a result of that birdman cult taking over power, somebody figured out that if you take um volcanic rock and just basically sprinkle it like um, pretty decent sized chunks of it, but just spread it out over former crop land, when the wind blows from the sea, it's going to blow through these rocks and it actually knocks some of the minerals out of the rocks and into the soil, and it does

just enough to make the soil nutrient rich again so that they could start growing crops once more. Right, so, these people had some real ingenious adaptations. Like the rats allegedly ostensibly came and kept the trees from growing back, which denuded the island. So they started eating the rats because they couldn't fish anymore because they didn't have trees to build the canoes, So they ate the rats. They figured out how to make the soil arable again, very

art so they could grow crops. So the normal, the normal two thousand, three thousand person sized population learned to sustain themselves even in the face of this ecological crisis. Right, so that's a success. Oh yeah, that's that's the new interpretation of it. I like it. Another couple of things that kind of lend to this theory is that, um, remember earlier we're talking about the mata, these spearheads supposedly that they used when they turned on each other and

delved into civil war. Uh, they took a closer look at these these researchers and they said, you know what if these are all supposed to be spearheads, they should probably all look about the same. And these things that we're finding don't look the same. They're all kinds of shapes. They're not sharp. Uh, they're actually kind of dulled and it wouldn't be very good for stabbing. Um. And what we think these are our tools for scraping, like brakes and hose and things that were left behind, and they

weren't They weren't meant to be spearheads at all. Yeah. So this great evidence that there was an enormous amount of war, uh, it turns out to be um farm tools in this new interpretation. Yeah. And then finally when the Europeans arrived, there was a population decline and they they say it's due to maybe STDs smallpox or yeah,

the plague, smallpox and STDs. Right, because again, yeah, when they when Rogovin showed up three thousand people and the eighteen eighties down to it like a hundred, a hundred and ten um. Yeah, So that it's really important to remember that all this new stuff that refutes diamond and and that um, the idea, the interpretation that he threw his weight behind this is all interpretation as well. It's a new interpretation of very old facts. But um, it

swings the other way. It doesn't say these people created what Diamond called eco side, you know where like they killed their their ecosystem, they killed their environment, and they s for it as a result. They say, no, they had they were dealt a bad hand with these rats that came aboard and and spread and and prevented trees, very important trees from growing. UM and they persevered. It's it's not a story of collapses, a story of continuity.

My favorite interpretation is Robert Crollwitch's from MPR from Radio Lab and he he kind of took a look at these new findings and said, I guess I see what you're saying that this is a success story, But is

it really like learning to make do? He's like, if you do want to take the rapa nui story and apply it to um modern day ecology, which is what everyone tries to do, He's like, this is really scary because it suggests that we'll keep going along in the face of like climate change getting worse and worse, but we'll get used to it more and more and we'll

make do. We'll just keep blimping along rather than doing something about it, taking the bull by the horns and moving forward to to progress rather than just muddling along. It's a good point, oh, kroll, which is full of good points. Let's let's radio web guys. They've been doing it right for years. Yeah. I still haven't met those dudes, have you know? Never have I think our friends from

stuff to blow in your mind? Yeah, yeah we haven't. No, I mean it kind of one of the neat things about the podcaster community is that you end up meeting a lot of these people and becoming pals. Not not them though, No, I've never like, I don't think they've ever been at anything we've done. It's not that they've avoided us or have Oh I think they have, but kind of anonymously and bood oh, come on boot, that's

what krow, which sounds like. No, it would be uh, very much more well produced than that, right, sound effects music. It would be good. Uh. If you want to know more about rap ANUEI type those words into the search part how stuff worst dot com? Read that, and then go do more research on the web to get the full story. Yeah, come up with your own theory. Sure, it's the fun thing. To send it in. Yeah, I said,

search far in this somewhere says time for the listener man. Yeah, the very special listener mail that I promised, because if you remember, many years ago, we did a special two part episode on our travels through Guatemala with you and me and Jerry and some Yeah, we all went down there on special limitation from our friends at the Cooperative Cooperative for Education co ED out of Cincinnata. And um.

We used to talk about them a lot because the great work they do with their school book program and uh, I mean that they've just done some like their life's work, you know, helping out the children of Guatemala. It's a great program too, self sustainable. Well, they got a new one we haven't talked about in a while. So we heard from Anne dem c r pal down there and uh and then this all came about because Anne was a fan and listener. So she still listens. Huh yeah,

she says she is. I believe her. Yeah, So uh, here it goes. They have a new program going called Thousand Girls Initiative, and it's very cool. What they're doing is they're ramping up efforts to keep one thousand girls in Guatemala from dropping out of school. Uh. As we learned when we went over there, keeping these kids in school is a real challenge because parents are often like, no, you know your ten Now you need to stay home and work because we need that. So keeping these uh,

especially young girls educated is a really valuable thing. So uh they've made it their mission to keep a thousand girls from dropping out by it's one of the best investments you can make in the developing world's education. It takes twelve years of education to break the cycle of poverty, and Guatemala twelve years. But poor rural Guatemalan, which we met plenty of down there, they have a one in twenty chance of reaching that milestone. So uh, you know

it's they have an uphill challenge ahead of them. So what they're doing now they have You can sponsor them. You can make it. Uh. You can be a sponsor and pledge to keep a girl from dropping out of school. Uh seventy dollars a month, or if you want to do thirty five dollars a month, they will actually match your donation with another sponsor to make sure that that one student is able to continue her education. So either thirty five bucks or seventy dollars a month. You can

literally keep a girl in school. How did they do it, Chuck, Well, they go to they have a very special link called thousand Girls Initiative dot org and that's spelled out t h o U s a Indie girls Initiative dot org. And you can actually pick out the student you sponsor. Is one of the great things that co ED does. You can put a real face and a real person, send them seventy or thirty five bucks a month, and

like it's a really great thing that you're doing. So that's from Anne and that's from co ED and they're still doing great work and we just think they're they're lovely people and we couldn't be more proud out of their continued efforts. Yeah, thanks a lot, guys, thanks a lot, and um, thanks for keeping us updated. And uh, if you want to go help them, what's that you are? Elegant, Chuck,

Thousand Girls Initiative dot org. Nice. Uh. And in the meantime, if you want to get in touch with us, you can tweet to us at s Y s K podcast and Josh um Clark. You can hang out with Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Stuff you Should Know, both with their own Facebook pages. You can send us an email to Stuff Podcast at how stuff Works dot com and has always joined us at our home on the web, Stuff you Should Know dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, is it how stuff Works dot com