Episode description

Our soft, human brains have been bested by 2022 so we are taking a quick break over the Christmas period and will be back assaulting your senses in Jan 2023. But because we don't want your ears to go unentertained, we're digging back into the archives for eps that have made us squirm, think or vomit (or hopefully, all three!). Today, we're re-living the horrors of Easter Island.

Easter Island is about as tiny and remote as you can get on the surface of our planet. It’s just 23 kilometres long (on its longest side), and as close as you can get to the Oceanic Pole of Inaccessibility. So you’d be forgiven if you’ve never heard of it.

But of course, you have.

You’ve heard of Easter Island - or Rapa Nui, as it is known to locals and should be known to everyone - because soon after it was settled by intrepid Polynesian explorers around the 12th century, the new inhabitants took up a fascinating cultural practice of carving and erecting thousands of Moai, or giant stone heads, along the circumference of the island. They brought the inhabitants spiritual protection and later, pop culture fame.

But you’ve probably also heard of Easter Island because sometime after the locals began erecting these thousands of Moai, the population - and culture - of the island collapsed. From a fertile paradise with perhaps ten thousand happy, farming, statue-building inhabitants, by the 20th century, there were barely a few hundred islanders, and the island itself was an arid relic of what once was. Archaeological expeditions described it as an exhausted terrain. The Moai were abandoned.

But what was to blame for such destruction? 

The leading theory has been that the people of Rapa Nui over-exploited their own resources, leading to civil war, mass stone head tipping and ruin. This makes Easter Island a poster child for human folly and the dangers of climate change. 

But is this theory right? Or is the actual story perhaps more prosaic than that? What other factors (*ahem* racism) could possibly be (*cough* genocide) at play here (*mumbles* lies about cannibalism to justify Christian-ising the place)?

Join Dr’s Will and Rod as they get to the bottom of the destruction of the forgotten people of Rapa Nui.

Sources 

• Benny Peiser’s ‘From Genocide to Ecocide: The Rape of Rapa Nui’. 
• DiNapoli, Crema, Lipo, Rieth and Hunt’s ‘Approximate Bayesian Computation of radiocarbon and paleoenvironmental record shows population resilience on Rapa Nui (Easter Island)’ in Nature Communications 
• BingUNews: ‘Resilience, not collapse: What the Easter Island myth gets wrong’ 
• Princeton: ‘Jacob Roggeveen, 1659–1729’ 
• Easter Island Travel: ‘Ship logs of 1722 voyage of Jacob Roggeveen’ 

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