“In just a few centuries, the people of Easter Island wiped out their forest, drove their plants and animals to extinction, and saw their complex society spiral into chaos and cannibalism.”
Nearly two decades later, an international team of geneticists has found evidence that this famous cautionary tale never happened.
The true story of Rapa Nui (named Easter Island by colonial Europeans) is not one of self-inflicted population collapse, the new findings suggest, but of cultural resilience.
In the 1600s, it seems that the ancient people of Rapa Nui were not utterly isolated on their island, and it is clear that they did not overexploit their resources to the point of ‘ecocide’.
Instead, ancient genetic data suggests the island was once home to a small population of between 1,500 and 3,000 individuals, who were interbreeding with populations that had Polynesian and Indigenous American ancestry long before Europeans had reached either region.
Genetic analysis indicates that Rapanui’s civilization was actually growing until the 1860s, when Peruvian slave raids and subsequent epidemics brought by European colonial activity decimated the island’s population to around 110 individuals.
Today, more than 1,500 people living on Rapa Nui identify as Indigenous Rapanui.
“These results do not support a major population collapse on Rapa Nui after its initial peopling and before the 1800s,” [conclude](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07881-4) the authors of the study, led by geneticists from the University of Copenhagen in Denmark and the University of Lausanne in Switzerland.
Polynesian seafaring is amazing. What exciting scholarship this is!Â
BrtFrkwr on
It’s easier to say they destroyed themselves than to admit they were killed off by European slaving and disease.
Phemto_B on
The study makes population collapse look unlikely, but that doesn’t change the fact that the indigenous species of date palms were wiped out. Interconnectedness could just mean that they left after the primary food source collapsed rather than starved.
Edit: And I can’t find any explanation of how genetic measures encode the number of people living on the island with you. Genetic diversity can sometimes be an analog for population size, but only with isolated populations, which their own evidence rules out. This feels like they’re reading A LOT into a little bit of data.
I’m not sure a “stripped bare and moved on” narrative is any better than the population collapse narrative.
Cease-the-means on
There is an excellent episode of the “Collapse of Civilizations” podcast that goes into detail about the colonialism and slavery version of the story.
Bakanogami on
Jared Diamond…wrong? Whoever would have thunk!
ofrm1 on
Jared Diamond wrong about something? Who would thunk?
7 Comments
Summary:
“In just a few centuries, the people of Easter Island wiped out their forest, drove their plants and animals to extinction, and saw their complex society spiral into chaos and cannibalism.”
So [writes](http://employees.oneonta.edu/allenth/Class-Readings-Password/EnvironmentalCollapseOfEasterIsland.pdf) Jared Diamond in his best-selling book *Collapse*, which was published in 2005.
Nearly two decades later, an international team of geneticists has found evidence that this famous cautionary tale never happened.
The true story of Rapa Nui (named Easter Island by colonial Europeans) is not one of self-inflicted population collapse, the new findings suggest, but of cultural resilience.
In the 1600s, it seems that the ancient people of Rapa Nui were not utterly isolated on their island, and it is clear that they did not overexploit their resources to the point of ‘ecocide’.
Instead, ancient genetic data suggests the island was once home to a small population of between 1,500 and 3,000 individuals, who were interbreeding with populations that had Polynesian and Indigenous American ancestry long before Europeans had reached either region.
Genetic analysis indicates that Rapanui’s civilization was actually growing until the 1860s, when Peruvian slave raids and subsequent epidemics brought by European colonial activity decimated the island’s population to around 110 individuals.
Today, more than 1,500 people living on Rapa Nui identify as Indigenous Rapanui.
“These results do not support a major population collapse on Rapa Nui after its initial peopling and before the 1800s,” [conclude](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07881-4) the authors of the study, led by geneticists from the University of Copenhagen in Denmark and the University of Lausanne in Switzerland.
Read the peer-reviewed paper in Nature here: [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07881-4](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07881-4)
Polynesian seafaring is amazing. What exciting scholarship this is!Â
It’s easier to say they destroyed themselves than to admit they were killed off by European slaving and disease.
The study makes population collapse look unlikely, but that doesn’t change the fact that the indigenous species of date palms were wiped out. Interconnectedness could just mean that they left after the primary food source collapsed rather than starved.
Edit: And I can’t find any explanation of how genetic measures encode the number of people living on the island with you. Genetic diversity can sometimes be an analog for population size, but only with isolated populations, which their own evidence rules out. This feels like they’re reading A LOT into a little bit of data.
I’m not sure a “stripped bare and moved on” narrative is any better than the population collapse narrative.
There is an excellent episode of the “Collapse of Civilizations” podcast that goes into detail about the colonialism and slavery version of the story.
Jared Diamond…wrong? Whoever would have thunk!
Jared Diamond wrong about something? Who would thunk?