Easter Island: there are new clues about the end of civilization in one of the most remote places in the world

A small group of Polynesians sailed thousands of kilometers across the Pacific a thousand years ago, reaching a remote island (Easter Island) where they built an emblematic civilization but exhausted natural resources. It is said that, over time, the Rapanui population soared to unsustainable levels and depleted the resources of the island, which they called Rapa Nui: they cut down all the trees, killed the seabirds and depleted the soil. .

When Europeans arrived in 1722 (Easter Day, hence the name Easter Island), this civilization of which there are still traces, such as the huge stone statues known as ‘moai’, entered collapsed and only a few thousand people remained.

A recent scientific study now questions this narrative and argues that the population of Rapa Nui did not commit ecocide or reach unsustainable levels, but quite the opposite: those Polynesians found ways to deal with the conditions. limited areas of the island and maintained a small, stable population for centuries. The proof: a sophisticated invention of ingenious “rock gardens” where the islanders cultivated highly nutritious sweet potatoes, a staple in their diet and enough to sustain a few thousand people, reported the Efe news agency.

The study, published on Friday in the journal “Science Advances†, was led by Dylan Davis, from the Columbia Climate School (New York). “These gardens demonstrate that the population could never have been as large as some of the previous estimates”, and that “these people managed to be very resilient with limited resources, modifying the environment to obtain products”, he highlighted.

Easter Island is possibly the most remote inhabited place on Earth and one of the last to be colonized by man, if not the last. The nearest continental mass is central Chile, almost 3,000 kilometers to the east. About 5,000 kilometers to the west are the tropical Cook Islands, from which settlers are believed to have sailed around 1200 AD.

The island is composed of volcanic rock, but unlike the lush islands of Hawaii and Tahiti, eruptions stopped hundreds of thousands of years ago and the mineral nutrients provided by the lava were lost. Some scientists maintain that the island had to support many more inhabitants than the nearly 3,000 that European settlers first saw, and several studies based on crop yields and other factors maintain that the Rapanui population could have been 17,500 or 25,000.

To carry out this study, the team spent five years analyzing the rocky terrain and its characteristics and, based on this data, trained a series of learning models to detect these ‘gardens’ through satellite images. and infrared, which highlight not only rocks, but also soils with more moisture and nitrogen, essential for vegetable gardens.

The team concluded that the rock gardens only occupy around 188 hectares, less than half of the island’s surface and that all food was based on sweet potatoes, these gardens could have supported around 2,000 people. However, based on isotopes found in bones and teeth and other evidence, the population obtained between 35% and 45% of their diet from marine sources, and a small amount from other less nutritious crops, such as bananas and sugar cane.

If these sources were taken into account, the population’s carrying capacity would have amounted to around 3,000 inhabitants, a figure observed by the first Europeans. For Carl Lipo, from Binghamton University and co-author of the study, although the idea of ​​the rise and fall of this civilization “continues to reign in public opinion”, it is difficult for this to have happened given the characteristics of the island .