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Easter Island:Mysteries of a Lost World

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Easter Island:Mysteries of a Lost World

Unread postby Subjectivist » Wed 20 Aug 2014, 16:37:53

This BBC documentary just showed up on my Netflix account today so I watched it. The host takes a new comprehensive look at Easter Island strongly challenging the Ecocide theory we have all heard repeatedly.

Archeological evidence now indicates the the population was robust and happy in 1722 when th first Dutch ships arrived, but within 50 years introduced European diseases had cut the population deeply down. Within the second 50 yeats after first contact slave raids combined with reduced the population to a few thousand when a new Governor arrived. He imported sheep and forced the remaining native population into a tiny reservation while the sheep population exploded and ate everything in sight making the small remaining groves of Rapa Nui Palm trees extinct. The native peoples were forbidden agriculture and the sheep ate all of the yams and casava until they died out in favor of hardy grasses. Recently descendents of the original Polynesian settlers have started planting trees native to other Polynesian islands in an attempt to restore the evology of he island to something resembling what existed before the Europeans devestated it with imported diseases and sheep ranch monoculture in the 1800's and early 1900's.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01q9w87
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Re: Easter Island:Mysteries of a Lost World

Unread postby HARM » Wed 20 Aug 2014, 17:02:39

Ug... political correctness and revisionist history run amok. Now we're supposed to believe that it's all the white devil's fault that Easter Islanders overshot the carrying capacity of their island and cut down every tree in sight. Did Makati1 and Noobtube write the screenplay?
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Re: Easter Island:Mysteries of a Lost World

Unread postby Subjectivist » Wed 20 Aug 2014, 18:02:49

HARM wrote:Ug... political correctness and revisionist history run amok. Now we're supposed to believe that it's all the white devil's fault that Easter Islanders overshot the carrying capacity of their island and cut down every tree in sight. Did Makati1 and Noobtube write the screenplay?


Sure, revising history so the enlightened Europeans came upon a savage canabilistic island full of foolish savages who couldn't manage themselves... Of course that version bares little resemblance to what the archological and historical accounts record.

Such a thing could never have happened in the past and need to be corrected now, could it?
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Re: Easter Island:Mysteries of a Lost World

Unread postby americandream » Wed 20 Aug 2014, 21:11:50

HARM wrote:Ug... political correctness and revisionist history run amok. Now we're supposed to believe that it's all the white devil's fault that Easter Islanders overshot the carrying capacity of their island and cut down every tree in sight. Did Makati1 and Noobtube write the screenplay?


With the state of humankind, I think there's lessons to be learned. Instead of guilt, that should be what you should be taking from these messages. After all, species death from living beyond our means is a fairly terminal event. Unless of course, you think its all political correctness (which once upon a time was called academic inquiry in this context and thoughtfulness in the general human context.)
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Re: Easter Island:Mysteries of a Lost World

Unread postby El_Producto » Thu 21 Aug 2014, 18:35:02

Seems like a reasonable explanation on 're surface. Many indigenous peoples who come into contact with more advanced people get decimated by disease.
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Re: Easter Island:Mysteries of a Lost World

Unread postby dissident » Thu 21 Aug 2014, 19:41:30

HARM wrote:Ug... political correctness and revisionist history run amok. Now we're supposed to believe that it's all the white devil's fault that Easter Islanders overshot the carrying capacity of their island and cut down every tree in sight. Did Makati1 and Noobtube write the screenplay?


It's the same pattern as in North and South America. And BTW, panties-in-a-bunch chauvinist, syphilis did not arrive in Europe from the new world. Those squeaky clean, morally superior Europeons brought a virulent strain to the new world that helped wipe out quite a few aboriginals.
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Re: Easter Island:Mysteries of a Lost World

Unread postby HARM » Fri 22 Aug 2014, 02:12:19

When the Dutch colonizers arrived in 1722, they described the landscape as barren and denuded of trees, as well as cannibalism being practiced by the relatively few survivors. Unless of course, you believe Jared Dimaond, Hunt & Lipo, National Geographic and a billion other respected sources are complete liars.

Of course Europeans also brought a lot of nasty diseases that did not help. Nonetheless, it's quite clear that the Easter Islanders had already decimated their own population via ecocide --with little or no help from Europeans.
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Re: Easter Island:Mysteries of a Lost World

Unread postby vtsnowedin » Fri 22 Aug 2014, 04:52:57

1722 was almost two hundred years after the Spanish conquest of South America and their introduction of small pox and measles there. Could it be that those diseases reached Easter island by native boat and the resulting devastation then removing the navigators and the knowledge of how to make the trip. If you have no written history losing all your elders removes the body of knowledge they have and eight generations later there would be little evidence it ever existed or of the plaque happening.
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Re: Easter Island:Mysteries of a Lost World

Unread postby Strummer » Fri 22 Aug 2014, 05:37:54

Subjectivist wrote:foolish savages who couldn't manage themselves


The existence of the Moai statues and the extreme effort wasted on creating them is more than enough proof for the foolishness of the natives and their inability to manage the limited resources of an isolated island.
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Re: Easter Island:Mysteries of a Lost World

Unread postby Tanada » Fri 22 Aug 2014, 09:56:47

HARM wrote:When the Dutch colonizers arrived in 1722, they described the landscape as barren and denuded of trees, as well as cannibalism being practiced by the relatively few survivors. Unless of course, you believe Jared Dimaond, Hunt & Lipo, National Geographic and a billion other respected sources are complete liars.

Of course Europeans also brought a lot of nasty diseases that did not help. Nonetheless, it's quite clear that the Easter Islanders had already decimated their own population via ecocide --with little or no help from Europeans.


Actually they did no such thing, the Dutch Admiral in charge called the island lush, and the people well fed, healthy and happy. Of course the Dutch were explorers, not colonizers so they had no special interest in their description of the island. When Colonizers started showing up 50 years later you get the claims that the natives were engaged in a civil war, were mal-nourished, and had stripped the island of trees leaving them without resources for survival.

Archeology shows that these claims were patently false and self serving for the Spanish colonizers. The Maoi statues were carefully lowered from the upright position to face down, not toppled over destructively in some civil war. Testing proved that if you push a statue over and let it fall it breaks, however nearly all of them were gently lowered down.

Of course the fact that the Spanish sent Catholic Priests in to convert the natives away from the Maoi and Birdman faiths into the Catholic faith could have something to do with it.

When the Spanish arrived the majority of the island was covered with lithiculture fields that had been built over generations. The fields grew abundant crops of Yams and Cassava, and the families or tribes raised chickens for meat. In supplement to this the people fished and gathered wild birds, wild fruits and other natural resources.

There is no evidence of a civil war, no evidence of large scale cannibalism, no evidence for self inflicted ecocide. The ecocide that took place was when a Spanish 'governor' appointed to 'take care' of the island imported Moreno sheep from Australia and forbid the natives who had survived the waves of plague and slave raids to keep them out of the fields. The Rapa Nui people were marginalized by the ever growing sheep herd until they were squeezed down into a tiny portion of the island. There certainly was Ecocide, along with genocide, but it was not the natives who committed it.

I enjoy reading Jared Diamonds work, but he is a linguist/ornithologist. His theories are interesting and deserve to be tested, but in the case of Easter Island and Greenland archeology has demonstrated his theories were mistaken. That does not make him a bad person or even a bad scientist. The whole point of science is to look at a situation with new eyes, propose a new theory, and test that theory based on solid evidence.

My own interest is in history so I watched the documentary on Netflix. The Archeological evidence supports the same pattern repeated over and over in the 1400-1950 period of modern history. Europeans explored vast numbers of new places and in the process unintentionally introduced a whole slew of diseases that caused social disruption. Just like the Black Death did in Europe in the 1200-1600 period these waves of new diseases cut down the population like the Grim Reaper. Just like Europe those places left undisturbed for a hundred years recovered, like the pacific coast of North America. In those places the native population rebounded and they maintained their culture in an altered form. In the USA/Canada the native population had recovered enough that when settlers arrived en mass at the end of the 1800's their culture survived. The only native languages thriving today are in the pacific northwest and Alaska. Rapa Nui was 'colonized' in the early period just like Massachusetts Bay. The native population was shrinking rapidly from disease and the culture was in chaos. Having people show up in the Chaos and tell you it was Gods Will because of your religion certainly did nothing to help. Hauling in the sheep in the mid 1800's was just the ecocide death blow, without the diseases and cultural chaos the population would have been large enough, organized enough, to resist being replaced by sheep monoculture.
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Re: Easter Island:Mysteries of a Lost World

Unread postby Subjectivist » Fri 22 Aug 2014, 17:54:26

Before watching this video I had never heard of lithic mulch, the practice of placing patterns of foot sized rocks on fields. The rocks greatly reduce wind and water erosion while also providing a microclimate of surface shade. They also add trace minerals as they slowly erode into the soil. The native population also had built water features out stone includieng nurseries for young palm trees along with yams, sweet potato, cassava, and sugarcane that they brought with them to the island when they arrived.
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Re: Easter Island:Mysteries of a Lost World

Unread postby Synapsid » Fri 22 Aug 2014, 18:25:05

The sweet potatoes and (I believe) the cassava are a puzzle of sorts. Europeans, arriving in the Pacific, found Polynesians growing them but they're native to South America.

Yams, chickens, pigs and sugarcane they brought with them from the Old World, but not sweet potatoes, or cassava.
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Re: Easter Island:Mysteries of a Lost World

Unread postby dissident » Fri 22 Aug 2014, 20:13:45

Strummer wrote:
Subjectivist wrote:foolish savages who couldn't manage themselves


The existence of the Moai statues and the extreme effort wasted on creating them is more than enough proof for the foolishness of the natives and their inability to manage the limited resources of an isolated island.


You are making too many assumptions about how much effort it cost to make them. There aren't thousands of these statues and they were created over centuries. So they were not carving dozens of them every year. Also, they did not use logs to roll them into place, they literally walked them with two teams using ropes and swaying them side to side. The shape of the base was deliberately designed to allow this and when the statues arrived at their final location the curvature was removed. Statues that fell accidentally during the "walk" were left abandoned. The claim that the forests of the islands were depleted to make these statues is a myth.

The Egyptian pyramids were an epic waste of human resources. I don't see them being used as an argument against the viability of the Egyptian civilization. The analogue of the island here is the restriction to the food production to the Nile River flood zone, which is a small amount of land compared to the desert all around it.
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Re: Easter Island:Mysteries of a Lost World

Unread postby Subjectivist » Fri 22 Aug 2014, 20:25:03

Synapsid wrote:The sweet potatoes and (I believe) the cassava are a puzzle of sorts. Europeans, arriving in the Pacific, found Polynesians growing them but they're native to South America.

Yams, chickens, pigs and sugarcane they brought with them from the Old World, but not sweet potatoes, or cassava.


Based on this story I found, the debate about chickens in South America is still going hot and heavy. One side presents evidence that they were present before 1492 meaning they arrived before Europeans did. The other side claims DNA is showing the chickens in South America have different strains than those from Polynesia. The pro Polynesia chicken side believes the Easter Island natives made it to South America and traded chickens for Sweet Potatos and possibly Cassava. The other side has no explination for how the South American crops arrived before Europeans discovered Easter Island.

"The evidence for Polynesian contact with the New World prior to Columbus is substantial," David Burley, an archaeologist at Simon Fraser University in Canada, said. "We have the sweet potato, the bottle gourd, all this New World stuff that has been firmly documented as being out here pre-Columbian. If the Polynesians could find Easter Island, which is just this tiny speck, don't you think they could have found an entire continent?"

Dr. Alice Storey agrees. In 2007, the then-Ph.D. student at the University of Auckland, published a study linking a 600-year-old Chilean chicken bone as having a genetic mutation found in ancient chicken bones found in the Pacific. Cooper has argued her findings did not describe a genetic mutation in the Pacific but one that came from European chickens.

Oopps forgot the URL again!
[url]http://www.ibtimes.com/when-did-chickens-cross-pacific-ocean-dna-shows-no-evidence-pre-columbian-contact-1562195
[/url]

IBT headline proclaims the DNA proves no contact while the quote from the article says the exact opposite. Go figure.
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Re: Easter Island:Mysteries of a Lost World

Unread postby dissident » Fri 22 Aug 2014, 20:30:33

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/easter/civ ... iants.html

- Total number of moai on Easter Island: 887
- Total number of maoi that were successfully transported to their final ahu locations: 288 (32% of 887)
- Total number of moai still in the Rano Raraku quarry: 397 (45%)
- Total number of moai lying 'in transit' outside of the Rano Raraku quarry: 92 (10%)


Mostly carved over a 250 year period between 1250 and 1500. So they made an average of just over 3 per year. But the rate of carving reflects the failure rate of delivery.

The Jared Diamond theory does not stand up to scrutiny:

http://www.americanscientist.org/issues ... r-island/1
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Re: Easter Island:Mysteries of a Lost World

Unread postby Synapsid » Sat 23 Aug 2014, 11:36:16

Hi Subjectivist.

The last I've seen about the Chilean chicken bone is that the Chilean sample was contaminated.

Polynesian sailors were certainly capable of reaching South America, and the sweet potato is good evidence that they did, but we seem to be without evidence of their leaving chickens behind (or anything else?) Maybe someday.
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Re: Easter Island:Mysteries of a Lost World

Unread postby Tanada » Thu 20 Nov 2014, 09:36:09

I just checked YouTube, this documentary is available online now without a Netflix subscription.

http://youtu.be/730YFNokIA8
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