pstarr wrote:The collapse happened before the Europeans arrived. The explorers reported a small ragged group of unhealthy people, folks virtually without a coherent social history. It was obvious the culture and technology that had built the stone men was long gone.
Overpopulation and ecological collapse are simple obvious conditions of all animal populations, it seems to be in our genes to do so. We are not exempt. It will come to us in this generation, perhaps within decades, even years. The UN was recently forced to acknowledge that it much vaunted demographic transition, the trend in education, family planning and population-growth decline was always a bunch of hoodoo. The UN no longer assumes a maximum of 9 billion humans. The UN now predicts we will breed to 11-12 billion. No way the earth can support that much. Our numbers will collapse long before then into the sub-1 billion preindustrial range
The rat story does not add up. The rats did not spontaneously generate themselves a century before European contact. If the rats were indigenous, then they had plenty of time to facilitate the loss of vegetation. The pattern here is clearly that of an alien species introduction. This then demands an explanation as to when and how were the rats introduced.
http://www.independent.co.uk/environmen ... 31105.htmlThe theory that the rats came together with the original settlers does not hold water. It would have taken at most 200 years for the rats to destroy the ecosystem. This obviously did not happen. No consistent theory as to what controlled the rats has been offered to make the early introduction theory work.
The alleged first contact with Europeans was in 1722. Either this was not the real first contact, or the history following 1722 is a collection of BS. It is hypothesized that Easter Island had a peak population over 15,000. But this is requires another food source which is alleged to be sweet potatoes:
https://www.sciencealert.com/easter-isl ... knew-aboutThe simulations in the above study show way too much variance and the lower bound is 3000 people which happens to agree with the 1722 estimate of 2000 to 3000. Crop cultivation would have denuded the island like pretty much all human agriculture that involves staples (potatoes, grains). Again, why would the Easter islanders hold off on cultivating a food staple that they had from as late as 1200 AD? The sweet potato farming story is inconsistent and fails as the silver bullet theory.
We have to go back and critically revisit the post 1722 history. It was not determined in 1722 that the island was denuded and that several species had gone extinct. There is no way some discovery expedition would be capable of carrying out such a scientific assessment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Easter_IslandThe first-recorded European contact with the island took place on 5 April (Easter Sunday) 1722 when Dutch navigator Jacob Roggeveen[23] visited for a week and estimated there were 2,000 to 3,000 inhabitants on the island. This was an estimate, not a census, and archaeologists estimate the population may have been as high as 10,000 to 12,000 a few decades earlier. His party reported "remarkable, tall, stone figures, a good 30 feet in height", the island had rich soil and a good climate and "all the country was under cultivation". Fossil-pollen analysis shows that the main trees on the island had gone 72 years earlier in 1650. The Dutch reported that a fight broke out in which they killed ten or twelve islanders.
The next foreign visitors arrived on 15 November 1770: two Spanish ships, San Lorenzo and Santa Rosalia, sent by the Viceroy of Peru, Manuel de Amat, and commanded by Felipe González de Ahedo. They spent five days on the island, performing a very thorough survey of its coast, and named it Isla de San Carlos, taking possession on behalf of King Charles III of Spain, and ceremoniously erected three wooden crosses on top of three small hills on Poike.[24] They reported the island as largely uncultivated, with a seashore lined with stone statues.
Four years later, in mid-March 1774, British explorer James Cook visited Easter Island. Cook himself was too sick to walk far, but a small group explored the island.[25]:26 They reported the statues as being neglected with some having fallen down; no sign of the three crosses and his botanist described it as "a poor land". He had a Tahitian interpreter who could partially understand the language.[25]:26 Other than in counting, though, the language was unintelligible.[26] Cook later estimated that there were about 700 people on the island. He saw only three or four canoes, all unseaworthy. Parts of the island were cultivated with banana, sugarcane, and sweet potatoes, while other parts looked like they had once been cultivated but had fallen into disuse. Georg Forster reported in his account that he saw no trees over ten feet tall on the island.[25]:27–28
So we have a gap of 1722 --> 1770. No evidence about any "extinction" study during the 1700s whatsoever. But we have two observations:
1) 1770: poor land not worthy of cultivation
2) 1774: 700 inhabitants
The evidence points to a rat-infestation induced collapse after 1722. It is improbable that the Europeans left no disease behind but even if this miracle happened, the rats are most certainly a 1722 infestation and could not have come with the original inhabitants in their sea canoes from Polynesia before 1200 AD.