Posted on 10/12/2018 12:24:40 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
Notice the statues are at the bottom of a hill.
Over time, natural erosion would cause dirt to drift downhill and bury them.
The caldera at the southern smallest tip appears to have some standing water...
I would like to go as well, just to test this hypothesis -- by going halfway up the average elevation, and drilling small well holes 90 of the way down to sealevel. If the model is correct, then there should be plenty of fresh water in at least some of them.
It holds rainwater, which slowly evaporates. It's probably a little toxic.
Excellent !!
The geologist Robert Shoch visited Easter Island and noted that some of the idols were carved from stone that have no known quarries on the island. He speculated that perhaps the sources of that type of stone were now underwater.
If there was a major sea level rise that inundated the quarries then the statues would predate considerably the estimated 13th century time period of their creation, possibly as early as end of the great ice age ten or eleven thousand years ago.
” These guys need to next show several practical methods of collecting this brackish water.”
Easter Island. Must have been either pottery or maybe soak it up with some kind of fibrous sponge material?
Easter baskets wouldn’t work.
Thanks, I'd never read what he'd written about Easter Island. Up front, the term "no known quarries" suggests that the quarry or quarries remain undiscovered, or they were very small and quarried out, or, and this isn't all that unlikely, the information is faulty. Schoch is smart, but he's been falling under the influence of some folks who greatly exaggerate the ages of things. The sediment cores taken on the island show that the island was unoccupied by humans until really not all that long ago.
Australia on one side, S America on the other, Rapa Nui somewhere in the middle...
https://www.newdawnmagazine.com/articles/the-mystery-of-gobekli-tepe-and-its-message-to-us
http://www.robertschoch.com/articles/schochgobeklitepenewdawnsept2010.pdf
I want to start out by saying that I really enjoy your posts and threads on these subjects and want to thank you for your efforts.
Dating, or rather, re-dating, is now an area of huge controversy. I’m sure you’re more than familiar with the Sphinx controversy.
Another thing Shoch mentioned is that Eastern Islanders themselves have no tradition of having carved the statues; “others” in remote antiquity had carved them.
Maybe terranean rocks just sitting loosely on the surface?
The Easter Islanders were extensively studied in the 1950s and 1960s by Thor Heyerdahl, and they do (or at least did) know all about their own history, including how to carve the statues using the local materials, how they were moved, and what happened that made the process stop. The fact is, Schoch used to fit in better with the late TH than he did with Robert Bauval, and it's too bad that's no longer the case. Now he cherrypicks stuff to support whatever he's pushing in his latest book, IMHO. Heyerdahl first made the connection between the S American mainland (Tiahuanaco, as a matter of fact) and Rapa Nui, based on art and architecture. The earliest statues on the island are few but stylistically different, and resemble S American work (also he excavated thoe earlier work to reveal formerly unseen details).
Regarding the Great Sphinx, I've always found his work on that compelling, and still do. In a way, the abuse he's suffered for that freed hm to go hog wild in the fringe, and as I've been there for years, I empathize with him, but since he's a rigorously trained scientist, he should know when to pull up.
... and the lucky ones who rode onward on the winds and currents to Hawaii
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