Notice the statues are at the bottom of a hill.
Over time, natural erosion would cause dirt to drift downhill and bury them.
Posted on 10/12/2018 12:24:40 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
The process of coastal groundwater discharge makes it possible for humans to collect drinkable freshwater directly where it emerges at the coast of the island... "The porous volcanic soils quickly absorb rain, resulting in a lack of streams and rivers," Lipo said. "Fortunately, water beneath the ground flows downhill and ultimately exits the ground directly at the point at which the porous subterranean rock meets the ocean. When tides are low, this results in the flow of freshwater directly into the sea. Humans can thus take advantage of these sources of freshwater by capturing the water at these points." ...He said there are very few sources of freshwater on the island, including two lakes that are perilously difficult to access, no streams, and one spring that is often reduced to a wetland bog. Much of the opposition to the research of Lipo's team is the presence of taheta on the island, which are small, carved-out cisterns used for collecting rainfall. To refute this argument, Lipo's team explained that if collecting rainwater was extremely necessary to island survival, the cisterns would be much larger, instead of being able to hold only between two and four liters of water each. The team's research shows that the little amount of rainfall that Rapa Nui receives (1240 mm/yr), coupled with the basic evaporation rate of water in a climate such as the island's, means that on average, taheta could not be used as viable sources of drinking water 317 days out of the year... Lipo said the group's next project is to try to understand how closely the availability of freshwater in certain locations is linked to the methods and means of building the large statues on the island...
(Excerpt) Read more at phys.org ...
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
Kon Tiki was the first adult level book I read that captured my soul. Just a kid it alerted my senses to learning. My addiction to hf radio and geography. It just would not let me go. I guess eventually the siren song of girls and then aviation came along and modified my interest over the subsequent decades.
But for more than a few years I wanted to be adrift on that raft leading the team to new discovery.
I got my late father a box ppbk set of the Heyerdahl titles then available — Fatu Hiva, Kon-Tiki, Aku-Aku, The Ra Expeditions — and afaik he never cracked any of them. I wound up reading them in my early 20s I guess, then got “The Tigris Expedition” “The Maldives Mystery” and “Early Man and the Ocean”. They’re, uh, around here someplace.
https://www.thriftbooks.com/a/thor-heyerdahl/210159/
Yup. That’s where the water source was, and I think still is. Cores have been taken at least once to see what the water levels have been, pollen, etc.
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