[blam]

GGG Ping.

[tet68]

George Bush's fault.

[nomorelurker]

Are they making this stuff up as they go along ping???

[Cicero]

If Gray Davis or Al Gore had been running things, this never would have happened.

[Frank_N_Sense]

I heard it was immigration from muslim lands and gun control

[Anti-Bubba182]

What I love about the Easter Island story is that is debunks the benign native impact on the environment myth we have been fed by the shovel full for years.

[Old Professer]

My guess is that it was the first, and maybe only, successful prison colony.

[AmishDude]

Bush's fault.

[fat city]

Like Haiti but with fancier statuary.

[somemoreequalthanothers]

the new inhabitants of Easter Island must have begun hacking down trees almost immediately, building the gigantic monuments and stone heads

The thought that the people intelligent enough to create and erect the monuments were so stupid as to render their existence obsolete is a real stretch.

[jennyp]

There's an interesting alternate theory out there, that the ecological & societal collapse didn't occur until much later, when the Peruvians & others started kidnapping the natives en masse for slavery.

[IYellAtMyTV]

Yeah, yeah, we know, humans bad, humans destroy, we should all just die, the world would be better, blah, blah, blah, Zzzzzzz

[Oztrich Boy]

The word is "Devastate": dev-as-tate.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks Blam.

Archaeologists had thought that humans first arrived at the island around 800 AD, based on radiocarbon dating of kitchen scraps and cooking fires... Hunt and Carl Lipo of California State University at Long Beach, US, radiocarbon-dated charcoal from the earliest human traces in a new excavation on the island. The site, Anakena, is Easter Island's only sandy beach and has long been regarded as the likeliest spot for first colonists to settle. To their surprise, the wood dated no earlier than 1200 AD – several hundred years more recent than they had expected.

IOW, "the most likely spot" didn't seem too likely to the people who actually settled the island around 800 AD. Or perhaps the beach is much newer than the volcanic rock that characterizes the rest of the coastline, simply because of wave and wind action.

And there's this:

In Horus vol II no 1, a journal published by the late David Griffard, Barry Fell was interviewed. Among other things:

We learned that seals were coming to a bad end and being mummified by nature in Antarctica in 1200 A.D. That was interesting and we wondered what was happening in Antarctica at that time...one of the technicians... noticed that a seal carcass that he himself had shot for dog-meat and that got left out through the winter... [looked] just like the mummified seals that they had been sending in. So without telling too many people what he was doing, he sent this mummified seal to be carbon-dated and do you know it was dated to 1200 A.D., and he had shot it the year before. When that was made public it really caused a storm...

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[razorback-bert]

It fits my new theory of Mini-Global Warming.

[S0122017]

They may be irresponsible, caused starvation and almost annihilated their people, but...



Look what beautifull tombstones their starved kin now have!!!

[S0122017]

They may be irresponsible, caused starvation and almost annihilated their people, but...



Look what beautifull tombstones their starved kin now have!!!

[ThanhPhero]

No group or other entity decimated Easter Island. The damage to the environment cannot be estimated in tenths and surely 1/10 damage is not nearly so severe as to warrant all the speculation. Decimation refers specifically to the killing of 1/10 of a group of people. It has been done since Roman times(Latin is the origin of the word) as reprisal for resistance by non-assimilatted populations or it has been done as punishment for losing a battle right up to Soviet times.

[Thombo2]

I'm rather confused here.I thought natives(non-white) lived in harmony with nature and respected the environment?sarc intended.I'm amazed this theory was actually printed.

[JudyB1938]

In the article about all those mummified seals dating out at 1200 AD, it was reported that the supplier slipped in a seal that he'd shot and left out all winter where it mummified. It was also dated at the same 1200 AD. A dating that was obviously erroneous.

Then I read this article where things are AGAIN being dated at 1200 AD.

And I laugh once again at our "intelligentsia".