Rapa Nui
Almost a thousand stone figures on the world's remotest island
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The moai were carved at Rano Raraku and moved to coastal platforms, probably upright using ropes — "they walked", the tradition says. The collapse narrative popularised by Jared Diamond has been strongly challenged: the palm forest was probably lost largely because Polynesian rats ate the seeds, the population appears to have been stable until contact, and the great fall came with European disease and the Peruvian slave raids of 1862–63, which removed roughly half the population in a single year. The case is an object lesson in how easily a tidy moral story outlives poor evidence.
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On an island in the middle of the Pacific, 3,500 kilometres from the nearest neighbour, people carved almost a thousand huge stone figures and moved them kilometres. For a long time the story was that they destroyed their own island. Newer research suggests rats ate the palm seeds, and that the worst came with Europeans: disease and slave raids.
Connects to
Part of Terra Saga — the story of Earth on a timeline. terrasaga.org