Easter Island: a sustainable society has been falsely blamed for its own demise | Hacker News Reader

Easter Island: a sustainable society has been falsely blamed for its own demise

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97 pointspseudolus20 comments

I'm not sure I follow this.

1. Diamond mentioned the rats as contributors to the deforestation; invasive species brought by humans (which the rats were) are a key example of ecological destruction.

2. Going from 9000 (or possibly as many as 15,000) in the 1500s to 3000 (using the most generous pre-disease estimate) at the time of first European contact sure as hell sounds like a dramatic decline to me, and the author doesn't propose how it happened.

I agree with you -- I don't see the connection between the research paper about DNA and the other claims in the linked HN piece.

I'd also add 3. It seems dubious that colonization would lead to oral histories of civil war, somehow "transferring" brutality from a foreign invader to themselves.

The author doesn't seem to give a lot of credit to the locals and their own accounts of history. Those stories are often much more accurate than we think.

> It seems dubious that colonization would lead to oral histories of civil war

Look at Africa, and the civil wars that popped up after post-colonization.

Or, I mean, look at Iraq now. When an outside government overthrows the current power, sets up their own ideal of a government, and then leaves, it usually doesn't end up well, right? There's going to be hangers-on of the old ways, they are going to be a PITA for the new system, once it's set up.

The civil wars were there pre-colonization as well.

Pre-colonization they were just wars. After Europeans drew lines and made countries, many wars became civil wars.

They didn't "pop up" post-colonization so much as "be directly caused, funded, and orchestrated by the exiting colonial powers and their superpower patrons".

Re: population, the article mentioned that we don't know what the population was, but a good guess is between 4,000 and 9,000. The 15,000 number mentioned isn't a guess at population, it's a theory on how many people could be sustained with the farming practices used.

So if there was a drop in population it may not have been as big of a drop as 15,000 to 3,000.

Paul Bahn (he's a rock art specialist; his is the only book[1] I've read on it other than Diamond) estimated the population at 10K pre-contact, though he also theorizes there was an earlier Spanish contact than the recorded one which prompted a collapse of their belief system and tipped an already fragile society over.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Enigmas-Easter-Island-Paul-Bahn/dp/01... -- cool book. The title is tongue in cheek; he mostly is annoyed by people who don't simply apply standard archaeology and anthropology to the island and look for more complex theories than necessary.

> the author doesn't propose how it happened.

The author says quite clearly it's not clear that it happened at all: "The question ... is one we still cannot convincingly answer ... But there is no real evidence of a population decline prior to the first European contact". Also you've cherry picked the high end estimate from "4k-9k"; going from 4k to 2K-3K is far less dramatic than 9k to 2k-3k. All of these numbers are pretty shaky estimates and Roggeveen admits his 2-3K estimate may be low as they were shooting people and they did want to line up on the beach to be counted. So maybe it's 5K to 5K.

Diamond's narrative of a starving people forced into cannibalism as a food source certainly doesn't fit much of the other evidence -- their bones indicate they were larger than other polynesians, not malnourished and show little evidence of being killed in battle.

Even the smallest possible population reduction is 25%. It's hard to see that and not ask for a reason.

Sorry late reply did not see. The "smallest possible" reduction is zero because the first range is quite possibly significantly low, by admission of the person who made it.

The real answer is more sinister. Throughout the 19th century, South American slave raids took away as much as half of the native population. By 1877, the Rapanui numbered just 111. Introduced disease, destruction of property and enforced migration by European traders further decimated the natives and lead to increased conflict among those remaining.

This, however, provides no explanation for the decline in population prior to the first European contact, as the author is claiming that DNA evidence suggests this was not going on prior to the arrival of Europeans. The author also claims that there was no pre-European decline, yet presents before-and-then estimates that are only consistent with that at the extremes of their ranges. In general, the argument being presented here is rather incoherent.

Just a theory, but is it possible that there was previous contact that wasn't as well documented?

One theory posited by people like Charles C. Mann is that the native population of say, North America were drastically reduced before the likes of English colonizers came onto the scene by infectious diseases.

Maybe, maybe not (and maybe that happened well after)

It would think that is possible, but the author seems to be claiming otherwise in the third-from-last paragraph.

One consideration (not raised in the article) is that perhaps the people of South America (unlike the Polynesians) did not have the seagoing technology or know-how to make a round trip to the island, prior to the arrival of europeans.

The English were relative latecomers among the European colonists of the americas, and by then smallpox and other diseases had spread widely. Apparently, the Wampanoag had suffered from an epidemic, now suspected to have been smallpox, in the years prior to the arrival of the Mayflower Pilgrims in 1620.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wampanoag

A fascinating talk on this subject was given in the Long Now series a little while back: http://longnow.org/seminars/02013/jan/17/statues-walked-what... . Highly recommended.

A strange article for sure, but the first I had heard about the island's population being cut in half by slave raids. That would cause a pretty terrible blow to any culture.

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