Easter Island

Easter Island, less commonly known as Rapa Nui, is a very mysterious island in the southeastern Pacific Ocean. Easter Island is well known for its large strange statues called Moai. With over 1000 miles to the nearest inhabited island, Easter Island is said to be the most remote inhabited place in the world .

It is called Easter Island because a Dutch explorer found the island on Easter Sunday in 1722. Easter Island is about 15 miles long and gets to about 7 miles wide. It is usually between 64 and 82 degrees Fahrenheit on Easter Island, it does not get Hurricanes. The date the first people colonized Easter Island is heavily debated, anywhere from 300 to 1200 depending on who you ask. Evidence suggests that when Polynesian people arrived to settle it, it was either already occupied, or they were later joined by a group of tall white people with "earlobes they can tie behind their neck". Despite being reported by several visiting vessels the white people seem to disappear and their story on the island is not really told.

It seems when Easter Island was first colonized it was divided between 9 "clans" each with its own leader and these 9 clans were ruled by one "great leader" who was a direct descendant of the original founder Hotu Matu'a. These people practiced a type of ancestor worship, and it is these people that made the Maoi statues.

The early settlers of Easter Island believed in a link between the living and the dead, the dead provide everything the living needed, the living provide a better place in the spirit world through worship. The Moai statues are symbolic of their dead ancestors watching over them.

Most of the Moai statues on Easter Island are composed of three pieces, the main body, the eyes, and the Pukao or hat/head dress. Almost all of the statues were carved out of a volcanic ash stone called "tuff" using only a hand chisel made of a much harder basalt stone. The Pukao or hat thing they put on top of the statues was carved out of red Scoria, another type of volcanic rock similar but heavier and harder than Pumice. The eyes were made of Choral and black Obsidian.

Only about half of all the statues made ever left the quarry where they were carved. About 200 were placed where it seems they were meant to be, along the coast and on pedestals. About 200 more Maoi statues were scattered across the island, seemingly without cause. Scientists think the statues that are scattered may have been on their way to the coast and never got there. Around 400 Moai statues are still at the quarry, some half finished, some look like they were never intended to leave the quarry.

It is not known how the Maoi statues were transported around the island, but most scientists agree that they would have needed to use the trees that were at one time very abundant on the island for ropes, and rolling logs etc..

If it is true that the possibly 200 scattered Maoi statues around Easter Island are on their way to be placed, that implies to me a very slow process of placing the statues. Why would there be that many statues "moving", unless they would move each statue only a small distance at a time in some type of orderly way? It is hard to believe that there is no evidence about how they were moved when 200 of them are in the middle of being moved.

Then one day all statue carving just stopped. It is not known exactly what took place but it seems the whole island just fell apart.

With a population reaching about 15,000 people the island was overcrowded, people started to war, and a birdman religion overtook the ancestor worship religion. It is suggested that the warring started because the people of Easter Island ran out of food, brought on by a severe depletion of all the trees on the island. It is not known exactly what happened to the trees. Some scientists believe that they used up the trees moving the giant Moai statues, not realizing until too late the damage they were doing to their own environment. Some scientists believe the Polynesian people brought rats with them when they settled on Easter Island, they think that the colony of rats grew very large, and they ate the seeds of the trees.

Either way, without trees the people could no longer build boats to fish with, the soil eroded, and a huge problem was presented to the people of Easter Island. As the people began to starve they began to fight, this is when the birdman religion took hold. It was a competition held by the people in which, a dangerous race for the first egg of the season won the right to special foods for your clan.

It seems that even with the birdman religion fighting did not stop, and the people of the island also took to statue toppling with deliberate attempt to break the necks of the Maoi statues.

This fighting and starving seems to have drastically reduced the population of Easter Island by the time explorers started to frequent the island more often. Explorers noted the lack of trees and that as time went on, more and more statues were toppled.

Slave traders arrived and took half of what was left of the population of Easter Island as well as gave the remainder smallpox. Later explorers noted that when they arrived on the island there were too many bodies to bury and they were just lying about.

In the end the population was reduced to under 200 people, and because of this much of the knowledge about what really went on there is lost forever. It does not appear to me to be related to aliens or gods though, just an amazing story.

I give this a 1 on the mystery scale. Let me know what you think.

1 = no mystery
2 = possible mystery
3 = total mystery


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