Against All Odds

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A new genetic study has shattered the long-standing belief that the people of Easter Island – or Rapa Nui – drove their society to collapse through environmental mismanagement.

The long-held narrative goes that the Rapa Nui’s inhabitants overexploited their resources, leading to a population crash, deforestation, and even cannibalism.

However, recent findings by an international team of geneticists tell a different story of remarkable cultural and societal resilience.

The research team analyzed the genomes of 15 ancient Rapa Nui individuals whose remains had been stored in European museums. These individuals – who lived on the island over the past 500 years – showed no signs of a dramatic population decline before European contact in the 18th century, according to Science Alert.

Instead, the Rapa Nui population was actually growing steadily until the 1860s, when Peruvian slave raids and diseases brought by European colonials reduced the island’s population to just 110 individuals.

“Our data does not support a major population collapse on Rapa Nui after its initial peopling and before the 1800s,” the researchers wrote in their paper published in Nature.

The genetic data also showed that Rapa Nui was not as isolated as previously thought.

Long before Europeans arrived, the island’s inhabitants had already intermixed with Polynesian and Indigenous American populations, suggesting that Polynesian navigators reached the Americas between 1250 and 1430.

“The sea was more a road to them rather than a barrier,” said lead authors J. Víctor Moreno-Mayar and Bárbara Sousa da Mota.

The findings also debunk the ecocide theory that blamed the Rapa Nui people for deforesting their island. While rats and overharvesting did contribute to the loss of palm forests, this did not lead to societal collapse.

Archeologist Carl Lipo, who was not involved in the research, said the study’s conclusions align with archeological evidence that the islanders lived sustainably until European disruptions.

“It’s terrific to see a completely independent line of evidence pointing to the same conclusions,” Lipo told New Scientist.