Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Rapa Nui (Easter Island)

Episode Date: October 15, 2022

Located in the South Pacific Ocean is one of the most isolated islands in the world. It is over a thousand miles from the nearest human settlement. There a civilization unlike any other in the world arose and ultimately fell. While the story of the island didn’t end with the fall of that civilization, the physical remains of that society have endured and have fascinated people for centuries.  Learn more about Rapa Nui, aka Easter Island, and the civilization and people who lived there on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Subscribe to the podcast!  https://link.chtbl.com/EverythingEverywhere?sid=ShowNotes -------------------------------- Executive Producer: Darcy Adams Associate Producers: Peter Bennett & Thor Thomsen   Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere Update your podcast app at newpodcastapps.com Discord Server: https://discord.gg/UkRUJFh Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/ Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/EverythingEverywhere Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/everythingeverywheredaily Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/everything-everywhere-daily-podcast/ Everything Everywhere is an Airwave Media podcast. Please contact [e-mail] to advertise on Everything Everywhere. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Located in the South Pacific Ocean is one of the most isolated islands in the world. It's over a thousand miles from the nearest human settlement. And it was here that a civilization unlike any other in the world arose and ultimately fell. While the story of the island doesn't end with the fall of that civilization, the physical remains of that society have endured and have fascinated people for centuries. Learn more about Rapa Nui, aka Easter Island, and the civilization and the people who live there on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong?

ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the Thurline podcast from NPR. There are several remarkable things about the island known as Rapa Nui. And the first remarkable thing is about its geography. Rapa Nui is remote, very remote. Depending on how you want to define it, it is the most or one of the

most remote islands in the world. The closest human settlement is Pitcairn Island, which is 2,75 kilometers, or 1,289 miles away. And if you remember back to my episode on Pitcaharn Island, it's about as small as a human settlement can be. Beyond that, the next proper settlement is the island of Mangareva in French Polynesia, 531 kilometers or 330 miles, further away. Rapa Nui is a volcanic island, a fact that is actually important in the history of the island, which I'll explain in a bit. The remoteness of Rapa Nui makes its settlement by humans the second most impressive thing about the island. I've previously done an episode on the incredible exploits of Polynesian navigators. Without question, their ability to sail across the open

ocean is impressive. But sailing to Rapa Nui might have been the most impressive thing that the Polynesians ever did. Rapa Nui is the only speck of land within a third. thousand miles, and the odds of finding it were very slim to say the least. You might think that the first people to reach Rapa Nui would probably have come from French Polynesia, the closest inhabited islands, and they might have. However, the oral tradition of the Rapa Nui people claims that the first settlers were actually two boats from the Cook Islands, 5,000 kilometers away. Rapa Nui makes up one of the vertices of what is known as the Polynesian Triangle. The Polynesian triangle is an area defined by Rapa Nui, Hawaii, and New Zealand, and within that area are

most of the Polynesian islands. The first humans probably arrived at Rapa Nui around 800 years ago. We can only guess how many Polynesians set out in open ocean, never to find dry land. One interesting thing about the early settlers of Rapa Nui, and of most Polynesians, was their consumption of sweet potatoes. Sweet potatoes came from South America, meaning that there must have been some sort of contact between Polynesians and South Americans, and Rapa Nui is the closest Polynesian island to South America. The first European to discover Rapa Nui was the Dutch explorer Yacobrogivin, who saw the island on Easter Sunday 1722,

and he dubbed it Pash Island, which was Dutch for Easter Island. Today in Spanish, it's still known as Ila Dave Pasqua. Captain Cook visited the island in 1774, and his Polynesian translator from Bora Bora was able to speak without too much difficulty to the natives on the island. Other than a location to get fresh food and water, the island was of little interest to Europeans. This all changed dramatically, and for the worse, in the 19th century, in particular the 1860s. Outsiders eventually figured out something that Rapa knew he had that they wanted. People.

Peruvian slave raiders began to hit the island to take people back to work in the mines in Peru. This devastated the population of the island. Over 1,500 people from the rather small population were taken, some never to return. Those who didn't die in the mines in Peru were eventually returned to the island. However, there was a small problem. They brought smallpox with them, which almost completely wiped out the entire population. With other diseases such as tuberculosis brought by whalers, there were only 111 people on the island as of 1877 and very few children.

As horrible as the human toll on the island was, the entire upper class of the Rapa Nui was taken, including the chief, his heir, and every single person who could read Rongo Rongo. Rongo was the only system of writing ever developed by any Polynesian society, and yet another remarkable thing about the island. In addition, everyone who were the keepers of Rapa Nui's civilization and traditions were gone. And this is where I have to bring up the thing, which is the single defining characteristic of Rapa Nui, the Moai. While the island's population shattered, Europeans moved in to take over the land. They found these large stone statues of human figures, which absolutely mystified them.

This led to the, quote, mystery of the Eastern Island Moai. I'm sure you've all seen photos of Moai. As far as the archaeologists can tell, they were constructed about 700 to 300 years ago, meaning that statue creation probably started as soon as the island was settled. Each of the moai are carved out of volcanic rock, and they are all carved from a single location, an extinct volcanic crater known as Rano-Raraku. The statues are believed to represent the heads of major families on the island. The statues are not just heads, but actually full torsos. Many of them also had hats that were put on them called Pukau.

These were carved from a totally different type of red pumice stone found in another part of the island. The statues also originally had eyes made of coral with pupils made of obsidian. There's only one reconstructed moai today with both the Pukau and the eyes. The moai were designed to be placed on a platform called an Ahu, which was positioned on the shore. By the time the Europeans arrived to the island, most of the moai had fallen over. This was a combination of civil wars on the island, where opposing sides would knock over the enemy's moai, and natural events such as earthquakes and tsunamis. There really aren't a lot of surviving moai on the island anymore.

There is one group located in the quarry which was never moved or abandoned in the middle of moving. Then there are a few others on the shore that were reconstructed. If you ever see a whole bunch of moai in a row, that is probably a single location known as Ahu Tangareiki. All of the moai had been originally toppled, but were reconstructed by the efforts of the Chilean government and a Japanese company in the 1990s. One of the striking things I noticed when I visited Easter Island was how few moai there really are. It seems like there are a lot more from photos that you see. If you've ever been to Easter Island, and I do recommend it, you can pretty much tell where any moai is on the island from a photo because there are so few of them.

Because the island's leaders were all killed in the 19th century, the secrets of how the statues were moved were lost. This was the great mystery that people have been trying to solve for decades. And this led to a host of theories about how the moai were moved. One of the unique things about Rapa Nui is that there are a great mystery that there are are no trees on the island. One of the popular theories was trying to connect this fact to the moai. The big theory was that the island was deforested to use the wood as rollers to move the moai. Extensive archaeology on the island proved this theory wrong. The deforestation on the island

was primarily due to Polynesian rats, which settlers had brought with them. The rats ate the seeds and prevented the trees from propagating. There were dozens of experiments conducted trying to move moai to prove how it was done. The legend on the island says that the statues were commanded to walk to their location. The most recent research, and what is now the consensus view, is that the moai did, in fact, walk. Sort of. They were basically moved upright like you would move a refrigerator. Ropes were tied, and men on either side would alternate pulling right-left, right-left. The moai, which were carved, but never moved, were carved in such a way that their centers of gravity were lower that they could easily be walked. They were then carved at the final site to make them look proper.

The era of Moai building appeared to have ended in the late 17th century due to the civil wars which ravaged the island. However, a new era began on the island known as the Tangata Manu, or the Birdman cult. The Birdman cult surrounded an annual competition on the island. Just off the coast of Rapa Nui is a tiny island called Motu Nui. This is primarily a bird nesting site. Every year, whereby representatives from each tribe on the island would swim to Motu Nui and wait for the Suti turns to nest. The contest was to be the first to get a Suti turn egg, swim back to Rapa Nui, climb the sea cliff up a volcano, and then return the egg intact to the village at the top of the volcano. This was actually a very dangerous contest, as the waters between the island were shark

infested, and the seacliff was extremely hazardous. The winner would be given a place of honor, and all of the tribes had to give him food. He was then given a place to live for the next year where he didn't have to do anything. Christian missionaries stopped the practice in the 19th century. The other thing I should mention about Rapa Nui was a particular resource they had that was not commonly found in the rest of the Pacific.

Obsidian. Obsidian can make for extremely sharp knives and spear points, and Rapa Nui was one of the best locations for it. Obsidian was incredibly valuable in a world that didn't have metal. Chile and Annexie, the island in 1888, and in the 20th century, the island was mostly used as a sheep ranch. The native Rapa Nui people were all kept in the only town on the island, Hangaroa. The island went under the administration of the Chilean Navy in 1966, which was the same year

the people on the island were given Chilean citizenship. There was a small military base in the island in the 1970s, but there wasn't a lot of tourism at that time. One of the big breaks for the Island occurred in 1987, when the airport runway was expanded thanks to funding from the United States government. One of the reasons the Rapa Nui Airport is abnormally long is because NASA paid for it to be an emergency landing site for the space shuttle. Consequently, it was now plenty big enough for Jumbo jets to land. The economy of Rapa Nui has radically changed since the 1980s, primarily due to tourism. The population is now about 7,500 people up from around 3,000, 40 years ago. The number of visitors to the island has exploded. There were approximately

156,000 visitors to Rapa Nui before the pandemic in 2019, up from just 70,000 visitors in 2012. The pandemic radically transformed the island as tourism, which made up the vast majority of the island's economy, went to zero almost overnight. Locals had to start growing their own food and fishing, both of which hadn't been done on the island for decades. If you want to visit Easter Island, and again, I recommend it if you can swing it. There are really only two places you can fly from, Santiago, Chile, and Tahiti in French Polynesia. Rapa Nui was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1995, and despite its small size, is one of the most iconic places on planet Earth. This small, remote island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean was the scene of some of the

worst of humanity with slavery and disease, yet also some of humanity's greatest cultural achievements. Everything Everywhere Daily is an Airwave Media podcast. The executive producer is Darcy Adams. The associate producers are Thor Thompson and Peter Bennett. I just wanted to extend a big thank you to everyone who is supporting the show over at Patreon.com. I have show merchandise available there, including hoodies, t-shirts, and stickers. Plus, it really just helps me get this show out every single day, including, of course, weekends and holidays. Remember, if you leave a review or send me a boostogram, you too can have it read on the show.