Stuff You Should Know - Why Did Easter Island's Civilization Collapse?

Episode Date: October 6, 2016

When the first Europeans landed on Rapa Nui, which they renamed Easter Island, they were puzzled by what happened there. Only a few thousand people lived there but there were signs of a massive civilization that once flourished. What happened there? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And Jerry's over there.

Look at those big stone heads behind you. We must be on Easter Island. Yeah, we are, Chuck. We just start every show like that, little role play. Okay, who are you right now? I don't know, I was, I'm not sure what that was. Started off as me, but then it went into Barney Fife or something.

Right, yeah, there you go. Barney Fife on holiday to Easter Island. Yeah. Or Rapa Nui. Mr. Limpit. Yeah. Boy, that ages us. Or Mr. Chicken.

The ghost of Mr. Chicken, another good one. I'd say 75% of our listeners are like, who was Barney Fife, who was Mr. Limpit, who was Mr. Chicken. Right, go look it up. You'll be delighted. Yeah, man, Don Knott. Yeah, he also did great turns on Scooby-Doo.

Oh, sure, and Threes Company. Yeah, man, he had a great career. I'd love that guy. RIP Don Knott. Is he not with us? Oh yeah, yeah, I think he died like in the last five, six, 10 years. Okay.

I think. You never know, man. You know, some of those people, you're like, oh, sure, like Abe Vagoda, people thought he was dead for years. It was like a part of pop culture that Abe Vagoda was dead. He just died this year, I think. He finally passed away, yeah, he's very sad.

He's like, fine, here I go. I think that maybe that's a, is that the ultimate compliment or the ultimate sign of disrespect that when you pass, everyone's like, I thought they were already dead. Disrespect. Okay.

We're on Easter Island, that's where we were. That's right. Rapa Nui. Which means the big rapa in Polynesian. Yeah. In Rapa Nui language. Did you know that? Are you alluding to Joe versus the volcano?

No. Oh, okay. That's the Waponi woos. Yeah, the big woo was the volcano. I just thought you were playing on that. No, I was looking high and low for what Rapa Nui translates into English. And all I could see were Jackass

as you said that it translates to Easter Island. Like that's not what I mean, internet. Yeah. Did you punch the internet? I did. Yeah. But it turned out it was just my laptop. No, the closest I found was that Rapa Nui

means big rapa, R-A-P-A. No idea what rapa means. Did you see the movie Rapa Nui? No, the Kevin Reynolds movie. Is that, who made it? Yeah, I think he wrote and directed it. I know he directed it, I'm pretty sure he wrote it too. And who is he?

Why do I know that name? Oh, he's done all sorts of stuff. Was he Waterworld? No, that's Kevin Costner. Well, no, he was in it. I think he directed it as well. Who's Kevin Reynolds? Kevin Reynolds and Kevin Costner's careers

were very much intertwined around that time. Maybe that's what I'm thinking. They got confused a lot. He's done a lot of great stuff. But you didn't see Rapa Nui? No. I assume it's a story, fictional story, wrapped in the events of probably the decline

of the island would be my guess. Yeah, Civil War, strife, possibly cannibalism. What's interesting though is that that fictional story wrapped in the true life events, turns out the true life events are probably fictional as well. Yeah, this actually, and maybe I should give our own article a break because most people

have been telling the same story for years, which is basically the story that author Jared Diamond told in his book in 2005 called Collapse. Right, he'd popularized it. He wasn't the first one to come up with this interpretation. No, but he's the one that really,

he's the gun, germs and steel guy, right? Yeah. One of my heroes, he wrote one of the greatest things I've ever read, the worst mistake in the history of the human race. Oh, really? Yeah, but please. Is it like a one word book?

What, Urkel? Yeah. I was trying to think of something, but that's better than anything I could have thought of. No, he was saying that he made the case that moving from hunting and gathering to agriculture was the worst mistake humans have ever made. Oh, really?

It's great, it's all over the internet if you want to go read it. Really great, easy read, and life changing. Changed my life. Is that why you stalk Buffalo today? By hand? Yep. Raised my own crops.

You come home, you're like, Yumi, skin that thing, I need a pelt. She's like, I just got done skinning the last one from yesterday. You skin it, and you go, okay. Where were we? We were talking about Kevin Reynolds wrapping a wee. Right, have not seen, sure.

We were saying that, and by the way, Kevin Reynolds did direct Waterworld. He directed Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves, a lot of Kevin Costner movies. Probably The Postman, too. No, he did Pandango. Oh, that was a good one. Yeah, he's done a bunch of stuff.

All right, so I think I remember where I was, which is we should take it easy on our article a little bit. I was a little annoyed that this article didn't say theorize and things like that. It kind of just said like, nope, this is what happened. And it was really judgy. Like the thing that it bought into

is an extremely judgy interpretation of things. Yeah. And it bought it as fact. It's the judgiest article on the whole site of Kevin. Well, what about the one I sent you earlier today? Yeah, how to deal with brown nosers? Yeah, we have an article on our site called how to deal with brown nosers.

Four pages. Yep. If you're looking for advice, go check it out. Goodness me. Weird times, my friend. So yeah, I was a little annoyed that it kind of treated us all as absolute scientific fact. Yeah.

When it certainly isn't. It just seems like one of those things that like someone said it, someone else wrote a popular book and then everyone's like, oh, well, that's what happened. Right, right, and that's really unusual for anthropology and archeology. Frankly, Jared Diamond should have known better.

He's really taken a lot of heat. His star was pretty high at the time. He had like a Nat Geo show, I think. He wrote Guns, Germs, and Steel. He wrote this book, Collapse, How Civilizations Decide to Choose to Succeed or Fail. And like even the wording in that title, like how a society chooses to fail,

is really judging in and of itself. So he definitely, you know, fell, there are a lot of plays on the word collapse and Jared Diamond collapsing as a result. So now he goes to Nat Geo and knocks on the door and like everyone's like, Shh, time to turn the light off. No, we turn it off, let's see that we're ready.

But yeah, the point is, is that there is a set of facts related to Rapa Nui, to Easter Island, that when you put together, form a mystery, a mystery that's basically been around since the first Europeans set foot on Easter Island and then came back and brought news of this place to the rest of the world. People have puzzled over what happened there.

And the problem is, is the oral traditions that came along, or that came from Rapa Nui from Easter Island, came along in like the 1880s. A good 150 years after Europeans came and Christianized everybody. When the population had been down to like a hundred people. And even today anthropologists and archeologists say, we don't really trust the oral tradition

from Rapa Nui at all. Like it's not a trustworthy source of information. Even like in a folkloric way, they're saying like the basics of it might not even be correct. So they're having to go back, which is very weird. That's a very unusual position to be in. Both for the indigenous culture

and the people who are trying to figure out what happened. But so the challenge is to take what we do know for a fact about Rapa Nui and then interpret it correctly. And not in a way that's like, this is it. This is the end all be all explanation. Which seems to be this weird thing that Rapa Nui has over academics who should know better. They say, this is it.

And the part about Jared Diamond, the reason he fell so hard is that his interpretation or the interpretation that he glomped onto and like popularized in his book was really, really judgy. Really judgy. Really like these people screwed up with their stupid faith and some wacky, tiki God

and look what brought them. And now we all need to learn the lesson because we're going down the same road. And that's just not done. You're not supposed to do that. All right. So why don't we do it this way? We'll give you the story as has been theorized

and popularized for many years. And then we'll hold off till the end for some new insights. Did I give away too much? No, I don't think so. Just judgy. I was judgy. No, no, no.

Just cause you say the word judgy doesn't make you judgy. Is that right? I think so. And also just want to tease this. We have a very special listener mail later too. So how about that? Lots of reasons to stick around. All right.

So you keep saying these words like Easter Island and Rapa Nui, like they're the same thing because they are. Rapa Nui also called Isla de Pascua. Which means Easter Island in Spanish, right? That's right. Easter Island, it's actually named, of course, when it doesn't matter what your island's called,

when the Dutch or the British or the Spaniards would come and call and they would say, oh, no, no, no. Here's what we'll call it. All right. Doesn't matter what you say. So we'll call it Easter Island. So I'm a Dutch admiral named Jacob Rogavine.

And it's Easter when I landed here in 1722. So what a great name. Obviously it's Easter Island. Rogavine also gets credit for discovering Easter Island. Actually, he was looking for an island that was Easter Island. That had been described by a pirate named Edward Davis in 1687.

Davis didn't come ashore, but even Rogavine was convinced that Easter Island was the island that Davis had described. Did he say they're large stone heads? No, he didn't mention the heads at all. Well, of course, weird. Easter Island is, I'm sure everybody knows this, but we should say right away

that they are very well known and most well known for their Moai, M-O-A-I, these beautiful, enormous, carved stone statues, not just stone heads. And that whole, boy, it's annoying, that internet thing still pops up once a year when people are like, look, there were bodies too. It's not just heads.

They've discovered their bodies are buried underground. They've known that since the early 1900s. But it's this weird, look up, snopes. It's this weird internet thing where every couple of years, the same stinking article gets shared that shows all these archeologists like have dug down and discovered their bodies beneath the earth, even though we've known this forever.

You gotcha. So anyway, these beautiful, beautiful statues, which we're gonna talk about in greater detail. But let's talk a little bit about how the original island was, what it was like there, who these people were, the Wopani. Originally colonized? Yeah, the Wopani woos.

The Rapa Nui, which so the island is Rapa Nui. Two words. And the inhabitants of the island are called the Rapa Nui. Clean, simple, I love it. Right, so the Rapa Nui, they think, were probably a single family that was headed up by a guy who was considered the first chief of the island. His name was Houttu Matua, or the great parent.

Hold on, do you know what just occurred to me? What? Evagoda was the leader of the Wopani woos. Yeah, all right. God, was there a better movie than that one? It's one of my faves. We've talked about it a lot. Yeah, it's Kevin Reynolds masterpiece.

So Houttu Matua is originally the first chief of Rapa Nui, and he allegedly came with just his family. Yes. They don't know exactly what they were doing out in their canoes, but they had seaworthy canoes because they hailed from Polynesia. Yeah, and they were great, great sailors, very experienced and hardy at sea.

Yeah, and this would have been a longstanding tradition trying out, setting out for new unknown islands because they believed that Polynesians are descended from Southeast Asians, who somewhere between 3,500 and 4,000 years ago, left Southeast Asia, started moving eastward toward the western coast of South America, in that general direction, and would come across an island,

stay there, populate it, move on to another one, populate it, and that's how Polynesia got populated. Rapa Nui, I believe, is the easternmost island in Polynesia, so they think that that was settled last. Yeah, go to Google Earth if you're in front of your computer and just type in Easter Island, and then it'll pop up this little triangular shaped island, and then just start zooming out, and keep zooming out,

and you'll see a lot of blue, and it's amazing to think that people got there in a canoe. Yeah, yeah, because it's like 3,000 or 3,500 miles from Tahiti, right? Yeah, like 2,200 miles from Chile. Right, but Chile is not where they came from, so they would have traveled by canoe. But that's the closest land, it's still 2,200 miles away.

It's amazing how remote. But they traveled like 3,000, 3,500 miles in a canoe. Unbelievable. To get from one island to another, and probably less, I think there's probably islands between Tahiti and Easter Island, but even still they traveled a very substantial distance, and then they clearly were intending to either make it

to another island or to colonize Rapa Nui, because they brought with them supplies, right? They brought with them plants to plant, like the taro root, which is like, I believe a cousin of the sweet potato, it's like a purple sweet potato. Yeah, that is correct. Nanners and taro, and this whole sweet potato thing, too,

was there was somebody who put out there that- Thor hired all. Yeah, maybe they came from South America, because that's where the sweet potato comes from, and then other people have since said, no, there's a lot of evidence that suggests that's not true. Right, well, yeah, Thor hired all, said, hey, there's sweet potatoes here.

Sweet potatoes are indigenous to South America. Pretty close. Therefore, they're from South America. Yeah, he didn't really put a lot of thought into that. No, well, he was an explorer. Yeah. You know, that's what he did. He explored, he built a raft,

Contiki, and sailed it himself from South America to Easter Island back in the 50s. I mean, it was cool, but he was a doer a little more than a thinker, right? Okay. And I believe they've concluded that the sweet potato actually originated in Southeast Asia, which just let them support even more.

But yeah, so they came here, they settled this island, they landed on the shore. It's tiny. It is, it's about three times the size of Manhattan. Yeah, it's 64 square miles, like I said, it's triangular, and was created like a lot of the islands from volcanic eruptions, which also come to play with these statues,

as we will see. Yep, and when they landed, his family said, well, we're family, but we better get to populating the place, so. Here's some wine. Right? Here's some taro root. Let's get to it, right?

The island they landed on though was, potentially they think, much different than the island that we know today. If you go there today, you're gonna see some white sandy beaches, and not a lot of trees. No. They believe that there could have been as many as 16 million palm trees at first,

just like rife with palm trees. Yeah, like so many of the islands, like, ugh, dealing with the palm trees whenever another one grows. Yeah, and it wasn't the most, it wasn't the friendliest, I mean, I say friendly, it was friendly, but it wasn't. Hospitable?

Yeah, that's the word. There wasn't just food everywhere, and tons of seafood. Like, apparently the waters around there are low in nutrients, so no coral reefs, and that means not a lot of fish. So you had some lizards, you had some mollusks, you had some insects.

And there was, if you went fishing, you had to go deep sea fishing away from the island, but again. Yeah, like get a dolphin. Right, dolphin hunting. That's what they ate. I know. It's so gross.

Which they could do, because they had really great canoes. But they, it was an ordeal. They ate a lot of vegetables, basically. Right. And a lot of those they planted. Right. So, they're living this way.

This article says they settled about 400 CE, right? Yeah. Which was what, 1600 years ago? I saw elsewhere, from more reliable sources, most people think it was about 1,000 years ago, instead of 1600. So about 1,000 CE, they settled the island. And the population starts to grow pretty quickly.

Apparently having six toes was a fairly normal trait among Rapa Nui originally. Because they might be in bread. Sure. And everything was going kind of hunky dory. They started ostensibly slashing and burning trees to clear land for fields. And they made their way.

Yeah, they were very spiritual people. They believed in the idea of mana, a sense of mana, which is this spiritual and political authority. And they instilled this through their arts, through cave drawings, and through these statues, which still haven't really gotten to. And through carvings, music, dance. And it was a big deal.

It meant a lot to them. Right, so the Rapa Nuians followed the traditional Polynesian structure of governance, which was there was different clans, right? Yeah. And then there was one head chief, one tribal leader that was in charge of everybody. Yeah.

Right, basically like Abe Vagoda. Who else would you want? And the authority of that chief came from deceased ancestors. Other chiefs that had lived and died and were now venerated as basically idols, supernatural idols, by the people who lived on the island. And this power came from these ancestors to the living chiefs in the form of this mana,

this spiritual power. And one of the most focused, laser focused ways mana was emanated was through the Moai. That's a great place to take a break, my friend. Thanks. Nice setup. Alright. Okay.

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All right, these Moai, which you refer to as heads, because you believe that internet meme. Well, it's not so much that it's a lot of head to the body. Yes. Proportionately speaking, it's almost all head. That's right, which some people think that one of the reasons is because they were meant to be a phallus. Yeah.

And of course, it's taken as literal fact by the HowStuffWorks article. That's right. All right, so these Moai, these beautiful statues, it's not something that you will only find on Easter Island. If you go to Hawaii or Tahiti, you will see similar type things. And this was, like you said, this was like the purest expression of that mana and how they felt about their ancestors. I think how they understood it was that the mana, this divine energy or divine power literally

transmitted through the Moai. Man, I'm going to have trouble with that the whole time. No, that's right. It's a lot of vowels together. Moai. It is. M-A-O-M-O-A-I. I think that's a mistake you're making.

You're thinking A. Moai. You're thinking Maori. Maybe not. Yes, you're exactly correct. And so these things were built, there's a volcano there called Reino Raraku. And in the pits of this volcano, they have this volcanic ash, this rock that's very lightweight, even though these things still weigh a lot.

It doesn't weigh as much as, you know, like granite would, let's say. Lightweight rock, it's very porous, it's malleable, it is very hard. And it's, originally it's tinted in like orange and ochre. And at first they would start around, you know, 1200 A.D. or what do you say now? C-E. C-E. But even that is kind of a nod to that whole thing, instead, I think scientists just say years ago.

Okay. Ooh, I like that. So there'd be like 800 years ago. That's clean. Or they say X years before present. So YBP. Oh, okay. That's not as clean.

No. But I still like it. I'm done with YBP. Yeah, you know me. So terrible. They started off kind of small. They were not as big as they would eventually get, because they were just kind of learning and teaching themselves how to do this.

They were still large though, but they weren't as large. Later on they would find some that they couldn't even move. And we'll get to this, but they would eventually move these things. But like El Gigante was the largest one they found, and that was like almost 72 feet tall. Yeah. I think up to 165 tons is how much they estimate El Gigante ways. Yeah. But the initial ones that they started with were much, much smaller.

Right. So like let's go with 10 feet or so and five or six tons. Yeah. Even that's still nothing to sneeze at though. You know? Correct. No matter how big your head is. So El Gigante specifically though is representative of I think one of the late Moai, because it's

still there. It's still left in its volcanic pit. It was never even excavated fully. Oh really? Yeah. It's just laying there. I think horizontally to the ground, because you know, they would go in and be like, this area is going to be the Moai and they would carve it out.

They'd carve out the outline of it and then they'd start carving down around it and start carving out the features, carve out beneath it, or if it was standing up, they would carve out around it and then just leave a little pedestal. Yeah. Called a keel. Right. This article says it was flat, but as we'll see later, that may or may not be true. Yeah.

They separated from its keel and then bring it down the mountain somehow, maybe rope something like that. Yeah. To their ahoo, which would be the platform on which the Moai would eventually stand and they would line them up on the island's perimeter facing in. In the island, not out to the sea. Yeah. Which it says here possibly they were guarding, watchfully guarding the island.

Sure. But I would think that they would be looking out toward the sea if that were the case. I don't know. Who knows? I don't know. But yeah, that point though where they were brought down the mountain and brought to their ahoo, this island was, again, it's three times the size of Manhattan. That was not just a quick thing necessarily.

No. And there's actually a huge mystery. How did they get these things? That again, the small ones weighed six tons, big ones weighed scores of tons. How did they get these things from one place to another? Especially considering that all they had were palm trees. Palm trees are not the sturdiest trees on the planet. And the kind of rope you can make from like palm is not the strongest rope.

So it's been a longstanding mystery of how they did this. Yeah. And here's one prevailing theory that for many years, and a lot of people still believe this is how they moved them, was that they would finish the statue, like we said, cut it from the keel, lower it down with ropes from the area in the volcano, and then put it on these palm logs and use those as like a conveyor system essentially. Rolling these things along very slowly over great distances, even though like you said it's a small island, to haul one of these things was no easy task.

Right. So that's the prevailing theory. And it's actually been tested more than once. An archaeologist named Joanne von Tilburg who said, you know what, if you took one of these things and you laid it on its back on top of some logs, like basically make a sled out of logs facing say in north-south direction, and then you roll them over logs that are in a east-west alignment, right perpendicular to it, that could probably work. And they tested out her theory, and apparently it took 12 people to move like a six or eight

tonne moai, 150 feet, took them two minutes. Yeah. So that is A theory. There's this other guy that we're going to talk about a little bit later who has some theories that just smack diamond right in the face. His name is Carl Leipo, or Lippo, L-I-P-O of Cal State Long Beach, go banana slugs? No. No.

That's San Jose State, right? Yeah. Cal State Long Beach. The Longshoremen. We're going to hear from them. All apologies. The Cal State Long Beach Port Authority. I like that.

So Terry Hunt of the University of Hawaii. No. Well, yeah. Carl Lippo and Terry Hunt, right? Yeah. Yeah, okay. So these two dudes who have their own theories about the other stuff, like I said, but they said and tested, they said, you know what, these things, if they had broader shoulder,

I'm sorry, broader bases than shoulders, and it wasn't exactly flat on the bottom, you could actually walk these dudes, stand them upright, get three ropes, get people on the side on each side of this and one person in the back holding it up and just kind of rock it back and forth and it sort of waddles forward. It's amazing to see. It's really cool. There's a National Geographic video on YouTube that shows all these different ways that they were tried, all these different theories tried out, done with like human action figures

or something. Yeah. Well, you can see the real thing too. Right. At the end, they show these guys trying out the real thing and this thing is like walking down the road. It's really neat. And it actually jibes with the Rapa Nui oral tradition that the Moai walked to their Ahu,

their pedestals. Yeah. They actually said we tied rope and walked them. Right. Well, supposedly whoever had a lot of mana was in charge of making these things walk and they did it with their mana, but the idea that you could make these things walk with some rope and tying into the oral tradition that they walked them, that's pretty fascinating. Agreed.

And in their real tests, they only used 18 people. So that ties in with their theories about how many people live there, which we'll get to later. Right. But a few ropes, 18 people, and they maneuvered a 10-foot, 5-ton replica, a few hundred yards. People poo-poo this and say, you know what, not all these bases were larger than the shoulders, first of all. Right.

And second of all, you basically carved a runway to do this and it wasn't like that for them. There was no place over terrain. There's no way you could have walked these dudes. Let's see. But maybe they did both, you know? Well, there's plenty of other theories. This Czechoslovakian engineer named Pavel Pavel, great name, right?

Yes. The magician, so nice he had to name it twice, right? He said that... And I say magician because I assume he's going to say magic. Yeah. Right? I don't think so. Oh, okay.

No, no, that's Eric von Dakin who said that it was UFOs that did it. Right. No, Pavel Pavel said it was kind of like it was similar to that walking thing, but rather than the thing actually like kind of wobbling down the road, he postulated a twisting motion. Right? So it's kind of like walking, but no part of the base actually leaves the ground. Oh, all right. It's just like one part twists forward and then you twist the other side forward and

it slowly makes its way forward. Kind of the same. Yeah. And then there's big debate over, okay. If you had them on a sled that was rolling over logs, were they standing up or were they laying down? Right. The key thing to remember whenever you're talking about or hearing somebody else more

importantly talk about Rapa Nui is that no one knows for certain anything. No, but they're making their best assumptions, not assumptions, but their theories. Hypotheses at best. Hypotheses at best. And they're all, they're interpretations of the few facts that we do know, right? That's right. And one of the things that has long been debated to is the idea of the population collapse that must have happened on Rapa Nui, right?

So when Admiral Rogavine showed up, he was the first European to see the Moai in person. And he was like, these things are amazing, they're huge. But I estimate there's something like maybe 3,000 people living on this island. So something must have led to this population decline because it would have taken 10,000 or 20,000 people to build and construct and move these things down the volcano, construct their ahu, their pedestals and get them up there. So what happened to the Rapa Nui? And from the moment he got back to Europe and shared his story about Easter Island,

this mystery has plagued archaeology in the West. What led to this population decline among the Rapa Nui? What happened on Easter Island? It's one of the great mysteries of archaeology. All right, buddy, well let's take a final break here and we will come back and talk about it. Our friends, whether you need a landing page, a beautiful gallery, or a professional blog, or if you want to sell something in an online store, we have a really easy, convenient answer

for you and it's called Squarespace. That's right, Josh just whispered it so you know it's true. Squarespace. Yep, with Squarespace you can create a beautiful website using very easy to use, intuitive drag and drop tools. You can also sell things using their seamless commerce tools and if you ever find yourself in a pickle, you can just go online and use their 24-7 chat and talk with a real live Squarespace person right there to help you solve your problems right away.

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on the island. By the way, first thing he did was kill 12 RAP nuans who apparently, I didn't see anywhere, were posing any threat whatsoever. Well, that's what you do to say we mean business. Right. And I'm sure they were thinking, could have killed a couple of us and we'd get the picture. Right, even one. Yeah, that would have done it.

One and then make eye contact for an extended period of time does the same thing as killing a dozen people. Or just fire your boomstick in the air. Sure. So Rogavine shows up and it's like something really bad happened here. The people have built, I think it's something like almost 900 Moai on the island, but only a couple of hundred are on their Ahu. We didn't say their Ahu actually these platforms, according to RAP-a-Nui tradition, were burial

grounds, the tombs for the chiefs that the Moai represent. Right. So very much the same way that the Egyptians built statues or edifices that were likenesses of the person who was buried there. This is basically the same thing. Yeah, they're ancestors. Wow, I said rice. You did.

Right. Right. So he shows up and he's like, there's hundreds of these things, a lot of them are abandoned on route from the mountain down to the Ahu, some of them are left in the pit. This place doesn't have any trees and there's only 3,000 people living here. Something really bad took place and everyone wants to know what. Yeah. So that's, like we said, Jared Diamond did not invent this, but the theory that he popularized

in 2005 was that what they did was they basically decimated the island's resources because they used all these palm trees. Right. They burned them down. They cleared paths. They built huts. They built canoes. They used them to roll the Moai with?

Yeah. So they basically took away and didn't understand what the outcome of this would be. So they took all these trees out, made these pathways and then what happened was there were no roots to keep and we, I think the, we do want an erosion or desertification. We do want a desertification, yeah. Yeah. So if you don't have tree roots, the rain is just going to wash away all the topsoil. The land's going to erode.

You're not going to be able to plant anything. Yeah. And they were relying because like we said earlier, they didn't have like tons and tons of fish and food everywhere. Right. So they were relying on the vegetation for their food, a food source. Plus the few animals that they did rely on like lizards, birds, when they cut down the trees, they were ruining those animals' habitats.

So they affected their food supply and that they stripped the land and couldn't grow crops. But they also got rid of the birds and the lizards that were living on the island as well. That's right. So the population's declining because of essentially starvation. People then begin to turn on one another. And the head chief, they split into a couple of different factions, I don't think a couple, like several factions, and then started fighting each other for the small bits of land that

were still fertile. Right. Yeah. The chief definitely lost control of the island and apparently warfare broke out, which is evidenced by these things called Mata. Supposedly evidenced. Right. So these are like very, very sharp obsidian spears that Rogavine even mentions in his

Chronicle that are supposedly implements of war. And if you scour Rapa Nui, you're going to find these things everywhere. But not very sharp. There's right. So there's evidence of like these spear-like implements all over the island, which further suggests that there was a lot of warfare there. And then also this motif pops up, this bird man motif. Yeah, I love this.

So a bird man cult popped up in the power vacuum that formed when the chief lost control in the face of this ecological crisis. And the bird man cult actually created like a parallel government, I guess, based on this god, Maki Maki. Yeah. So there's a power vacuum. Bird man cult forms because they need to, you know, fill the leadership void. There was an idea that if the first person, it was basically a contest, whoever finds

the first egg of this turn of the year gets to be the bird man, the leader of the bird men. Right. And so they would go scrounging around, climbing up the volcanoes in the mountainous areas. So okay, this article says that I saw elsewhere that they went down the cliff, swam to an offshore island and raided some turn nests. Oh, really? Yeah.

Well, at any point. Either way, they're after this egg. Yeah. They're looking for the sooty turn egg. It's a great band name. Yeah. That's not bad. Or maybe bird man cult.

That's a good one. With the album title, sooty turn. You know the cult, the band, the cult? Oh, sure. They were originally called Southern Death Cult. Yeah. That is true. So whoever, like I said, found this would be the leader of the cult.

The egg, right? Yeah. Yeah. And second prize, set of stake knives. Third prize, you're fired. Right. Now, actually, second prize was you would stab yourself with a spear, supposedly. Supposedly.

Again, not a lot of evidence to suggest it. No, but this How Stuff Works article takes it as fact. That's right. And it sounds like something like a six-year-old telling the story through and to. And if you didn't find the first egg, you had to stab yourself with your own spear. Yeah. So the bird man cult supposedly in this prevailing theory, I don't even know if I can say prevailing anymore, in this one theory put forward was they were responsible for

building back up the population and the culture of Easter Island. They started seeing all these cave drawings of birds and things, which kind of makes sense. And life on Easter Island was starting to pick back up again, supposedly, when the Dutch came in 1722. Yeah. So all of this, this collapse that led to famine and warfare and cannibalism, supposedly. Supposedly. All took place right before the Europeans showed up.

And then as the Europeans came, first it was the Dutch in 1722. The Spanish showed up in 1772, Captain Cook, James Cook. He showed up in 1774. And as when James Cook showed up, after that, the missionaries started to come. I think the Spanish actually annexed Easter Island. Yeah. In a very sneaky way. They said, oh, look at this.

This is a writing tool and this is something you can write on. You should practice by just doing whatever you can do with this right here on this dotted line. And they said, oh, well, thank you. You just signed over the rights of the island to the Spanish. Right. Yeah. This scribble that you just put down.

Yeah. That works for us. And I think in the 1880s, 1888 Chile annexed Easter Island. And today, Easter Islanders are Chilean citizens still. That's right. But by this time, by the late 19th century, the population of Easter Island had dwindled down to like 110 people, right? Yeah, thanks to the influence of what the Westerners brought.

Well, OK. So that's basically the prevailing legend that we just went over, that they overused the resources available to them in this greed and competition. There is apparently evidence that there was a lot of competitiveness among the carvers of the Moai. Yeah. I guess the idea was that the bigger and better your Moai, the more opportunity the mana had to flow from it, right, which meant the more powerful you were in practical terms

on the island. And that they were just using up all of these resources heedlessly, carelessly, and they brought along this ecological collapse, right? And then you can throw in that they probably would have been totally wiped off the face of the earth had the Westerners not shown up and stabilized their society further, right? So I mean, they Christianized them. They taught them how to read. They taught them how to raise cattle and livestock.

And today, if you go to Rapa Nui, there are plenty of Rapa Nuians still living on the island today. I think the population is back to about 2000, 3000, right? Right. So all of that is the narrative that stood for many, many years until, I think about 2010, maybe 2011, there was an archaeologist and her name is Dr. Maro Mulruni. She's from Honolulu. She works for the Bernice Paouahi Bishop Museum.

I have trouble with Polynesian words in Honolulu and she did a study at Rapa Nui and said, I think this interpretation is wrong. I don't think there was a collapse, a population collapse at all. That's right. This is published in the journal Antiquity and some other researchers have gotten on board this train that basically said, you know what, we're just going on this. There must have been 10, 20, 30,000 people there just because someone said, well, there had to be.

Look at these statues, right? And there really wasn't any archaeological evidence to prove anything, no scientific evidence. So their theory is that, no, the population when the Dutch showed up, two to 3000 was kind of about right. That was a normal, stable population and that it hadn't been a bunch of people before that it probably been about the same. Yeah, and that Lypo guy that I talked about earlier, he was in on this and he has demonstrated

through evidence how those Moai, like I said, could have been moved, constructed, built and moved without 20,000 people. He said they had plenty of food. They weren't starving like when the Dutch showed up. They even offered the Dutch food and said, I would like your hats, not like, oh my God, I'm starving. You've got to help us. Yeah, give me food.

So there's a lot of evidence there that they were doing just fine, basically. Right. The thing was is that, I mean, there was evidence that some sort of collapse had happened. It's just the idea that there was a population collapse is, like you said, based on Rogovine's idea that there must have been more people before, right? Pretty much everyone agrees that there was an ecological collapse, that there used to be way more trees and that this huge loss of trees led to a loss of cropland of arable soil.

But exactly how that happened is what's really an issue and it's a really big distinction because the Jared Diamond camp says that the Rapa Nui went crazy and buck wild, building their idols to their gods and chopped down all the trees and shot themselves in the feet, right? Yes. And newer interpretation led by people like Mulroney and Hunt and Lipo say, we think it was rats, actually. Yes.

Here's the idea. These rats stow away on the canoes. They can reproduce at what they say in this article, a furious rate. Polynesian rat population can double in 47 days in a lab setting. There are no predators on the island, plenty of food, these tree roots. So if they multiplied, they said that there could have been as many as 2-3 million rats on this island. Right.

And you hit it on the head. They eat trees, they eat little tree shoots, they eat tree seeds, so they keep trees that have been cut down from being replaced. That's right. So the rats are eating all this. There's also evidence that they were potentially eating these rats as a food source. So it all is kind of lining up that it was not necessarily a mystery of population decimation but they call it a success story that these people learn to adapt to their new environment,

do things like eat rats and kind of maintain a stable population. Right. And then somewhere along the way, as a result of that bird man cult taking over power, somebody figured out that if you take volcanic rock and just basically sprinkle it, like pretty decent sized chunks of it but just spread it out over former cropland, when the wind blows from the sea, it's going to blow through these rocks and it actually knocks some of the minerals out of the rocks and into the soil and it does just enough to make the soil nutrient rich again so that they could start growing crops once more, right?

So these people had some real ingenious adaptations, like the rats allegedly ostensibly came and kept the trees from growing back, which denuded the island. So they started eating the rats because they couldn't fish anymore because they didn't have trees to build the canoes. So they ate the rats, they figured out how to make the soil arable again, very smart so they could grow crops. So the normal 2,000, 3,000 person sized population learned to sustain themselves even in the face of this ecological crisis.

Right. So it's a success. Well, yeah, that's the new interpretation of it. I like it. Another couple of things that kind of lend to this theory is that, remember earlier we're talking about the maata, these spearheads supposedly that they used when they turned on each other and delved into civil war. They took a closer look at these, these researchers, and they said, you know what, if these are

all supposed to be spearheads, they should probably all look about the same. And these things that we're finding don't look the same, they're all kinds of shapes. They're not sharp, they're actually kind of dulled and wouldn't be very good for stabbing. And what we think these are, are tools for scraping, like rakes and hose and things that were left behind, and they weren't meant to be spearheads at all. Yeah. So this great evidence that there was an enormous amount of war turns out to be farm tools in this new interpretation.

Yeah, and then finally, when the Europeans arrived, there was a population decline and they say it's due to maybe STDs, smallpox, or yeah, the plague smallpox and STDs. Right. Because again, yeah, when Rogavine showed up, 3,000 people, and the 1880s, down to like 100, 110. Yeah, so it's really important to remember that all this new stuff that refused diamond and that the idea, the interpretation that he threw his weight behind, this is all interpretation as well.

Absolutely. It's a new interpretation of very old facts, but it swings the other way. It doesn't say these people created what diamond called ecocide, you know, where like they killed their ecosystem, they killed their environment and they suffered as a result. They say, no, they had, they were dealt a bad hand with these rats that came aboard and spread and prevented trees, very important trees from growing and they persevered. They persevered. It's not a story of collapse, it's a story of continuity.

My favorite interpretation is Robert Krollwich's from NPR from Radio Lab. And he kind of took a look at these new findings and said, I guess I see what you're saying that this is a success story, but is it really like learning to make do? He's like, if you do want to take the Rapa Nui story and apply it to modern day ecology, which is what everyone tries to do, he's like, this is really scary because it suggests that we'll keep going along in the face of like climate change getting worse and worse, but we'll get used to it more and more and we'll make do. We'll just keep limping along rather than doing something about it, taking the bull

by the horns and moving forward to progress rather than just muddling along. That's a good point. Oh, Krollwich is full of good points. Yeah, those Radio Lab guys, they've been doing it right for years. Yeah. Still haven't met those dudes, have you? No, never have. I think our friends from Stuff Below Your Mind have, yeah, we haven't.

No, I mean, kind of one of the neat things about the podcaster community is that you end up meeting a lot of these people and becoming pals. Not them though. No, I've never, like, I don't think they've ever been at anything we've done. It's not that they've avoided us or have they. I think they have, but kind of anonymously and booed. Oh, come on. Booed.

That's what Krollwich sounds like. No, it would be very much more well produced than that. Right. Sound effects. Music. That's pretty good. If you want to know more about Rapa Nui, type those words into the search bar at HouseTofWorks.com, read that, and then go do more research on the web to get the full story.

Yeah, come up with your own theory. Sure. It's the fun thing to do. Send it in. Yeah. I said search bar in there somewhere, so it's time for Listener Mail. Yeah, the very special Listener Mail that I promised, because if you remember, many years ago, we did a special two-part episode on our travels through Guatemala with you,

and me, and Jerry. And some Ronzacapa. Yeah, we all went down there on special limitation from our friends at the Cooperative for Education Coed out of Cincinnati. And we used to talk about them a lot because of the great work they do with their schoolbook program. Right. And, I mean, they've just done some like their life's work, you know, helping out the

children of Guatemala. Yeah. It's amazing. It's just so sustainable. Well, they got a new one. We haven't talked about it in a while, so we heard from Ann Dempsey, our pal down there. Oh, right. And this all came about because Ann was a fan and Listener.

Yeah. And she still listens, huh? Yeah, she says she does. Well, I believe her. Yeah. So here it goes. They have a new program going called Thousand Girls Initiative, and it's very cool. What they're doing is they're ramping up efforts to keep 1000 girls in Guatemala from

dropping out of school by 2020. As we learned when we went over there, keeping these kids in school is a real challenge because parents are often like, no, you know, you're 10, now you need to stay home and work because we need that. Yeah. So keeping these, especially young girls educated is a really valuable thing. So they've made it their mission to keep 1000 girls from dropping out by 2020. It's one of the best investments you can make in the developing world is education.

It takes 12 years of education to break the cycle of poverty in Guatemala, 12 years. At a poor rural Guatemalan, which we met plenty of down there, they have a 1 in 20 chance of reaching that milestone. So you know, they have an uphill challenge ahead of them. Yeah. So what they're doing now, they have, you can sponsor them. You can be a sponsor and pledge to keep a girl from dropping out of school $70 a month or if you want to do $35 a month, they will actually match your donation with another

sponsor to make sure that that one student is able to continue her education. Oh, that's smart. So either $35 or $70 a month, you can literally keep a girl in school. How do they do it, Chuck? Well, they go to, they have a very special link called 1000girlsinitiative.org and that's spelled out T-H-O-U-S-A-N-D, girlsinitiative.org and you can actually pick out the student you sponsor. Right.

It's one of the great things that co-ed does. They put a real face and a real person, send them $70 or $35 a month and like, it's a really great thing that you're doing. Yeah. So that's from Ann and that's from co-ed and they're still doing great work and we just think they're lovely people and we couldn't be more proud of their continued efforts. Yeah. Thanks a lot, guys.

Thanks a lot, Ann. Thanks for keeping us updated and if you want to go help them, what's that URL again, Chuck? 1000girlsinitiative.org. Nice. And in the meantime, if you want to get in touch with us, you can tweet to us at syskpodcast and joshumclark. You can hang out with Charles W. Chuck Bryant and stuff you should know both with their

own Facebook pages. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com and as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life.

Tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.