The Current - How the giant heads of Easter Island “walked”

Episode Date: November 28, 2025

We might be getting closer to understanding how those giant heads on Easter Island ended up there — and no, it’s not aliens! Instead they may have “walked” with the help of ropes. We speak with Carl Lipo, professor of anthropology at Binghamton University in New York, and Terry Hunt, professor of anthropology at the University of Arizona. They have been researching for an answer for more than two decades, and now published two studies with new information about how the moai of Easter Island were built and moved around

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This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. On a remote island in the Pacific Ocean, a frightening and mysterious massacre took place. A race of stone giants carved a thousand years ago, guard the shore in silence, as if unable to endure what they have witnessed. The clues to the mystery remain locked behind mute lips. There is no voice to tell who carved the giants And why hundreds of them were destroyed

In the Easter Island Massacre Great Leonard Nimoy from In Search of Ancient Marvels Like the Pyramids and Stonehenge have long Captivated People's imaginations How were they built? By whom? Why? One of these great mysteries Is on a remote volcanic island

Off the Coast of Chile, Easter Island, home to nearly a thousand massive stone figures known as Moai, and there have been many theories about who built them. Is it possible that celestial beings visited here thousands of years before? Ancient astronaut theorists believe these monolithic figures provide clues that the Rapa Nui ancestors may have actually been space travelers. Was it aliens? Could there be other reasons that these gargantuan statues were currently? created. Anthropologists believe they may have finally landed on the answer, and no,

space travelers are not involved. Carl Leipo is a professor of anthropology at Bigampton University in New York. Terry Hunt is a professor of anthropology at the University of Arizona. They've been researching this for more than two decades, visited Easter Island many times and have now published two studies with new information about how the MoI were built and moved around. Good morning to you both. Good morning. Carl, can you describe, I mean, Easter Island for a lot of people. is it exists as a fantastical place in the mind it's further than the middle of nowhere in some ways you have been what is it like when you are there amongst these figures it's it's an extraordinary experience you know you fly thousands of miles across the ocean and to this tiny speck of land

you get get out of the plane and across this landscape you find hundreds and hundreds of statues all sitting on massive platforms. And the statues are, you know, they range from a couple meters high to as high as 10 meters in height, just gargantuan figures that sort of boggle the mind. And certainly that's been the thing that's inspired Europeans and visitors for, you know, for centuries now and has led to us great mystery.

Terry, when you're there, what is it like to be amongst? How does it make you feel when you're in and amongst these figures? Small. The statues are huge. Huge. And truly mind-boggling. I mean, you stare up at these giants, seemingly immoable moai and really impressive. Seemingly immovable is kind of key, Terry. What do we know about the Rapa Nui, the people who built them? Well, the Rapa Nui people are Polynesians, and they settled the island about 800 years ago from other islands in eastern Polynesia. and they brought with them the the custom of anthropomorphic human-like figures that represent

ancestors or deified ancestors. And so that cultural tradition really took off on Rapa Nui. And so, Carl, what do we know about why these structures were built? I mean, most of them face inland, but what? There are seven of them that face the sunsets during the equinox. Why were they positioned where they were and why were they built in the first place? Well, as Terry mentioned, these are deified ancestors. They represent the people that have passed on and they're constructed and brought from

a quarry to the center of communities to look over the communities. They're really looking inland because that's where the people are and they're looking wisely over them and sort of guiding them into the future. The seven that are looking out to see is a bit of a misnomer. sense that really every in a small island every statue regardless where it is is ultimately looking at the ocean this this particular ahu where these statues are is inland looking out at the community they're just also looking out to the sea because it's on a hill but really they're centered really around the community because this is the focus of

community activity the investment that communities make in their ancestors so terry as you said seemingly immovable objects one of the big mysteries is how they were moved across the island. Some of them are 30 feet tall, as you said, they're enormous. They weigh 80 tons. What have you learned? You know, when we first went to Rapa Nui and started doing archaeological work there, Carl, and I said, we're not going to study how they're transported because we thought we might know the answer. But we kept making more and more observations about the form of the statues, about the way they were broken, the way they were found on the roads. And we started to understand

much better aspects of their transport. We also really were assigned, basically, to describe how the statues were moved for our book. And so we did that before we had done any experiments. And we concluded that the statues must have been moved into vertical position, given the evidence that we were seeing on the ground and in the statues themselves. And that evidence was what, Carl? Well, the statues, when we see them leading from the Corey out to the communities, When they're on roads, the many fallen statues that seem to have fallen or failed during the transport, when the hills are going, when it's going uphill, we find that they're on their backs. And when they're going downhill, they're on their face, which really kind of points to the fact that they must have been standing up in the position. We also see them broken in particular ways, you know, really this show that they were vertical before that happened.

But one of the most important observations we made is we saw shapes. statues had this forward lean that wouldn't allow them to stand up on their own, which is puzzling because if you're going to make a statue that ultimately you want to stand up, why would you carve it in such a way that it couldn't stand up during its transport? So all these things led us to really conclude that there must have been moved in a standing position. And so the standing position, Terry, is essentially that they were walked across the island. Is that right? Yes, all the features that Carl just described really are engineering. features that allow the moai to have a forward lean allows a forward motion with a rope in the

back ropes on both sides set up a pendulum effect and the moai actually steps so this this ingenious engineering um allows the statues to walk and um it really is walking um if you think about the physics of our own walking it's the same thing so like i'm holding a water bottle right now and i'm kind of like tipping it back and forth, but it's moving forward. And that's kind of like, I mean, in a much smaller and different way, the way that you're suggesting these things were moved across the island. Yes, indeed. And you tested this out. I have seen this video of you. You tested this out on Hawaii with, I mean, there are ropes around statues that kind of tied around, it almost looks like a headband around the top of the statues. And then they're, they're pulled by three

different groups. Is that right? That's right. And we tried the ropes in different positions, because we didn't know where the ropes would go. It turns out that where the ropes are placed up around the head and sort of right below the brow ridge of the moai is the only place that works. And there you have enough leverage to get the rocking into motion. The rope in the back, the people on the rope in the back, allow it to fall forward,

and that enables the moai to step. And it works very well. It's actually very efficient. and it's surprisingly easy actually when you're once once the moai gets rocking it's kind of kind of on its own in some ways how long would it have taken to move an 80 ton statue by walking it well not as long as as we might think because they could they could walk it quite a distance we were able to walk a moai about 40 about 100 meters and 40 minutes and you could extrapolate from that and and uh you could see that within a few days you could

move a moai um a pretty good distance carl what were you going to say i mean just in terms of how efficient this this technology was yeah it's it's amazingly efficient you know uh these things are carved in order to do this and you know we watched the video of all the stuff that comes before it we fumbled around and tried to you know all these different methods but once we locked it in And we really were, and Terry's mentioned this, but we used this analogy before that, you know, it's like we put the key in the car and the engine started and it moved on its own. I mean, it was really remarkable from something that we could not move at all. It couldn't shake it. We couldn't rock it.

Into something that was just alive. It was really shocking. What do you make of the other theories, Carl, that have been floated around this, that they were rolled across logs, that there were canoes that were used to transport the statues? I mean, the other one that we all dreamt of when we were kids is that it was alien. that did this, but we'll dismiss the aliens for a moment, but that there were other ways that these enormous statues were moved. Is there any, what do you just make of those theories? Well, you know, people have, you know,

propose these plausible ideas, mostly from the ideas like, well, if I was going to move it, how would I do it? And, you know, put forward the idea, like, well, it must be some kind of contraption. It's a sled or it's log rollers. And then they show that you could do it. But, you know, they're all plausible. to some degree, but they're not linked to the evidence that the archaeological record.

The difference, you know, we try to emphasize is we surely started from the archaeological record to say, what must have happened in order for these features to have been there? What must have happened to have broken this way and to be shaped this way? You know, we were trying to figure it out from trying to explain what we're seeing.

Those other methods, you know, that's possible, they ignore a lot of details. For example, log rollers seem plausible, But, of course, the trees that they're trying to roll, they would have had to roll it across are palm logs, which are really just giant stalks of grass. They're very mushy and really wouldn't be capable. But, you know, the idea is like, yeah, sure, it could be that way. But really, we'd say, like, what must have happened? And I think that's the difference.

There's an anthropologist in New Zealand who wrote, in light of your research. It has exposed the public parable of Easter Island and turned it on its head to demonstrate that the people of Rappanui are resourceful and inventive, one of the most unlivable places on earth habitable for centuries and creating some of the world's most recognizable monuments. When you take a listen to that, Carl, what does that say about why your work matters? Well, that's one of the thing that's the most rewarding to us is that, you know, as we've done this research, it started out with the story that people got there and, you know, used up the resources there and led to their destruction. And as we've done, you know, as we've done our work and looked at the details, we've learned, in fact, these people were ingenious. I mean, the success they had with the Moai is just one piece of a big puzzle about how they were able to engineer their society to be resilient on this teeny tiny island that's remote with no other options. It's really a remarkable place to learn from, and it's really the ingenuity of the people that live there.

It's kind of amazing, Terry, to think. I mean, again, this is one of those mysteries when we were kids we would read about it in Ripley's, believe it or not books. Do you know what I mean? How did the statues of Easter Island get there? And you've gotten closer to figuring that out. we have and as carl said there are many lessons to learn from rapa noi it's it's an incredible place and uh i think largely misunderstood unfortunately but uh that's why research matters and that's why uh evidence matters it's fascinating to hear about your research and the work

that you've done and just jealous that you've been there uh so many times to see these uh these items firsthand thank you very much for being here thank you car lepo is a professor of anthropology at bigum University in New York, Terry Hunt, a professor of anthropology at the University of Arizona. This has been the current podcast. You can hear our show Monday to Friday on CBC Radio 1 at 8.30 a.m. at all time zones. You can also listen online at cbc.ca.ca slash the current or on the CBC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca.com. podcasts.