Ancient DNA Disproves Fall of Easter Island Civilization

Analysis suggests that the inhabitants of the island, located about 3,700 km from mainland South America, arrived in the Americas in the 1300s - long before Christopher Columbus discovered the New World in 1492.

The first people to set foot on Rapa Nui were Polynesian settlers, sometime between 800 and 1200 AD. Rapa Nui is famous for the large stone statues that dot its hills and plains for so long. Today, the island is uninhabited, with the nearest inhabitants only 2,000 km away and 3,500 km off the coast of Chile.

Rapa Nui Easter Island is famous for its 887 stone statues, called moai, located at the southernmost point of the Polynesian Triangle in the South Pacific Ocean. Photo: Sipa USA

Geographer Jared Diamond in his 2005 book "Collapse" used Easter Island as a cautionary tale about how resource exploitation can lead to internal strife, catastrophic population decline, and the destruction of ecosystems and civilizations.

But that remains controversial, other archaeological evidence suggests Rapa Nui was home to a small but resilient society.

The new analysis marks the first time scientists have used ancient DNA to answer the question of whether Easter Island ever experienced a social collapse, helping to shed light on its mysterious past.

Easter Island Genome

To delve deeper into Rapa Nui’s history, researchers sequenced the genomes of 15 people who lived on the island for the past 400 years. These remains are housed at the Musée de l’Homme Man in Paris, part of the French National Museum of Natural History.

According to the study published Wednesday in the scientific journal Nature, researchers found no evidence of a population “bottleneck” or a sharp decline in population.

Instead, the island was home to a small population that steadily grew in size until the 1860s, according to the analysis. At that point, the study notes, raiders had already taken a third of the population and displaced them from the island.

Rapa Nui, now part of Chile, has long been a source of inspiration. A carving of the giant statues at the Rano Raraku crater. (Photo: Getty Images)

"There was definitely no collapse that killed 80-90% of the population as has been argued," said study co-author J. Víctor Moreno-Mayar, associate professor of genetics at the University of Copenhagen's Earth Institute in Denmark.

The genome also revealed that Easter Islanders had exchanged genes with a group of Native Americans, suggesting that the inhabitants crossed the ocean to South America sometime between 1250 and 1430, before Columbus reached the Americas, and before Europeans arrived on Rapa Nui in 1722.

Polynesian people

Ancient genomes increasingly demonstrate that the Easter Island population collapse theory is a false narrative, according to Matisoo-Smith.

"We know that the Polynesians who discovered Rapa Nui and settled here at least 800 years ago were some of the world's greatest navigators and explorers," she said in a statement shared by New Zealand's Science Media Centre.

"Their ancestors lived at least 3,000 years in the ocean. They crossed thousands of kilometers of ocean and found most of the habitable islands across the vast Pacific. It would be more surprising if they did not find the coast of South America."

Matisoo-Smith says scholars in the Pacific have questioned ecological genocide and social collapse based on a range of archaeological evidence.

“But finally, we have ancient DNA that answers these two questions and will probably allow us to tell a more realistic story about the history of this island,” she said.

Additionally, a study based on satellite imagery of land once used for farming, published in June, came to a similar conclusion.

Ha Trang (according to CNN)

Source: https://www.congluan.vn/dna-co-dai-bac-bo-ve-su-sup-do-cua-nen-van-minh-dao-phuc-sinh-post312434.html