Is Easter Island an example of environmental collapse? This idea has deep roots in our imagination, dating back to the 18th century, when the first Europeans arrived on this little patch of lost land in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, far away from it all, where they found giant statues, but only about 3,000. The inhabitants, not to mention those who seemed necessary to carve and move those huge stones with the faces of men. But, after all, the history of Rapa Nui can be an example of this SustainabilityHe defends a team of scientists who have been studying the island in recent years.
Carl LeBow’s team, from Binghamton University (New York, United States), published a study on Friday in the scientific journal Advancement of science It presents the results of mapping “stone gardens”, which was carried out using satellite images and artificial intelligence analysis. What they concluded was that previous estimates of the number of farming areas on Easter Island where swaying techniques (grinding stones to fertilize nutrient-poor soil with minerals such as nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium) were used were too high.
“What we are discovering, through archaeological research, is that 3,000 is probably the sustainable size of the island’s population, given the subsistence strategies they had,” Carl LeBow said at a press conference. Connected To talk about your team’s work.
Satellites and artificial intelligence
It is estimated that Easter Island, which has an area of just 164 square kilometers and is located 3,500 kilometers west of South America and 2,000 kilometers east of Pitcairn Island, its closest inhabited neighbour, which was colonized by Polynesians who lived there, arriving by canoe, could have had a number Its population is 17 thousand people. “The maximum population that rock garden infrastructure can support is about 3,900 people,” the scientists wrote in the article.
The accuracy of the detection method for these orchards is greater than 80%, using short-wave infrared spectrum images, and they are analyzed by “Machine learning“(A form of artificial intelligence),” the researchers say. “This suggests to us that we need to continue to make more measurements and more evaluations, but it is highly accurate enough to say that the estimates that were made were greatly overestimated.” And our results consistently show that the area devoted to these vegetable gardens on the island was much smaller,” said Carl Lebo.
“Shortwave infrared allowed us to analyze areas where rocks created moist soil, which could have been essential for organic productivity,” the scientist said. “Satellite images have allowed us to make an estimate of the rock gardens on the entire island, whereas a study done on the ground would have taken years, or decades, of traveling to each place to map them,” he said, illustrating how important technology is to supporting this archaeological research.
Lost trees
The idea that the Easter Islanders cut down all the trees and thus destroyed their island doesn’t have a lot of support, Lebo says. “There is a lot of fossil evidence, such as pollen, that indicates that there were many trees on the island, before humans arrived there, and that they were on the way to extinction. When the Europeans got there, there were plants, and we have reports of some Palm trees from one researcher says: “From the European perspective, the loss of trees was an environmental catastrophe.”
“But what we discovered is that the trees don’t seem to have been of much value to the survival of the community. You can’t make canoes out of palm trees,” he explained. Although it bears fruit, the Polynesians brought with them rats that ate these fruits. “In fact, trees have been barriers to the way people are able to produce food on land, which involves cutting down trees to grow sweet potatoes,” Lebo said. “So the loss of the forest probably marked the island going from something that couldn’t support a lot of people to something that made a population of about 3,000 people viable.” He confirms that the story is contrary to what the common narrative says.
When the Europeans arrived at Easter Island (on Easter Sunday 1722), they found it very depopulated. How could this handful of people, Rapa Nui, be enough to carve and transport to the place where there are thousands of giant statues, MoaiWhich can weigh up to 86 tons and ten meters high, and is carved into volcanic rock?
“The recklessness of the ancestors”
“In fact, to build these statues, the Europeans would have employed thousands and thousands of people to carve and move them, using an enormous amount of resources. So the story of environmental collapse begins with the first Europeans arriving there.” Leader [James] He cooks [explorador britânico]When he arrived there in 1770, he wrote that the island’s barren landscape, and the small population who lived there at the time, were due to what he called “the recklessness of the ancestors,” reports Karl LeBow. “In other words, the inhabitants of Easter Island would have They exhausted natural resources, leading to the collapse of the environment, population and society.
“It’s a very European point of view, the idea that there must have been a much larger population, and that something terrible would have happened before the Europeans arrived,” says the North American scientist. The theory became established and reached the pages of the books of Jared Diamond, the great scientist and science promoter, in his book Collapse – The rise and fall of human societies.
Carlos Barria – Reuters
“But this story is not true,” says Karl Lebo, stressing that what scientists have discovered, in the last two decades, is that “the people of Easter Island lived in a very sustainable way.”
Let’s understand, says Lebo: “The island was never an easy place to live, but the inhabitants managed to devise ways to survive, and remained within the limits of the island’s capacity until the Europeans arrived.” He argues that what early Westerners found, which appeared to them as a collapsing society, was in fact a highly sustainable population.
Naturally, after the arrival of Europeans, the population of Rapa Nui collapsed, due to the introduction of diseases to which the islanders had no immunity and because many of them enslaved the whalers who settled on the island and competed for resources. He summed up: “We see a decline, but because of the things that the Europeans bring with them.”
Carl LeBow’s team wants to change this entrenched idea of describing Rapa Nui as a case study of environmental collapse. “This story persists, and is used by ecologists to make models and develop policies over and over again, which we believe is completely false,” he warned.
“Easter Island is a great example of how people have been able to adapt when there are limited resources in a very small area, and how they have done so in a sustainable way. This does not seem like a good example of collapse that can be applied to other places or even to our future,” Carl LeBow said.
“Easter Island is full of surprises. I hope we can overcome this false narrative, because there are more interesting stories to tell, for example about how people managed to survive on that island and learn lessons to apply to our own lives.”
