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Easter Island story

pipelineaudio said:
All thru Polynesia, micronesia, etc..., there were those guys, they HAD to keep going

No matter how nice the place they found, they STILL had to keep going
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There's a simple reason why "they still had to keep going": a tropical island can't support arbitrarily large populations.

The migration process went roughly like this:
  • A migration group arrives at an uninhabited island and settles in it.
  • Because the group is small, it is well below the carrying capacity and they can live in relative luxury.
  • Over several generations the population grows until at some point there is only just enough food for everybody.
  • At some point the islanders decide to send part of their population away. Or a portion of them decide to go as their own idea.
  • A migration group sets out towards unknown destination.
 
T'ai Chi said:
So is it:

1) religious craze led to making lots of stone statues led to using all the trees led to soil erosion led to extinction by ecocide

or

2) disease brought by outside populations, and rats, led to demise

or

3) next decades' story which will probably contradict both of these
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[A.J.Rimmer] ALIENS!!!! [/A.J.Rimmer]
 
Kopji said:
Also a good point.
I'll check on Pigs. I think they are an invasive species that would be introduced much later.
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Pigs are absolutely an invasive species, but so far as I know, one the islanders brought with them. From what I can tell through a quick googling, they were introduced to Hawaii, for example, in the fourth century AD, and my admittedly hazy memory is that in general, pigs arrived with humans on most of the islands. (Which makes sense, although it's entertaining to imagine a shifty-eyed pig stowing away on airplane landing gear ala tree snake.)

I don't doubt that Easter Island was deforested and the carrying capacity of the island dropped significantly, but I thought that was after the heads were gettin' built, so I don't know if we can neccessarily understand the origin of the head building in terms of scare food resources.
 
Deforestation was in progress while the figures were being sculpted. Deforestation was not only related to stone face building, but also to activites such as agriculture and cooking.

Regardless of their motivations, they were cutting trees at a rate faster than the recovery rate of the forest. And at a certain point, they no longer had trees to build canoes, so they no longer could catch fish far from the island's shore. And they could no longer eat fruits, the soils started to be washed away by rains, so crops started to fail...
 
I was thinking of this thread as I watched a show on The Discovery Channel this weekend called "What Really Killed the Dinosaurs?". It should be required watching for anyone who complains about how prevailing scientific hypotheses change over time. It went into several ideas that have cropped up about the extinction of the dinosaurs over the last few decades, what evidence there was to support each and how, as new evidence came to light that contradicted certain facts of the previous hypotheses, the 'story' of what happened to the dinosaurs was revised. Fascinating stuff in its own right and an extremely good look at how science deals with new facts that contradict well established theories.
 
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