10 ms·

Easter Island heads have bodies

186 points by timf 15y ago

jamesladd 15y ago
Anyone else wondering why it took so long to look below the surface?
- AdamTReineke 15y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moai http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moai http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ahu_Tongariki.jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ahu_Tongariki.jpg The article has an image of excavated ones that have short bodies. Seems like this one was unusually tall.
  - dalke 15y ago
    Relevant quote from that WP link: "Though moai are whole-body statues, they are commonly referred to as "Easter Island heads". This is partly because of the disproportionate size of most moai heads and partly because, from the invention of photography until the 1950s, the only moai standing on the island were the statues on the slopes of Rano Raraku, many of which are buried to their shoulders. Some of the "heads" at Rano Raraku have been excavated and their bodies seen, and observed to have markings that had been protected from erosion by their burial."
ComputerGuru 15y ago
This blew my mind. I don't know why, I find it incredibly eye-opening that the first thought that one might think of on seeing a head in the dirt (that there's the rest of it underneath) has just simply never occurred to generations of people because we were "told" by someone that they're just heads. How powerful words can be in casting an illusion, in defeating creativity, and hiding the truth!
- lisper 15y ago
  A Google Images search for "Easter Island" reveals many heads with above-ground bodies, and a few heads buried up to their noses. That some of the bodies are buried up to the neck should come as no surprise to anyone.
  - electromagnetic 15y ago
    What I wonder is, were these buried statues left like that by the islanders. I mean to get the hat on the statue, the statue has to both be stable and you have to access the head. So was the easy method of doing this burying the statue? If so how fast did the islanders die off that they couldn't dig out the statues back to their intended state. What's scary is what these peoples last days must have been like if they abandoned so many of these before completion.
    - phpnode 15y ago
      I seriously doubt the easiest way to get the hat on is by digging a massive hole, burying the statue, using the ground around it as a ramp, maneuvering the head into position and then somehow either raising the statue in position or digging out the ground around the hole so that it no longer looks like a hole. I think it's more likely the statues were laid flat, their hats attached and then raised with ropes and blocks of wood and a lot of man power. Who knows why they were buried, perhaps their religions and customs changed over time and they buried certain heads as a mark of denigration or respect.
      - lisper 15y ago
        My bet would be natural silting and settlement. Easter Island was deforested at some point in its history. New groundwater patterns and a few hundred years could easily sink a few stone statues up to their eyebrows.
- mushishi 15y ago
  Without knowing about the subject, I am curious to know, do you seriously think that [it] "has just simply never occurred to generations of people"...? A lack of physical investigation is not enough to conclude such a thing.
  - ComputerGuru 15y ago
    Typically, excavation of ancient peoples' objects has been a very high-priority thing for most people - there's generally a lot of pressure to uncover these artifacts and get a "better understanding" as its usually while in reality being just a big curiosity and a huge source of entertainment. Just look at the billion dollar business in ancient Egyptian artifacts and momenta, and the attention that new finds in the Nile bring.... and before you say that's not necessarily comparable - look at the at least millions of dollars tourist budget the Easter Island heads have generated each year. People just LOVE to talk/gossip/guess/BS about past civilizations, and I'd seriously imagine the only reason no one has bothered to dig up a head is simply because no one believed there was anything more to it than a head. Then there's the fact that we very much call them "heads" - doesn't that speak volumes for the fact that we don't think they have bodies? I also believe there are a number of theories floating around about why the ancients only made heads and not whole bodies (which is absolutely laughable right now).
- eps 15y ago
  Thor Heyerdahl expeditions in mid 50s is what brought Easter Island and its figures to everyone's attention. These were truly captivating adventures, very intriguing and original, and as such they were widely publicized. As a part of the research his team carved, transported and installed a replica figure using only rudimentary tools. And this figure was - wait for it - a head. I would guess that this could've been just the thing that cemented the idea of figures being heads in public's minds, including those of future Easter Island researchers. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Heyerdahl http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Heyerdahl
josscrowcroft 15y ago
That is phenomenal. Raises the question: did whoever built them bury them, or were they buried by natural forces?
- Osiris 15y ago
  I was thinking the same thing. Perhaps originally they weren't buried. Are they designed in such as way as they could have stood upright by themselves? I would guess that the people doing this work would be able to determine the dirt they were digging into was newer or older than the rock itself.
  - redwood 15y ago
    Perhaps they couldn't turn these massive pieces of rock upright without the aid of gravity
- morganpyne 15y ago
  It's been ages since I read it, but I think that Jared Diamond's book 'Collapse' explains a bit about the island and the statues construction (his main focus is on the self-destructive cycles of behavior of the population however). Also, I thought this was old news? I'm sure I have seen that photo quite a while ago.
alexwolfe 15y ago
This is one of the most amazing discoveries I have seen recently. The sheer weight of that stone is absolutely insane. I'm still a little stunned this was just discovered. I would love to know what the people who made this were thinking. To create a work of art that detailed and massive just to bury 75% of it seems very odd. I'm sure there was a good reason to do it (in their minds at least), I'd love to know what that was.
- Anti-Ratfish 15y ago
  Making stuff and burying it is very common in archeology according to my (limited) knowledge. Chucking stuff as offerings into springs, holes etc as offerings. Burin it with dead people (anyone under that stone is now 2 dimensional). But I do agree that this seems odd - half burying...
  - redwood 15y ago
    Allows you to prop it up
  - gedejong 15y ago
    Guess it could be a case of bad foundation, causing it to slowly sink into the ground over many years. Judging the type of ground of the excavation site at the photo, it seems to contain a rather high amount of clay, which is a terrible foundation.
  - Daniel_Newby 15y ago
    > Making stuff and burying it is very common in archeology ... Göbekli Tepe in Turkey is an interesting example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe
- suivix 15y ago
  Maybe them just knowing the art is there is good enough. Like painters who paint the back sides of fences[1], or watchmakers who make intricate engravings on the internal parts, because 'God can see it'[2]. [1] http://www.myfoxphoenix.com/dpp/news/sci_tech/biographer-reveals-the-genesis-of-steve-jobs-perfectionism-10-24-2011 http://www.myfoxphoenix.com/dpp/news/sci_tech/biographer-rev... [2] http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_seymour_how_beauty_feels.html http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_seymour_how_beauty_feels.ht...
lurch00 15y ago
This still a tech news aggregator? This is something that should be on reddit, not hacker news...?
- suivix 15y ago
  Gaddafi's death was a frontage story here. This isn't really a tech news aggregator anymore, it's an everything place.
- dfc 15y ago
  Read the FAQ and tell me how a story about art/discovery/paradigm-shifting is OT... tl;dr hn is not a technews aggregator.
  - lurch00 15y ago
    http://www.eisp.org/ http://www.eisp.org/ has way more information on the topic than the linked blog. I don't think it's off topic, I just think it's a poor article which has no real substance (hence the reddit comparison). Eh. I guess I'll just stick to HN classic.
    - nickolai 15y ago
      >Eh. I guess I'll just stick to HN classic. it's #2 there now (http://news.ycombinator.com/classic http://news.ycombinator.com/classic)
    - dfc 15y ago
      Is hn:classic how you started reading HN?
  - tripzilch 15y ago
    > Read the FAQ and tell me how a story about art/discovery/paradigm-shifting is OT... Art, okay. But how is this paradigm shifting? We already knew they have bodies below surface for at least a couple of decades. And a good deal of the statues are well above ground with their bodies. They're just called "Easter Island Heads" because their heads are often disproportionally large to their bodies. PARADIGM SHIFT! If that's a paradigm shift to you, here, have some more! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions Though, I do notice that "Easter Island Heads are in fact not merely heads" is not among them. Maybe I should edit that, given the popularity of this story among what are supposed to be a community of knowledgeable and intelligent people :) Finally, you say it's a story about "discovery". The posted article doesn't really mention anything about a discovery. The original article kind of does: http://www.eisp.org/3879/ http://www.eisp.org/3879/ Has the same pictures, nearly the same text, maybe it's a bit TL;DR for this crowd given that you even had to summarize your one-sentence post: > tl;dr hn is not a technews aggregator. In which case, congratulations to anybody who read this far.
rafedb 15y ago
ancient aliens!
- ibisum 15y ago
  Read the book "Behold!! The Protong!" and you'll get an even more intriguing explanation. These statues are a WARNING TO THE FUTURE that the great CATACLYSM, which comes in cycles, will HAPPEN AGAIN. Below the ground-line (which represents the flood survivors emerging from the murk) these statues are holding the "Bi" - an iconic feature representative of the grand CATACLYSM where the balance of water is tipped, and which you can find in almost all ancient artwork, regardless of the culture that creates it - an ocean-covering flood which occurs when the land masses move in reaction to Solar activity. Easter Island is a WARNING set up by an ancient civilization to protect us from ignorance. Let us never learn the extent to which SZUKALSKI was RIGHT!
  - lukifer 15y ago
    Setting aside the outlandish CONJECTURE which is the CONTENT of your post, the arbitrary SHOUTING does not aid your CREDIBILITY.
    - ibisum 15y ago
      I would have thought quoting SZUKALSKI alone would have set that off, but okay .. not that I'm a huge fan of Zermatism (a subject I would have thought at least a few hackernews visitors might be familiar with) but the ideas of SZUKALSKI are intriguing from the perspective of being able to look outside the box. There is scientific analytical thought, and then there is artistic motive desire, and if you apply both to the same subject you often get surprising results. In my opinion, the idea of Protong-as-a-warning has quite a bit of validity, if only intelligent minds weren't so easily dissuaded from looking outside their own little boxes now and then ...
      - dalke 15y ago
        "if you apply both to the same subject" Where's the scientific thought? If the world was covered with an ocean any time soon (call it the last million years so we can include every human culture) then there would be obvious physical traces, and salt-intolerant species, including plants, would have died.
dfc 15y ago
Does anyone else have flashbacks of super mario brothers on gameboy when they see the statues?
GeneTraylor 15y ago
Whenever I see an easter island head, I can't help but draw parallels between our global civilization and theirs. The eastern islanders consisted of around a dozen tribes, each competing for resources with others. It's thought that all of these statues were put up in a race by chieftains, competing with one another to put up the biggest, most refined and the best statue. I wouldn't be surprised if they competed in their standards of life too. ("I eat X for breakfast, lunch and dinner!") I certainly wouldn't be surprised by the fact that they might have had political factions, special interests and a life rife with complicated political maneuvering. (it was certainly in the short term interests of statue makers to be against conservation and egg chieftains on) After all we're the same species and they were just like us. However what they failed to realize was the inescapable fact that they were living on a small piece of land in the middle of a vast ocean. Their seemingly inexhaustible resources were pitiful by any standards. As time wore on and their population boomed, a point came when all of these factors came together. Their squandering of resources combined with their unsustainable way of life for a large population faced off with their limited resources, and the result was ugly. Their entire civilization collapsed. Most of the population was lost to famine. Their civilization descended to cannibalism to survive. This degraded civilization became the perfect breeding ground for disease and even more people died. This cycle went on and on until their entire civilization was wiped out and the entire population nearly eradicated. I shudder to think what it must have been like to live in this world. It must have been a nightmare. Today like the eastern islanders with their statues, we keep on building taller and taller structures, better and more lethal weapons, and crazier systems. We compete with one another for status symbols at personal, regional and national levels. Today we are just as isolated on this tiny blue ball, with a finite amount of resources, a booming population, combined with special interests and huge egos. Like the eastern islanders we have nowhere to go...
- gbog 15y ago
  Ok, nice prose of your, but the tiny blue ball thing is bullshit. Any plane on window seat will show you that the Earth is enormous and empty for most it's parts, even in China. Don't think I advocate more cars and buildings. It's just that the tiny crowded ball argument is wrong, and dangerous, as it can be used to build a nasty antihumanism.
gregschlom 15y ago
Like everybody, I've heard of the heads at Easter Island since childhood and yet I never had a clue of where on Earth Easter Island migh be. So here's a Google Maps link for geography-impaired folks like me: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Easter+Island,+Isla+de+Pascua,+Chile&hl=en&ll=-12.897489,-65.742187&spn=114.078688,227.988281&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=55.543096,113.994141&vpsrc=6&hnear=Easter+Island&t=m&z=3 http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Easter+Island,+Isla+de+Pascua,... Answer: between Chile and Australia, closer to Chile.
tripzilch 15y ago
Of course they have bodies! How is this news to anyone? A good part of these statues are well above ground including their bodies, and we've known the sunken ones have bodies below the ground for several decades already. They've been excavating these statues for quite a while already. Here, go read the Wikipedia article on Moai, it's way more interesting than this article (which is just a copy of the first few paragraphs of http://www.eisp.org/3879/ http://www.eisp.org/3879/ with the commentary "wild stuff" added): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moai http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moai Now excuse me while I go submit an article about the Great Pyramids having five sides. Yes mind=blown, I know.
- trolleycar 15y ago
  OK Mr. Know-It-All Troll. Who cares if you already know this?
- copper 15y ago
  I think the fact that they're referred to as Easter Island heads, rather than statues might have had something to do with it :) More seriously, the iconic pictures of the heads are from Rano Raraku (IIRC), and that is just heads and a bit of neck sticking out of the ground, isn't it?
  - gus_massa 15y ago
    According to Google Image Seach :) more than a half has body, and some have a hat http://www.google.com.ar/search?hl=en&q=moai&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=9765l10312l0l10656l4l4l0l0l0l0l391l719l3-2l2l0&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.,cf.osb&biw=1024&bih=625&wrapid=tlif131998176684310&um=1&ie=UTF-8&tbm=isch&source=og&sa=N&tab=wi http://www.google.com.ar/search?hl=en&q=moai&gs_sm=e... (IIRC, all most of them had had a hut, but in most of them the hat had fallen an been lost.)
    - copper 15y ago
      Well, I believe this particular head is the one I've seen most commonly in books[1], and that was quite a long time ago (I wish I could remember if the original Aku-Aku book had pictures.) [1] http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/Moai_Heads.png http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/Moai_Heads.png

186 points by timf 15y ago

jamesladd 15y ago

Anyone else wondering why it took so long to look below the surface?

AdamTReineke 15y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moai http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moai http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ahu_Tongariki.jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ahu_Tongariki.jpg The article has an image of excavated ones that have short bodies. Seems like this one was unusually tall.
- dalke 15y ago
  Relevant quote from that WP link: "Though moai are whole-body statues, they are commonly referred to as "Easter Island heads". This is partly because of the disproportionate size of most moai heads and partly because, from the invention of photography until the 1950s, the only moai standing on the island were the statues on the slopes of Rano Raraku, many of which are buried to their shoulders. Some of the "heads" at Rano Raraku have been excavated and their bodies seen, and observed to have markings that had been protected from erosion by their burial."

ComputerGuru 15y ago

This blew my mind. I don't know why, I find it incredibly eye-opening that the first thought that one might think of on seeing a head in the dirt (that there's the rest of it underneath) has just simply never occurred to generations of people because we were "told" by someone that they're just heads. How powerful words can be in casting an illusion, in defeating creativity, and hiding the truth!

lisper 15y ago
A Google Images search for "Easter Island" reveals many heads with above-ground bodies, and a few heads buried up to their noses. That some of the bodies are buried up to the neck should come as no surprise to anyone.
- electromagnetic 15y ago
  What I wonder is, were these buried statues left like that by the islanders. I mean to get the hat on the statue, the statue has to both be stable and you have to access the head. So was the easy method of doing this burying the statue? If so how fast did the islanders die off that they couldn't dig out the statues back to their intended state. What's scary is what these peoples last days must have been like if they abandoned so many of these before completion.
  - phpnode 15y ago
    I seriously doubt the easiest way to get the hat on is by digging a massive hole, burying the statue, using the ground around it as a ramp, maneuvering the head into position and then somehow either raising the statue in position or digging out the ground around the hole so that it no longer looks like a hole. I think it's more likely the statues were laid flat, their hats attached and then raised with ropes and blocks of wood and a lot of man power. Who knows why they were buried, perhaps their religions and customs changed over time and they buried certain heads as a mark of denigration or respect.
    - lisper 15y ago
      My bet would be natural silting and settlement. Easter Island was deforested at some point in its history. New groundwater patterns and a few hundred years could easily sink a few stone statues up to their eyebrows.
mushishi 15y ago
Without knowing about the subject, I am curious to know, do you seriously think that [it] "has just simply never occurred to generations of people"...? A lack of physical investigation is not enough to conclude such a thing.
- ComputerGuru 15y ago
  Typically, excavation of ancient peoples' objects has been a very high-priority thing for most people - there's generally a lot of pressure to uncover these artifacts and get a "better understanding" as its usually while in reality being just a big curiosity and a huge source of entertainment. Just look at the billion dollar business in ancient Egyptian artifacts and momenta, and the attention that new finds in the Nile bring.... and before you say that's not necessarily comparable - look at the at least millions of dollars tourist budget the Easter Island heads have generated each year. People just LOVE to talk/gossip/guess/BS about past civilizations, and I'd seriously imagine the only reason no one has bothered to dig up a head is simply because no one believed there was anything more to it than a head. Then there's the fact that we very much call them "heads" - doesn't that speak volumes for the fact that we don't think they have bodies? I also believe there are a number of theories floating around about why the ancients only made heads and not whole bodies (which is absolutely laughable right now).
eps 15y ago
Thor Heyerdahl expeditions in mid 50s is what brought Easter Island and its figures to everyone's attention. These were truly captivating adventures, very intriguing and original, and as such they were widely publicized. As a part of the research his team carved, transported and installed a replica figure using only rudimentary tools. And this figure was - wait for it - a head. I would guess that this could've been just the thing that cemented the idea of figures being heads in public's minds, including those of future Easter Island researchers. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Heyerdahl http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Heyerdahl

josscrowcroft 15y ago

That is phenomenal. Raises the question: did whoever built them bury them, or were they buried by natural forces?

Osiris 15y ago
I was thinking the same thing. Perhaps originally they weren't buried. Are they designed in such as way as they could have stood upright by themselves? I would guess that the people doing this work would be able to determine the dirt they were digging into was newer or older than the rock itself.
- redwood 15y ago
  Perhaps they couldn't turn these massive pieces of rock upright without the aid of gravity
morganpyne 15y ago
It's been ages since I read it, but I think that Jared Diamond's book 'Collapse' explains a bit about the island and the statues construction (his main focus is on the self-destructive cycles of behavior of the population however). Also, I thought this was old news? I'm sure I have seen that photo quite a while ago.

alexwolfe 15y ago

This is one of the most amazing discoveries I have seen recently. The sheer weight of that stone is absolutely insane. I'm still a little stunned this was just discovered. I would love to know what the people who made this were thinking. To create a work of art that detailed and massive just to bury 75% of it seems very odd. I'm sure there was a good reason to do it (in their minds at least), I'd love to know what that was.

Anti-Ratfish 15y ago
Making stuff and burying it is very common in archeology according to my (limited) knowledge. Chucking stuff as offerings into springs, holes etc as offerings. Burin it with dead people (anyone under that stone is now 2 dimensional). But I do agree that this seems odd - half burying...
- redwood 15y ago
  Allows you to prop it up
- gedejong 15y ago
  Guess it could be a case of bad foundation, causing it to slowly sink into the ground over many years. Judging the type of ground of the excavation site at the photo, it seems to contain a rather high amount of clay, which is a terrible foundation.
- Daniel_Newby 15y ago
  > Making stuff and burying it is very common in archeology ... Göbekli Tepe in Turkey is an interesting example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe
suivix 15y ago
Maybe them just knowing the art is there is good enough. Like painters who paint the back sides of fences[1], or watchmakers who make intricate engravings on the internal parts, because 'God can see it'[2]. [1] http://www.myfoxphoenix.com/dpp/news/sci_tech/biographer-reveals-the-genesis-of-steve-jobs-perfectionism-10-24-2011 http://www.myfoxphoenix.com/dpp/news/sci_tech/biographer-rev... [2] http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_seymour_how_beauty_feels.html http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_seymour_how_beauty_feels.ht...

lurch00 15y ago

This still a tech news aggregator? This is something that should be on reddit, not hacker news...?

suivix 15y ago
Gaddafi's death was a frontage story here. This isn't really a tech news aggregator anymore, it's an everything place.
dfc 15y ago
Read the FAQ and tell me how a story about art/discovery/paradigm-shifting is OT... tl;dr hn is not a technews aggregator.
- lurch00 15y ago
  http://www.eisp.org/ http://www.eisp.org/ has way more information on the topic than the linked blog. I don't think it's off topic, I just think it's a poor article which has no real substance (hence the reddit comparison). Eh. I guess I'll just stick to HN classic.
  - nickolai 15y ago
    >Eh. I guess I'll just stick to HN classic. it's #2 there now (http://news.ycombinator.com/classic http://news.ycombinator.com/classic)
  - dfc 15y ago
    Is hn:classic how you started reading HN?
- tripzilch 15y ago
  > Read the FAQ and tell me how a story about art/discovery/paradigm-shifting is OT... Art, okay. But how is this paradigm shifting? We already knew they have bodies below surface for at least a couple of decades. And a good deal of the statues are well above ground with their bodies. They're just called "Easter Island Heads" because their heads are often disproportionally large to their bodies. PARADIGM SHIFT! If that's a paradigm shift to you, here, have some more! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions Though, I do notice that "Easter Island Heads are in fact not merely heads" is not among them. Maybe I should edit that, given the popularity of this story among what are supposed to be a community of knowledgeable and intelligent people :) Finally, you say it's a story about "discovery". The posted article doesn't really mention anything about a discovery. The original article kind of does: http://www.eisp.org/3879/ http://www.eisp.org/3879/ Has the same pictures, nearly the same text, maybe it's a bit TL;DR for this crowd given that you even had to summarize your one-sentence post: > tl;dr hn is not a technews aggregator. In which case, congratulations to anybody who read this far.

rafedb 15y ago

ancient aliens!

ibisum 15y ago
Read the book "Behold!! The Protong!" and you'll get an even more intriguing explanation. These statues are a WARNING TO THE FUTURE that the great CATACLYSM, which comes in cycles, will HAPPEN AGAIN. Below the ground-line (which represents the flood survivors emerging from the murk) these statues are holding the "Bi" - an iconic feature representative of the grand CATACLYSM where the balance of water is tipped, and which you can find in almost all ancient artwork, regardless of the culture that creates it - an ocean-covering flood which occurs when the land masses move in reaction to Solar activity. Easter Island is a WARNING set up by an ancient civilization to protect us from ignorance. Let us never learn the extent to which SZUKALSKI was RIGHT!
- lukifer 15y ago
  Setting aside the outlandish CONJECTURE which is the CONTENT of your post, the arbitrary SHOUTING does not aid your CREDIBILITY.
  - ibisum 15y ago
    I would have thought quoting SZUKALSKI alone would have set that off, but okay .. not that I'm a huge fan of Zermatism (a subject I would have thought at least a few hackernews visitors might be familiar with) but the ideas of SZUKALSKI are intriguing from the perspective of being able to look outside the box. There is scientific analytical thought, and then there is artistic motive desire, and if you apply both to the same subject you often get surprising results. In my opinion, the idea of Protong-as-a-warning has quite a bit of validity, if only intelligent minds weren't so easily dissuaded from looking outside their own little boxes now and then ...
    - dalke 15y ago
      "if you apply both to the same subject" Where's the scientific thought? If the world was covered with an ocean any time soon (call it the last million years so we can include every human culture) then there would be obvious physical traces, and salt-intolerant species, including plants, would have died.

dfc 15y ago

Does anyone else have flashbacks of super mario brothers on gameboy when they see the statues?

GeneTraylor 15y ago

Whenever I see an easter island head, I can't help but draw parallels between our global civilization and theirs. The eastern islanders consisted of around a dozen tribes, each competing for resources with others. It's thought that all of these statues were put up in a race by chieftains, competing with one another to put up the biggest, most refined and the best statue. I wouldn't be surprised if they competed in their standards of life too. ("I eat X for breakfast, lunch and dinner!") I certainly wouldn't be surprised by the fact that they might have had political factions, special interests and a life rife with complicated political maneuvering. (it was certainly in the short term interests of statue makers to be against conservation and egg chieftains on) After all we're the same species and they were just like us. However what they failed to realize was the inescapable fact that they were living on a small piece of land in the middle of a vast ocean. Their seemingly inexhaustible resources were pitiful by any standards. As time wore on and their population boomed, a point came when all of these factors came together. Their squandering of resources combined with their unsustainable way of life for a large population faced off with their limited resources, and the result was ugly. Their entire civilization collapsed. Most of the population was lost to famine. Their civilization descended to cannibalism to survive. This degraded civilization became the perfect breeding ground for disease and even more people died. This cycle went on and on until their entire civilization was wiped out and the entire population nearly eradicated. I shudder to think what it must have been like to live in this world. It must have been a nightmare. Today like the eastern islanders with their statues, we keep on building taller and taller structures, better and more lethal weapons, and crazier systems. We compete with one another for status symbols at personal, regional and national levels. Today we are just as isolated on this tiny blue ball, with a finite amount of resources, a booming population, combined with special interests and huge egos. Like the eastern islanders we have nowhere to go...

gbog 15y ago
Ok, nice prose of your, but the tiny blue ball thing is bullshit. Any plane on window seat will show you that the Earth is enormous and empty for most it's parts, even in China. Don't think I advocate more cars and buildings. It's just that the tiny crowded ball argument is wrong, and dangerous, as it can be used to build a nasty antihumanism.

gregschlom 15y ago

Like everybody, I've heard of the heads at Easter Island since childhood and yet I never had a clue of where on Earth Easter Island migh be. So here's a Google Maps link for geography-impaired folks like me: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Easter+Island,+Isla+de+Pascua,+Chile&hl=en&ll=-12.897489,-65.742187&spn=114.078688,227.988281&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=55.543096,113.994141&vpsrc=6&hnear=Easter+Island&t=m&z=3 http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Easter+Island,+Isla+de+Pascua,... Answer: between Chile and Australia, closer to Chile.

tripzilch 15y ago

Of course they have bodies! How is this news to anyone? A good part of these statues are well above ground including their bodies, and we've known the sunken ones have bodies below the ground for several decades already. They've been excavating these statues for quite a while already. Here, go read the Wikipedia article on Moai, it's way more interesting than this article (which is just a copy of the first few paragraphs of http://www.eisp.org/3879/ http://www.eisp.org/3879/ with the commentary "wild stuff" added): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moai http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moai Now excuse me while I go submit an article about the Great Pyramids having five sides. Yes mind=blown, I know.

trolleycar 15y ago
OK Mr. Know-It-All Troll. Who cares if you already know this?
copper 15y ago
I think the fact that they're referred to as Easter Island heads, rather than statues might have had something to do with it :) More seriously, the iconic pictures of the heads are from Rano Raraku (IIRC), and that is just heads and a bit of neck sticking out of the ground, isn't it?
- gus_massa 15y ago
  According to Google Image Seach :) more than a half has body, and some have a hat http://www.google.com.ar/search?hl=en&q=moai&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=9765l10312l0l10656l4l4l0l0l0l0l391l719l3-2l2l0&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.,cf.osb&biw=1024&bih=625&wrapid=tlif131998176684310&um=1&ie=UTF-8&tbm=isch&source=og&sa=N&tab=wi http://www.google.com.ar/search?hl=en&q=moai&gs_sm=e... (IIRC, all most of them had had a hut, but in most of them the hat had fallen an been lost.)
  - copper 15y ago
    Well, I believe this particular head is the one I've seen most commonly in books[1], and that was quite a long time ago (I wish I could remember if the original Aku-Aku book had pictures.) [1] http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/Moai_Heads.png http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/Moai_Heads.png