Easter Island

From SkepticWiki

[edit] Definition

Easter Island is a real island in the South Pacific [1], most well-known for its enormous carved stone statues of human heads.

[edit] The Statues

There are over 800 statues on the island, called moai, each of which was monolithic (that is, carved from a single large piece of stone). Many of these statues weigh in excess of twenty tons. Folks like Erich von Däniken have asserted that these statues must be of extraterrestrial origin, or at the very least must have been built with extraterrestrial assistance. The argument goes something like this:

• Boy, those statues sure are big and heavy!
• I can't figure out how primitive people without modern powered heavy-lifting cranes could have moved those big rocks from the quarry to where they're standing now.
• And if I can't figure it out, then surely those ancient people couldn't have figured it out either.
• Therefore, they must have had help from space aliens.

Needless to say, there are numerous flaws in this argument, which is an example of the God of the Gaps Fallacy and/or the Argument from Incredulity. In fact, armed with only the "primitive" tools discovered on the island by archaeologists and the help of some manual laborers, experimenters have been able to successfully accomplish each step necessary to build and place such statues from start-to-finish. [2] The erection of so many enormous monolithic statues by natives of the island was certainly a remarkable accomplishment, but it required no mythical help from "outsiders."

[edit] The Natives

Easter Island has been inhabited continuously since at least 1200 C.E., and has probably been inhabited longer.

A myth exists that when Easter Island was first discovered by Europeans, not only was it littered with moai, but it was also completely uninhabited. This myth is untrue; the first Eurpoean contact was in 1722, and the Dutch crew who landed there reported seeing both the moai and the native Rapa-nui islanders.[3]

It is true, though, that the construction of moai was no longer being practiced by the time of its European discovery. Their construction had become a "lost art." This, of course, fuels additional speculation among believers in alien visitation that the moai were left as presents from the stars.

The most likely explanation for the loss of the moai-building tradition is that the enormous effort required to erect so many moai eventually bankrupted the civilization. They had to quit building moai, or perish.