Easter Island

In the South Pacific, more than 2,000 miles from the coast of South America and over 1,000 miles from the nearest inhabited island, sits a tiny triangle of land just fifteen miles across. Its people call it Rapa Nui; the wider world calls it Easter Island. There is almost nothing else for thousands of miles in any direction. Few places on the planet are so completely defined by their isolation.

Around the year 1200 AD, give or take a century, a small group of Polynesian voyagers found this speck of rock at the end of an extraordinary sea journey, navigating thousands of miles of open ocean by the stars, the swell and the flight of birds. They stepped ashore onto an island then covered in a vast palm forest, and they stayed. Cut off from the rest of humanity, they built a society all their own.

Over the following centuries that society did something astonishing. The islanders divided into clans, and each clan honoured its ancestors by carving enormous human figures from stone — the moai. There are close to 900 of them. Most were quarried at a single volcanic crater, Rano Raraku, where the soft rock could be cut with stone tools. The largest finished moai stands ten metres tall and weighs as much as eighty tonnes. Then, somehow, these giants were moved miles across the island and raised upright on stone platforms, their backs to the sea, their faces watching over the living.

When Europeans finally arrived — the Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen sighted the island on Easter Sunday, 1722, which is how it got its European name — they found something that puzzled them. The island was almost bare. The great palm forest that had once covered it was gone. To outsiders it seemed impossible: how could people raise such monuments and yet leave themselves a treeless, windswept rock?

For a long time, the most popular answer was a grim one, and it became famous through books read all over the world. In this version, the islanders were the authors of their own ruin. They are said to have cut down their forest recklessly — to clear fields, to burn as fuel, and, above all, to move and raise their ever-larger moai. As the trees disappeared, the soil washed away, the fishing canoes could no longer be built, and food ran short. Some researchers argue that the islanders destroyed the very environment that kept them alive, in a slow self-inflicted disaster often called an "ecocide." In this telling, starvation drove the clans to war, and in their rage rival groups toppled one another's moai, pulling down the ancestors of their enemies. By the time outsiders arrived, the story goes, a once-great society had already collapsed.

It is a powerful, even haunting story — a warning, many said, for our own world. But over the past twenty years a growing number of scholars have begun to deny that it is true.

The newer view does not deny that the forest disappeared — it clearly did. But it challenges almost everything else. For one thing, the trees may not have been felled by people alone. Polynesian rats, which arrived with the first settlers, bred in their millions and ate the palm nuts, so that for every tree cut down, few or none grew back. Recent research suggests rats played a major part in stripping the island of its forest. And losing the trees, these scholars argue, did not doom the islanders: they adapted, farming cleverly with stone gardens, and their numbers stayed modest and steady. Many now deny that any great pre-European collapse ever happened at all.

So what did destroy the Rapa Nui world? The newer answer points not inward but outward — to the visitors. European ships brought diseases to which the islanders had no resistance. Then, in 1862 and 1863, slave raiders from Peru fell upon the island and seized perhaps 1,500 people — a huge share of the population — to work and die in mines and plantations far away. Most never returned; the few who did brought smallpox home with them. Within a few years a community of several thousand had crashed to barely a hundred souls. The carving of moai had already ended, and the toppling of the great statues — every standing moai was eventually pulled down — went on through these terrible decades.

Today both stories are still argued over. One side insists the islanders wrecked their own home; the other insists the real catastrophe was inflicted from outside. The truth is probably tangled and partly lost. What is certain is that the people of Rapa Nui did not vanish: their descendants live on the island still, and in recent years they have raised some of the fallen moai back onto their feet. The stone giants have gone from a warning about how a people destroyed themselves to a warning about what was done to them — and the argument over which is right has itself become part of the island's mystery.