Science Goes with the Cultural Flow

The Easter Island revision
shows how science myths
can track cultural values

Easter Island is well known for its huge statues of elongated heads rising from the ground, dubbed Moai, made by the Polynesians who inhabited the island. Remember how environmental activists used Easter Island as a warning? The islanders used up all their natural resources, students were told, and suffered a population collapse due to “self-imposed ecocide” where shortages led to wars and even cannibalism. Another version says that Europeans, especially missionaries (gasp!), brought disease and death to the islanders in the 19th century that decimated the population. Wrong, wrong.

(Note: the island and its people are now called Rapa Nui for reasons of political correctness, and “scientists” are often dubbed “researchers” to dodge accountability for mistakes.)

Easter Island population collapse never happened (11 Sept 2024, University of Copenhagen). A new study involving scientists from the University of Copenhagen “debunks” a “long-standing theory” about the history of the island and its people.

Not only is there no evidence of a population collapse before the Europeans arrived on the island, the data also shows that they were capable of even more formidable voyages across the Pacific than had been previously established, ultimately reaching the Americas.

Easter Island’s population never collapsed, but it did have contact with Native Americans, DNA study suggests (11 Sept 2024, Live Science). What would the storytellers think of today’s headlines?

Researchers have long debated whether the Polynesian island’s population plummeted due to deforestation, the overexploitation of local resources and warfare during the 1600s, before the arrival of Europeans a century later, according to a study published Wednesday (Sept. 11) in the journal Nature.

But now, after studying the genomes of 15 inhabitants of the Polynesian island, researchers think there was never a rapid drop in population after all.

Students had been told that there were 15,000 inhabitants in the 16th century. Now, they’re claiming there were never more than about 3,000. Moreover, those inhabitants had contact with the mainland as early as 1300 AD and later. The inhabitants were far more mobile than earlier taught.

Ancient people of Easter Island made return trips to South America (11 Sept 2024, New Scientist). “DNA analysis shows that people from Easter Island had contact with Indigenous Americans around the 1300s,” James Woodford’s article begins, “and finds there was no population crash before the arrival of Europeans.” The population was actually increasing when Europeans arrived, according to a new genetic analysis.

Ancient DNA debunks Rapa Nui ‘ecological suicide’ theory (11 Sept 2024, Nature podcast). Hear about the story “then” and “now” in this podcast.

Rapa Nui’s population history rewritten using ancient DNA (11 Sept 2024, Nature News & Views). “By analysing the ancient genomes of individuals from Rapa Nui, researchers have overturned a contentious theory that the remote Pacific island experienced a self-inflicted population collapse before European colonization.”

Famed Polynesian island did not succumb to ‘ecological suicide,’ new evidence reveals (11 Sept 2024, Science Magazine). This article blames “anthropologists” (scientists studying human cultures) for the mistaken narrative.

When European explorers first reached Rapa Nui, a remote island in the south Pacific Ocean, in the 1700s, they encountered a small community of about 3000 people living among giant stone statues and stone platforms. Anthropologists later concluded that ancient, much larger populations on what Europeans called Easter Island had built the statues, called mo’ai, and had used up the island’s resources to do so, resorting to violence and cannibalism before European arrival. This narrative of ecological and population collapse became a cautionary tale of overexploitation of resources, popularized by University of California (UC), Los Angeles biologist Jared Diamond in his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.

The new narrative says that the island never had a huge population. The 3,000 or so inhabitants built the statues. This implies they were smarter and more capable than earlier believed by European visitors. Native islanders took part in the new study and feel good that it increases their prestige.

“Working with Indigenous groups, we face so many tropes and outdated narratives that people keep perpetuating—even scientists,” says Kathrin Nägele of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, who wrote an accompanying commentary for Nature.

Incidentally, Jared Diamond has long been a staunch Darwinist, popularizer of evolution and anti-creationist. He was not the first to propound the collapse myth, but helped to popularize it. He disputes the new conclusion, the Science article notes.

As for disease and death brought by Europeans, was it the fault of European missionaries? “Peruvian slave raiders kidnapped one-third of the population in the 1860s and disease outbreaks left only about 110 individuals by the 1870s.” Last we checked, Peru is not part of Europe, and slave trading is not in the wheelhouse of missionaries of the gospel.

See also our 25 July 2023 article about Easter Island, “Scientists: Often Wrong, Rarely Humble.”

Notice how the changing story tracks with cultural values of science then and now. The earlier narrative tracked with notions of European superiority and the need for colonialism to help less-evolved humans. Today’s narrative tracks with exalting native cultures above western civilizations, attacking “colonialism” and bashing white Europeans. So which narrative is correct? Wait a few decades or centuries and it will change again. The Moai aren’t talking, and the grandchildren of today’s islanders will tell the scientists new tales about a past they never personally experienced.

The data are not definitive on which the study was based. Live Science quoted one skeptic who discounted the rigor of the investigation:

Jo Anne Van Tilburg, an archaeologist and director of the Easter Island Statue Project, who was not involved in the study, said that she’s skeptical about the results and that further research is necessary….

She added, “That 15 bones produced results of 10 percent Native American ancestry is implausible even knowing that many such cist interments were carried out after missionary contact in 1864, with records of a few into the early twentieth century. Hence, ‘ancient’ is an overreach. So, too, are the population numbers and trend inferences they make. Nonetheless, archaeological data barely examined here points to at least one contact with the South American coastal region was most probably made by Polynesians.”

Easter Island statues (Mo’ai). Creative Commons.

So what is the truth about the history of Easter Island? Only God knows. Nobody alive today was there to see. Scientists can infer certain things and render hypotheses improbable, but due to underdetermination of theories by data, there is enough wiggle room for multiple stories to be told around the campfires of today’s science shamans.

If scientists cannot be sure about observable islands whose people are descendants of inhabitants a few centuries ago, how can they talk so dogmatically about what happened “millions of years” ago? The closed lips of the Moai seem to be mocking the hubris of some scientists.