vanished civilizations

From: Jordan Dimov (jdimov@cis.clarion.edu)
Date: Tue Jun 26 2001 - 07:01:09 MDT


This is only vaguely relevant, but I found it interesting and somewhat
conclusive.

Excuse the long post and the screwed up punctuation.

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Easter's End
by Jared Diamond
Published in Discover Magazine on 08/01/95

In just a few centuries, the people of Easter Island wiped out their
forest, drove their plants and animals to extinction, and saw their
complex society spiral into chaos and cannibalism. Are we about to follow
their lead?

Among the most riveting mysteries of human history are those posed by
vanished civilizations. Everyone who has seen the abandoned buildings of
the Khmer, the Maya, or the Anasazi is immediately moved to ask the same
question: Why did the societies that erected those structures disappear?

Their vanishing touches us as the disappearance of other animals, even the
dinosaurs, never can. No matter how exotic those lost civilizations seem,
their framers were humans like us. Who is to say we won+IBk-t succumb to
the same fate? Perhaps someday New York+IBk-s skyscrapers will stand
derelict and overgrown with vegetation, like the temples at Angkor Wat and
Tikal.

Among all such vanished civilizations, that of the former Polynesian
society on Easter Island remains unsurpassed in mystery and isolation. The
mystery stems especially from the island+IBk-s gigantic stone statues and
its impoverished landscape, but it is enhanced by our associations with
the specific people involved: Polynesians represent for us the ultimate in
exotic romance, the background for many a child+IBk-s, and an adult+IBk-s,
vision of paradise. My own interest in Easter was kindled over 30 years
ago when I read Thor Heyerdahl+IBk-s fabulous accounts of his Kon-Tiki
voyage.

But my interest has been revived recently by a much more exciting account,
one not of heroic voyages but of painstaking research and analysis. My
friend David Steadman, a paleontologist, has been working with a number of
other researchers who are carrying out the first systematic excavations on
Easter intended to identify the animals and plants that once lived there.
Their work is contributing to a new interpretation of the island+IBk-s
history that makes it a tale not only of wonder but of warning as well.

Easter Island, with an area of only 64 square miles, is the world+IBk-s
most isolated scrap of habitable land. It lies in the Pacific Ocean more
than 2,000 miles west of the nearest continent (South America), 1,400
miles from even the nearest habitable island (Pitcairn). Its subtropical
location and latitude--at 27 degrees south, it is approximately as far
below the equator as Houston is north of it--help give it a rather mild
climate, while its volcanic origins make its soil fertile. In theory, this
combination of blessings should have made Easter a miniature paradise,
remote from problems that beset the rest of the world.

The island derives its name from its +IBw-discovery+IB0- by the Dutch
explorer Jacob Roggeveen, on Easter (April 5) in 1722. Roggeveen+IBk-s
first impression was not of a paradise but of a wasteland: +IBw-We
originally, from a further distance, have considered the said Easter
Island as sandy+ADs- the reason for that is this, that we counted as sand
the withered grass, hay, or other scorched and burnt vegetation, because
its wasted appearance could give no other impression than of a singular
poverty and barrenness.+IB0-

The island Roggeveen saw was a grassland without a single tree or bush
over ten feet high. Modern botanists have identified only 47 species of
higher plants native to Easter, most of them grasses, sedges, and ferns.
The list includes just two species of small trees and two of woody shrubs.
With such flora, the islanders Roggeveen encountered had no source of real
firewood to warm themselves during Easter+IBk-s cool, wet, windy winters.
Their native animals included nothing larger than insects, not even a
single species of native bat, land bird, land snail, or lizard. For
domestic animals, they had only chickens.

European visitors throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
estimated Easter+IBk-s human population at about 2,000, a modest number
considering the island+IBk-s fertility. As Captain James Cook recognized
during his brief visit in 1774, the islanders were Polynesians (a Tahitian
man accompanying Cook was able to converse with them). Yet despite the
Polynesians+IBk- well-deserved fame as a great seafaring people, the
Easter Islanders who came out to Roggeveen+IBk-s and Cook+IBk-s ships did
so by swimming or paddling canoes that Roggeveen described as +IBw-bad and
frail.+IB0- Their craft, he wrote, were +IBw-put together with manifold
small planks and light inner timbers, which they cleverly stitched
together with very fine twisted threads. . . . But as they lack the
knowledge and particularly the materials for caulking and making tight the
great number of seams of the canoes, these are accordingly very leaky, for
which reason they are compelled to spend half the time in bailing.+IB0-
The canoes, only ten feet long, held at most two people, and only three or
four canoes were observed on the entire island.

With such flimsy craft, Polynesians could never have colonized Easter from
even the nearest island, nor could they have traveled far offshore to
fish. The islanders Roggeveen met were totally isolated, unaware that
other people existed. Investigators in all the years since his visit have
discovered no trace of the islanders+IBk- having any outside contacts: not
a single Easter Island rock or product has turned up elsewhere, nor has
anything been found on the island that could have been brought by anyone
other than the original settlers or the Europeans. Yet the people living
on Easter claimed memories of visiting the uninhabited Sala y Gomez reef
260 miles away, far beyond the range of the leaky canoes seen by
Roggeveen. How did the islanders+IBk- ancestors reach that reef from
Easter, or reach Easter from anywhere else?

Easter Island+IBk-s most famous feature is its huge stone statues, more
than 200 of which once stood on massive stone platforms lining the coast.
At least 700 more, in all stages of completion, were abandoned in quarries
or on ancient roads between the quarries and the coast, as if the carvers
and moving crews had thrown down their tools and walked off the job. Most
of the erected statues were carved in a single quarry and then somehow
transported as far as six miles--despite heights as great as 33 feet and
weights up to 82 tons. The abandoned statues, meanwhile, were as much as
65 feet tall and weighed up to 270 tons. The stone platforms were equally
gigantic: up to 500 feet long and 10 feet high, with facing slabs weighing
up to 10 tons.

Roggeveen himself quickly recognized the problem the statues posed:
+IBw-The stone images at first caused us to be struck with
astonishment,+IB0- he wrote, +IBw-because we could not comprehend how it
was possible that these people, who are devoid of heavy thic timber for
making any machines, as well as strong ropes, nevertheless had been able
to erect such images.+IB0- Roggeveen might have added that the islanders
had no wheels, no draft animals, and no source of power except their own
muscles. How did they transport the giant statues for miles, even before
erecting them? To deepen the mystery, the statues were still standing in
1770, but by 1864 all of them had been pulled down, by the islanders
themselves. Why then did they carve them in the first place? And why did
they stop?

The statues imply a society very different from the one Roggeveen saw in
1722. Their sheer number and size suggest a population much larger than
2,000 people. What became of everyone? Furthermore, that society must have
been highly organized. Easter+IBk-s resources were scattered across the
island: the best stone for the statues was quarried at Rano Raraku near
Easter+IBk-s northeast end+ADs- red stone, used for large crowns adorning
some of the statues, was quarried at Puna Pau, inland in the
southwest+ADs- stone carving tools came mostly from Aroi in the northwest.
Meanwhile, the best farmland lay in the south and east, and the best
fishing grounds on the north and west coasts. Extracting and
redistributing all those goods required complex political organization.
What happened to that organization, and how could it ever have arisen in
such a barren landscape?

Easter Island+IBk-s mysteries have spawned volumes of speculation for more
than two and a half centuries. Many Europeans were incredulous that
Polynesians--commonly characterized as +IBw-mere savages+IB0---could have
created the statues or the beautifully constructed stone platforms. In the
1950s, Heyerdahl argued that Polynesia must have been settled by advanced
societies of American Indians, who in turn must have received civilization
across the Atlantic from more advanced societies of the Old World.
Heyerdahl+IBk-s raft voyages aimed to prove the feasibility of such
prehistoric transoceanic contacts. In the 1960s the Swiss writer Erich von
D+AOQ-niken, an ardent believer in Earth visits by extraterrestrial
astronauts, went further, claiming that Easter+IBk-s statues were the work
of intelligent beings who owned ultramodern tools, became stranded on
Easter, and were finally rescued.

Heyerdahl and Von D+AOQ-niken both brushed aside overwhelming evidence
that the Easter Islanders were typical Polynesians derived from Asia
rather than from the Americas and that their culture (including their
statues) grew out of Polynesian culture. Their language was Polynesian, as
Cook had already concluded. Specifically, they spoke an eastern Polynesian
dialect related to Hawaiian and Marquesan, a dialect isolated since about
A.D. 400, as estimated from slight differences in vocabulary. Their
fishhooks and stone adzes resembled early Marquesan models. Last year DNA
extracted from 12 Easter Island skeletons was also shown to be Polynesian.
The islanders grew bananas, taro, sweet potatoes, sugarcane, and paper
mulberry--typical Polynesian crops, mostly of Southeast Asian origin.
Their sole domestic animal, the chicken, was also typically Polynesian and
ultimately Asian, as were the rats that arrived as stowaways in the canoes
of the first settlers.

What happened to those settlers? The fanciful theories of the past must
give way to evidence gathered by hardworking practitioners in three
fields: archeology, pollen analysis, and paleontology.

Modern archeological excavations on Easter have continued since
Heyerdahl+IBk-s 1955 expedition. The earliest radiocarbon dates associated
with human activities are around A.D. 400 to 700, in reasonable agreement
with the approximate settlement date of 400 estimated by linguists. The
period of statue construction peaked around 1200 to 1500, with few if any
statues erected thereafter. Densities of archeological sites suggest a
large population+ADs- an estimate of 7,000 people is widely quoted by
archeologists, but other estimates range up to 20,000, which does not seem
implausible for an island of Easter+IBk-s area and fertility.

Archeologists have also enlisted surviving islanders in experiments aimed
at figuring out how the statues might have been carved and erected. Twenty
people, using only stone chisels, could have carved even the largest
completed statue within a year. Given enough timber and fiber for making
ropes, teams of at most a few hundred people could have loaded the statues
onto wooden sleds, dragged them over lubricated wooden tracks or rollers,
and used logs as levers to maneuver them into a standing position. Rope
could have been made from the fiber of a small native tree, related to the
linden, called the hauhau. However, that tree is now extremely scarce on
Easter, and hauling one statue would have required hundreds of yards of
rope. Did Easter+IBk-s now barren landscape once support the necessary
trees?

That question can be answered by the technique of pollen analysis, which
involves boring out a column of sediment from a swamp or pond, with the
most recent deposits at the top and relatively more ancient deposits at
the bottom. The absolute age of each layer can be dated by radiocarbon
methods. Then begins the hard work: examining tens of thousands of pollen
grains under a microscope, counting them, and identifying the plant
species that produced each one by comparing the grains with modern pollen
from known plant species. For Easter Island, the bleary-eyed scientists
who performed that task were John Flenley, now at Massey University in New
Zealand, and Sarah King of the University of Hull in England.

Flenley and King+IBk-s heroic efforts were rewarded by the striking new
picture that emerged of Easter+IBk-s prehistoric landscape. For at least
30,000 years before human arrival and during the early years of Polynesian
settlement, Easter was not a wasteland at all. Instead, a subtropical
forest of trees and woody bushes towered over a ground layer of shrubs,
herbs, ferns, and grasses. In the forest grew tree daisies, the rope-
yielding hauhau tree, and the toromiro tree, which furnishes a dense,
mesquite-like firewood. The most common tree in the forest was a species
of palm now absent on Easter but formerly so abundant that the bottom
strata of the sediment column were packed with its pollen. The Easter
Island palm was closely related to the still-surviving Chilean wine palm,
which grows up to 82 feet tall and 6 feet in diameter. The tall,
unbranched trunks of the Easter Island palm would have been ideal for
transporting and erecting statues and constructing large canoes. The palm
would also have been a valuable food source, since its Chilean relative
yields edible nuts as well as sap from which Chileans make sugar, syrup,
honey, and wine.

What did the first settlers of Easter Island eat when they were not
glutting themselves on the local equivalent of maple syrup? Recent
excavations by David Steadman, of the New York State Museum at Albany,
have yielded a picture of Easter+IBk-s original animal world as surprising
as Flenley and King+IBk-s picture of its plant world. Steadman+IBk-s
expectations for Easter were conditioned by his experiences elsewhere in
Polynesia, where fish are overwhelmingly the main food at archeological
sites, typically accounting for more than 90 percent of the bones in
ancient Polynesian garbage heaps. Easter, though, is too cool for the
coral reefs beloved by fish, and its cliff-girded coastline permits
shallow-water fishing in only a few places. Less than a quarter of the
bones in its early garbage heaps (from the period 900 to 1300) belonged to
fish+ADs- instead, nearly one-third of all bones came from porpoises.

Nowhere else in Polynesia do porpoises account for even 1 percent of
discarded food bones. But most other Polynesian islands offered animal
food in the form of birds and mammals, such as New Zealand+IBk-s now
extinct giant moas and Hawaii+IBk-s now extinct flightless geese. Most
other islanders also had domestic pigs and dogs. On Easter, porpoises
would have been the largest animal available--other than humans. The
porpoise species identified at Easter, the common dolphin, weighs up to
165 pounds. It generally lives out at sea, so it could not have been
hunted by line fishing or spearfishing from shore. Instead, it must have
been harpooned far offshore, in big seaworthy canoes built from the
extinct palm tree.

In addition to porpoise meat, Steadman found, the early Polynesian
settlers were feasting on seabirds. For those birds, Easter+IBk-s
remoteness and lack of predators made it an ideal haven as a breeding
site, at least until humans arrived. Among the prodigious numbers of
seabirds that bred on Easter were albatross, boobies, frigate birds,
fulmars, petrels, prions, shearwaters, storm petrels, terns, and tropic
birds. With at least 25 nesting species, Easter was the richest seabird
breeding site in Polynesia and probably in the whole Pacific.

Land birds as well went into early Easter Island cooking pots. Steadman
identified bones of at least six species, including barn owls, herons,
parrots, and rail. Bird stew would have been seasoned with meat from large
numbers of rats, which the Polynesian colonists inadvertently brought with
them+ADs- Easter Island is the sole known Polynesian island where rat
bones outnumber fish bones at archeological sites. (In case you+IBk-re
squeamish and consider rats inedible, I still recall recipes for creamed
laboratory rat that my British biologist friends used to supplement their
diet during their years of wartime food rationing.)

Porpoises, seabirds, land birds, and rats did not complete the list of
meat sources formerly available on Easter. A few bones hint at the
possibility of breeding seal colonies as well. All these delicacies were
cooked in ovens fired by wood from the island+IBk-s forests.

Such evidence lets us imagine the island onto which Easter+IBk-s first
Polynesian colonists stepped ashore some 1,600 years ago, after a long
canoe voyage from eastern Polynesia. They found themselves in a pristine
paradise. What then happened to it? The pollen grains and the bones yield
a grim answer.

Pollen records show that destruction of Easter+IBk-s forests was well
under way by the year 800, just a few centuries after the start of human
settlement. Then charcoal from wood fires came to fill the sediment
cores, while pollen of palms and other trees and woody shrubs decreased or
disappeared, and pollen of the grasses that replaced the forest became
more abundant. Not long after 1400 the palm finally became extinct, not
only as a result of being chopped down but also because the now ubiquitous
rats prevented its regeneration: of the dozens of preserved palm nuts
discovered in caves on Easter, all had been chewed by rats and could no
longer germinate. While the hauhau tree did not become extinct in
Polynesian times, its numbers declined drastically until there weren+IBk-t
enough left to make ropes from. By the time Heyerdahl visited Easter, only
a single, nearly dead toromiro tree remained on the island, and even that
lone survivor has now disappeared. (Fortunately, the toromiro still grows
in botanical gardens elsewhere.)

The fifteenth century marked the end not only for Easter+IBk-s palm but
for the forest itself. Its doom had been approaching as people cleared
land to plant gardens+ADs- as they felled trees to build canoes, to
transport and erect statues, and to burn+ADs- as rats devoured seeds+ADs-
and probably as the native birds died out that had pollinated the
trees+IBk- flowers and dispersed their fruit. The overall picture is among
the most extreme examples of forest destruction anywhere in the world: the
whole forest gone, and most of its tree species extinct.

The destruction of the island+IBk-s animals was as extreme as that of the
forest: without exception, every species of native land bird became
extinct. Even shellfish were overexploited, until people had to settle for
small sea snails instead of larger cowries. Porpoise bones disappeared
abruptly from garbage heaps around 1500+ADs- no one could harpoon
porpoises anymore, since the trees used for constructing the big seagoing
canoes no longer existed. The colonies of more than half of the seabird
species breeding on Easter or on its offshore islets were wiped out.

In place of these meat supplies, the Easter Islanders intensified their
production of chickens, which had been only an occasional food item. They
also turned to the largest remaining meat source available: humans, whose
bones became common in late Easter Island garbage heaps. Oral traditions
of the islanders are rife with cannibalism+ADs- the most inflammatory
taunt that could be snarled at an enemy was +IBw-The flesh of your mother
sticks between my teeth.+IB0- With no wood available to cook these new
goodies, the islanders resorted to sugarcane scraps, grass, and sedges to
fuel their fires.

All these strands of evidence can be wound into a coherent narrative of a
society+IBk-s decline and fall. The first Polynesian colonists found
themselves on an island with fertile soil, abundant food, bountiful
building materials, ample lebensraum, and all the prerequisites for
comfortable living. They prospered and multiplied.

After a few centuries, they began erecting stone statues on platforms,
like the ones their Polynesian forebears had carved. With passing years,
the statues and platforms became larger and larger, and the statues began
sporting ten-ton red crowns--probably in an escalating spiral of
one-upmanship, as rival clans tried to surpass each other with shows of
wealth and power. (In the same way, successive Egyptian pharaohs built
ever-larger pyramids. Today Hollywood movie moguls near my home in Los
Angeles are displaying their wealth and power by building ever more
ostentatious mansions. Tycoon Marvin Davis topped previous moguls with
plans for a 50,000-square-foot house, so now Aaron Spelling has topped
Davis with a 56,000-square-foot house. All that those buildings lack to
make the message explicit are ten-ton red crowns.) On Easter, as in modern
America, society was held together by a complex political system to
redistribute locally available resources and to integrate the economies of
different areas.

Eventually Easter+IBk-s growing population was cutting the forest more
rapidly than the forest was regenerating. The people used the land for
gardens and the wood for fuel, canoes, and houses--and, of course, for
lugging statues. As forest disappeared, the islanders ran out of timber
and rope to transport and erect their statues. Life became more
uncomfortable--springs and streams dried up, and wood was no longer
available for fires.

People also found it harder to fill their stomachs, as land birds, large
sea snails, and many seabirds disappeared. Because timber for building
seagoing canoes vanished, fish catches declined and porpoises disappeared
from the table. Crop yields also declined, since deforestation allowed the
soil to be eroded by rain and wind, dried by the sun, and its nutrients to
be leeched from it. Intensified chicken production and cannibalism
replaced only part of all those lost foods. Preserved statuettes with
sunken cheeks and visible ribs suggest that people were starving.

With the disappearance of food surpluses, Easter Island could no longer
feed the chiefs, bureaucrats, and priests who had kept a complex society
running. Surviving islanders described to early European visitors how
local chaos replaced centralized government and a warrior class took over
from the hereditary chiefs. The stone points of spears and daggers, made
by the warriors during their heyday in the 1600s and 1700s, still litter
the ground of Easter today. By around 1700, the population began to crash
toward between one-quarter and one-tenth of its former number. People took
to living in caves for protection against their enemies. Around 1770 rival
clans started to topple each other+IBk-s statues, breaking the heads off.
By 1864 the last statue had been thrown down and desecrated.

As we try to imagine the decline of Easter+IBk-s civilization, we ask
ourselves, +IBw-Why didn+IBk-t they look around, realize what they were
doing, and stop before it was too late? What were they thinking when they
cut down the last palm tree?+IB0-

I suspect, though, that the disaster happened not with a bang but with a
whimper. After all, there are those hundreds of abandoned statues to
consider. The forest the islanders depended on for rollers and rope
didn+IBk-t simply disappear one day--it vanished slowly, over decades.
Perhaps war interrupted the moving teams+ADs- perhaps by the time the
carvers had finished their work, the last rope snapped. In the meantime,
any islander who tried to warn about the dangers of progressive
deforestation would have been overridden by vested interests of carvers,
bureaucrats, and chiefs, whose jobs depended on continued deforestation.
Our Pacific Northwest loggers are only the latest in a long line of
loggers to cry, +IBw-Jobs over trees+ACEgHQ- The changes in forest cover
from year to year would have been hard to detect: yes, this year we
cleared those woods over there, but trees are starting to grow back again
on this abandoned garden site here. Only older people, recollecting their
childhoods decades earlier, could have recognized a difference. Their
children could no more have comprehended their parents+IBk- tales than my
eight-year-old sons today can comprehend my wife+IBk-s and my tales of
what Los Angeles was like 30 years ago.

Gradually trees became fewer, smaller, and less important. By the time the
last fruit-bearing adult palm tree was cut, palms had long since ceased to
be of economic significance. That left only smaller and smaller palm
saplings to clear each year, along with other bushes and treelets. No one
would have noticed the felling of the last small palm.

By now the meaning of easter Island for us should be chillingly obvious.
Easter Island is Earth writ small. Today, again, a rising population
confronts shrinking resources. We too have no emigration valve, because
all human societies are linked by international transport, and we can no
more escape into space than the Easter Islanders could flee into the
ocean. If we continue to follow our present course, we shall have
exhausted the world+IBk-s major fisheries, tropical rain forests, fossil
fuels, and much of our soil by the time my sons reach my current age.

Every day newspapers report details of famished countries-- Afghanistan,
Liberia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia, the former Yugoslavia,
Zaire--where soldiers have appropriated the wealth or where central
government is yielding to local gangs of thugs. With the risk of nuclear
war receding, the threat of our ending with a bang no longer has a chance
of galvanizing us to halt our course. Our risk now is of winding down,
slowly, in a whimper. Corrective action is blocked by vested interests, by
well-intentioned political and business leaders, and by their electorates,
all of whom are perfectly correct in not noticing big changes from year to
year. Instead, each year there are just somewhat more people, and somewhat
fewer resources, on Earth.

It would be easy to close our eyes or to give up in despair. If mere
thousands of Easter Islanders with only stone tools and their own muscle
power sufficed to destroy their society, how can billions of people with
metal tools and machine power fail to do worse? But there is one crucial
difference. The Easter Islanders had no books and no histories of other
doomed societies. Unlike the Easter Islanders, we have histories of the
past--information that can save us. My main hope for my sons+IBk-
generation is that we may now choose to learn from the fates of societies
like Easter+IBk-s.



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