Chile: There was no ecocide or overpopulation on Rapa Nui

Chile - November 02, 2023 A new study challenges the ecocide narrative to explain the collapse of Polynesian culture on Easter Island, Chile, claiming that the population never increased to unsustainable levels. Instead, the research argues that the Polynesians who arrived on Rapa Nui, as they called it, found ways to cope with the island's severe constraints and maintained a small and stable population for centuries. The evidence for this conclusion is a recently documented inventory of ingenious "rock gardens" where the islanders grew highly nutritious sweet potatoes, a staple of their diet. The gardens covered just enough area to sustain a few thousand people, the researchers say. The study was published in the journal Science Advances. "This shows that the population could never have been as large as some of the previous estimates," lead author Dylan Davis, a postdoctoral researcher in archaeology at Columbia's School of Climate, said in a statement. "The lesson is the opposite of the collapse theory. People were able to be very resilient in the face of limited resources by modifying the environment in a way that helped them." Easter Island is possibly the most remote inhabited place on Earth and one of the last to be colonised by humans, if not the last. The nearest landmass is central Chile, almost 3,500 kilometres to the east. Some 5,100 kilometres to the west are the tropical Cook Islands, from which settlers are believed to have arrived around 1200 AD.The 100-square-kilometre island is made up entirely of volcanic rock, but unlike lush tropical islands such as Hawaii and Tahiti, eruptions ceased hundreds of thousands of years ago and the mineral nutrients brought in by the lava have long since eroded from the soil. Located in the subtropics, the island is also drier than its tropical sisters. To complicate matters, the surrounding ocean waters drop sharply, meaning that the islanders had to work harder to capture marine creatures than those living on Polynesian islands surrounded by accessible and productive lagoons and reefs. To cope with this, the settlers used a technique called rock gardening or lithic mulching. This consists of spreading rocks on low surfaces that are at least partially protected from salt spray and wind. In the interstices between the rocks, they planted sweet potatoes. Research has shown that the rocks, from golf-ball sized to the largest, disrupt the winds that dry the atmosphere and create turbulent airflow, which …