The Easter Island Heads Have Bodies

[Yavin4]

Kewl.







Read more:

http://www.eisp.org/

[Drale]

1. This just adds more to the mystery of Easter Island. /nt

[harmonicon]

13. What's the mystery?

Quite a lot is known about the place. One thing that isn't known, which I REALLY wish was, was how to translate their writing system (now someone will tell me that it has, and I'll feel like a doofus).

[Uncle Joe]

57. The backside of that last statue at the bottom seems to be a symbol of marriage. n/t

[DCKit]

75. For one, how'd they move them?

Now that we know they're more than twice the size, it's a mystery greater than how the pyramids were built.

Only today's heaviest cranes and trucks could handle that much weight.

Still, it's a pity they invested so much effort into monuments and not in building a sustainable society, instead - additionally, that the lesson is lost on us.

[caveat_imperator]

76. Physics

Maybe the guy here can help researchers figure it out?-
http://www.theforgottentechnology.com

[Pachamama]

77. Sadly, they likely rolled them on logs from all the trees they clearcut from the island that led to

...eco destruction of their environment....

[DCKit]

83. The simplistic answers don't work for something THAT large and heavy.

Either that, or I was wrong on the Internet - again - and needed to be put down.

[Pachamama]

84. Levitation?

Hey, i met Shamans in Peru & Equador that have talked about it.....
Maybe it was the Ayahuasca, but you cant say absolutely not.....

[The Wielding Truth]

2. OMG! This is amazing. So cool.

[zappaman]

3. Whoa...

Thanks for posting this!

[stevedeshazer]

4. That's incredible!

Wow, how did they do it and why?

[awoke_in_2003]

16. probably used ground penetrating radar...

with that, it would be easy to detect. Ultrasound would work, too.

[Fawke Em]

52. I think the poster meant how did the

ancient people who carved/built them do that and why did they do that.

I don't think the poster was speaking about how the scientists found the "bodies."

[awoke_in_2003]

74. Doh! Nt

[bluerum]

5. For all my 56.5 years I believed they were heads..

I now need to change a portion of my world view.

Amazing find.

[Bolo Boffin]

6. They also have units.

As they are very happy to show you.

[Buns_of_Fire]

37. I got the impression of standing at a urinal.

[Honeycombe8]

7. Wow! That's amazing! You mean they never dug down in the ground before?

I wonder why?

[Lochloosa]

12. Same question here...

[harmonicon]

14. No, it's been known for a long time.

I think this is at least the third time in as many years that I've seen a thread started about it on DU. I'm not criticizing that - I think archaeology is fascinating and am all for more threads about it. I guess it's just that a lot of people don't know about it.

[Trajan]

15. Well .. In all fairness ... People dont 'know' something until they learn about it ...

Consider yourself fortunate to have been taught these facts before the others learned about them ... There is always somebody first, then second, then third ...

I am pretty well informed of many things, yet I did not know about the bodies either .... go figure ...

[harmonicon]

23. I'm just an archaeology/anthropology buff!

This is still about a new excavation, so it's still exciting for me.

[Sirveri]

39. ten thousand people learn new things each day!

[Dont call me Shirley]

72. Everytime posted, the hole gets deeper. That's the fascination.

[Baitball Blogger]

8. Wow.

Were these heads the inspiration behind the head in Night in the Museum?

[xchrom]

9. Du rec. Nt

[spanone]

10. k&r...

[Taverner]

11. Easter Island is a CLASSIC case of environmental destruction for consumerist sake

At the time, if you built a Moai to honor an ancestor, you gained prestige. The way to transport the stones were with palm tree trunks, rolling them. After a while, no more trees. No more trees, no more anything else. Soon, cannibalism ensues and everyone has a Republican Party Convention on each other's asses.

The end.

[HiPointDem]

27. The resource depletion story pushed by Jared Diamond has some holes. Which aren't given as

much publicity as Diamond's story. But in fact, a lot of scholars disbelieve Diamond's story.

Few historical tales of ecological collapse have achieved the cultural resonance of that of Easter Island. In the conventional account, best popularised by Jared Diamond in his 2005 book ‘Collapse’, the islanders brought doom upon themselves by over-exploiting their limited environment, thereby providing a compelling analogy for modern times. Yet recent archaeological work suggests that the eco-collapse hypothesis is almost certainly wrong – and that the truth is far more shocking....

More recent archaeological work has now challenged almost every aspect of this conventional ‘ecocide’ narrative, most completely and damningly in a new book by the archaeologists Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo entitled ‘The Statues That Walked’. Hunt and Lipo did not set out to challenge the conventional story: their initial studies were intended merely to confirm it by providing some greater archaeological detail. However, as they dug and analysed, things turned out very differently.

http://www.marklynas.org/2011/09/the-myth-of-easter-islands-ecocide/


Diamond, however, ignores and fails to address the true reasons behind Rapa Nui’s collapse. Why has he turned the victims of cultural and physical extermination into the perpetrators of their own demise? This paper is a first attempt to address this disquieting quandary.
It describes the foundation of Diamond’s environmental revisionism and explains
why it does not hold up to scientific scrutiny....

“The real mystery of Easter Island, however, is not its collapse. It is why distinguished scientists feel compelled to concoct a story of ecological suicide when the actual perpetrators of the civilisation’s deliberate destruction are well known and were identified long ago…

As a final point, I would argue that Easter Island is a poor example for a morality tale about environmental degradation. Easter Island’s tragic experience is not a metaphor for the entire Earth. The extreme isolation of Rapa Nui is an exception even among islands, and does not constitute the ordinary problems of the human environment interface. Yet in spite of exceptionally challenging conditions, the indigenous population chose to survive – and they did…

What they could not endure, however, and what most of them did not survive, was something altogether different: the systematic destruction of their society, their people and their culture.”

http://www.uri.edu/artsci/ecn/starkey/ECN398%20-Ecology,%20Economy,%20Society/RAPANUI.pdf

[grantcart]

32. Your analysis of people projecting an environmental story onto the Easter Island archealogy actually

duplicates Dr. Albert Schweitzer's disassembling hundreds of years of systematic theology in his brilliant doctoral essay "Quest for the Historical Jesus".

During rational periods they found a rational Jesus, during conservative periods a conservative one and so one.

In biblical studies it is called eisogesis (reading into) rather than exogesis (reading out of).

When it comes to objective examination of archeology or ancient texts the first rule is to abandon any parallels to modern life and work from a blank slate. Good scholarship requires leaving ideology or modern perspectives behind.

Thanks for the links.

[HiPointDem]

36. Here's another one, then:

Rethinking the Fall of Easter Island
New evidence points to an alternative explanation for a civilization's collapse (rats)

http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/feature/rethinking-the-fall-of-easter-island/1


and another: cultural evolution...then syphilis:

NARRATOR: Easter Island's fall came to be seen as a terrible ecological warning from history. But there was one nagging problem with the self-destruction theory, something that just didn't fit. Paul Rainbird has studied the journals kept by the Dutch sailors who arrived on Easter Island in 1722. This was one hundred years after the island had apparently descended into starvation and conflict, and yet there was absolutely no sign of crisis.

PAUL RAINBIRD: In Roggeveen's journals we find that this, this place isn't an impoverished place at all. He talks about fields of sweet potatoes, he talks about yams, he talks about field full of sugar-cane and he also talks of the people themselves. They were healthy, they were fit, there is no sign at all of the collapse we're supposed to have regarded to have happened and indeed if that collapse was through warfare there was also no sign whatsoever of war-like behaviour. Indeed he noted that there were no weapons to be seen.

NARRATOR: If Easter Island had completely self-destructed the Dutch should have encountered islanders who were desperate and starving. But they weren't. They were fit and healthy with food to spare. So by the time the Dutch appeared the crisis was over. Something must have pulled Easter Island society back from disaster. The key to the recovery lies at Orongo, a place poised between an extinct volcano on one side and the crashing sea on the other...

NARRATOR: Again and again in the bones he examined Doug Owsley saw the same thing...This thickening and curvature of the bones is the mark of a particularly devastating disease, a disease that had never been seen on Easter Island before Western contact: syphilis.

NARRATOR: Faced with disease and the cultural shock of Western contact, Easter Island's fragile recovery began to collapse. The people became weakened and the death toll started to mount. The first signs may have already been there when Captain Cook arrived 50 years after the Dutch.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2003/easterislandtrans.shtml

[joshcryer]

49. That article is by the same people! The rats story is thoroughly debunked, by science.

C'mon, this is nonsense. Those journals don't refute the collapse. When collapse happens not everyone dies. Some survive. And those journals suggest a society that had survived its trials and was trying to rebuild from its previous collapse, with the lessons it had learned from it.

[joshcryer]

48. It's also similar to denialist arguments.

They base their entire premise on a later arrival of the inhabitants, a basis which is not supported by their "work" since they ... haven't published it. It flies in the face of the rest of the evidence, and they even have to pull out an "outlier" and implausible explanation for the deforestation (rats, which don't affect the other islands in that region in that way), in fact there were previous studies which showed that rats wouldn't have that effect, yet they chose not to even cite the paper.

Classic denialist approach. Cite the evidence you want (and even evidence you don't have), then when there's evidence to refute it, ignore it. For example, the protracted wars between the inhabitants are well established, hundreds of skeletons show damage, but they chose to cite an old outdated report where someone said there was no evidence of that kind of thing.

Here is a sufficient enough refutation of the authors works.

They wanted to paint a contrary narrative, and they didn't do the science to back it up, so they weaseled, that's what I see anyhow.

[hfojvt]

38. interesting article

However, it seems to me they do the same manipulating of the evidence that they accuse Diamond and Heyerdal of.

They say this "the systematic destruction of their society, their people and their
culture. Diamond has chosen to close his eyes to the real culprits of Rapa Nui’s real
collapse and annihilation."

"The systematic destruction" is the culprit, they claim. Yet, when I read their article, one of the biggest destructive forces in the story is - smallpox.

"shortly after their return, smallpox, the germs of which they
had brought with them, broke out and transformed the island into a vast charnelhouse.
Since there were too many corpses to bury in the family mausoleums,..."

Granted, the smallpox seemed to reach the island because of the evil actions of slave traders, but there was nothing especially systematic about the introduction or spread of the disease.

These authors quote '“The authors make their assumptions. They then look for evidence, pick
out the bits they like, ignore the bits that don’t fit, and finally proclaim that their
assumptions have been vindicated” (Bahn, 1990:24). A similar criticism can be made
of Diamond’s eco-biased approach to the question of Rapa Nui’s collapse.'

Yet, they themselves seem to have made their own assumption, the assumption about the evils of western civilization, like western civilization invented smallpox, and maybe later stole the smallpox vaccine from indigenous peoples.

[HiPointDem]

41. maybe. but if you read everyone, including the early explorers, you get a much broader

picture of all the variables than you do from reading a single source. and once you read more widely, you can see that diamond's book has some holes.

i've posted several links; there's also syphilis in the mix, which predated smallpox. From the French expedition of 1786:




Also, diamond says since there were no trees the easter islanders had no boats, but there's evidence to contradict this from a contact circa 1830s:



Atlas in Pictures of the Voyage around the World of the frigate Venus, 1830 - 1839 by Dupetit-Thouars. Published in Paris in 1846.

Drawing by Choris from the (book above) showing two types of Easter Island canoe made of driftwood. One is a “sewn” canoe with an outrigger and one is the same type of canoe without such an outrigger. An oar and a paddle with a human head are also shown.

http://www.chauvet-translation.com/figurelegends.htm

[hfojvt]

50. oh, I am not defending Diamond

the authors do a good job of tearing his narrative to shreds

What I am saying is that debunking the idea of ecocide and civil war and cannibalism is fine, but then laying the blame on genocide is another leap, just like the one Diamond made. It seems to me that the real culprit was disease. The other thing that struck me was that if those people lived on that isolated island for 1,000 years, they must have been amazingly inbred, especially if their population was less than 5,000 (but the authors are not sure of that, perhaps as high as 20,000? although that is a LOT of people to pack in to 63 square miles but with abundant sea food, perhaps it is possible)

[HiPointDem]

63. agree, disease is definitely in the mix. but that is also partly a contact phenomenon.

[joshcryer]

46. Hunt and Lipo are full of it.

Their entire thesis resists on carbon dating that may or may not be correct. Yes, if they arrived later than thought, the collapse coincides with the settlers. If they arrived just a little bit earlier, the story is drastically different.

http://www.marklynas.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Bahn-flenley-CWA.pdf

edit: the more I think about it the more annoyed I get, as they employ really bullshit denialist arguments to make their case, using poor dating methods, selectively choosing outdated papers, making up evidence without having a peer reviewed paper to show for it, the list goes on.

[provis99]

80. Mark Lynas is a fringe researcher.

The bulk of the evidence favors Diamond's interpretation; Lynas provides no evidence, only conjecture.

[HiPointDem]

82. Lynas isn't a "researcher" at all; he's a writer and blogger. He's talking about a book by Terry

Hunt (U of Hawaii Anthropology Dept, Head of Honors program) and Carl Lipo (Prof of Archaeology at Cal State long Beach.

Jared Diamond's training is in physiology and geography.

[XemaSab]

81. Diamond's book doesn't hold up at all

He keeps insisting that they intentionally cut the trees down, but at the same time he says that all the tree seeds they have found in archaeological sites were gnawed by rats.

This was about where I threw the book across the room.

[cleanhippie]

17. Easter Island is a lesson we need to learn in depleting natural resources.

[HiPointDem]

28. There are some alternate scenarios, e.g.:

Last edited Tue May 15, 2012, 02:58 AM - Edit history (1)

While the theory of ecocide has become almost paradigmatic in environmental
circles, a dark and gory secret hangs over the premise of Easter Island’s self destruction:
an actual genocide terminated Rapa Nui’s indigenous populace and its
culture.

Diamond ignores, or neglects to address the true reasons behind Rapa Nui’s
collapse. Other researchers have no doubt that its people, their culture and its
environment were destroyed to all intents and purposes by European slave-traders,
whalers and colonists...“one of the most hideous atrocities committed by white men in the
South Seas” (Métraux, 1957:38), “perhaps the most dreadful piece of genocide in
Polynesian history” (Bellwood, 1978:363).

So why does Diamond maintain that Easter Island’s celebrated culture, famous for
its sophisticated architecture and giant stone statues, committed its own environmental
suicide? How did the once well-known accounts about the “fatal impact” (Moorehead,
1966) of European disease, slavery and genocide – “the catastrophe that wiped out
Easter Island’s civilisation” (Métraux, ibid.) – turn into a contemporary parable of self inflicted
ecocide? In short, why have the victims of cultural and physical extermination
been turned into the perpetrators of their own demise?

http://www.uri.edu/artsci/ecn/starkey/ECN398%20-Ecology,%20Economy,%20Society/RAPANUI.pdf

[cleanhippie]

55. Interesting. Thanks for the link.

[joshcryer]

47. Refutation of the above paper:

http://www.marklynas.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Bahn-flenley-CWA.pdf

[Canuckistanian]

18. Thought you meant this

Amazing.

[FailureToCommunicate]

19. Your mom is always right: Look at those sunburns!

Shoulda used sunblock!

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

20. Were they intentionally buried by the islanders?

Or did the march of time over the centuries cause dirt to accumulate around them, burying them?

[Cracklin Charlie]

21. Cool!

Were the moai originally displayed as whole bodies, and buried by erosion, or sinking? Or were they buried by the humans who put them in place?

I'll go read the article now.

[Ron Obvious]

22. Wasn't this in MAD magazine decades ago?

I could have sworn I saw this in a MAD magazine cartoon many years ago, where the bodies were presumably a joke. And now it's actually turned out to be true..

[progressoid]

24. Heh - Great minds and what not...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=439&topic_id=2300437

[Marie Marie]

25. Way kewl. Bodies complete with navels.

Thanks for sharing this.

[Aerows]

26. Wow

That's pretty amazing. Thanks for posting this. It's rather incredible what people have done before us

[limpyhobbler]

29. omg wtf gtfo nt

[HiPointDem]

30. Known since the 18th century. Explorers' drawings show full bodies.

Last edited Tue May 15, 2012, 01:56 AM - Edit history (4)

Easter Island was unknown to Europeans until the 1722 visit by a Dutch navigator Jacob Roggeveen. In his journal he briefly notes “remarkable, tall, stone figures, a good 30 feet in height”. The second to visit, in 1770, were two Spanish ships.... One of the maps they compiled contains probably the earliest depiction of the moai statues, albeit a very schematic one:



In 1774, the island was rediscovered during the second voyage of Captain James Cook. One of the expedition’s artists was William Hodges, who produced this famous landscape:




In 1786 Jean-François de la Pérouse visited Easter Island and his gardener declared that "three days' work a year" would be enough to support the population.



Rollin, a major in the Pérouse expedition, wrote, "Instead of meeting with men exhausted by famine... I found, on the contrary, a considerable population, with more beauty and grace than I afterwards met in any other island; and a soil, which, with very little labor, furnished excellent provisions, and in an abundance more than sufficient for the consumption of the inhabitants.

The British ship HMS Blossom arrived in 1825 and reported seeing no standing statues. Easter Island was approached many times during the 19th century, but by then the islanders had become openly hostile to any attempt to land, and very little new information was reported before the 1860s.

http://isabelgg.blogspot.com/


Why had they become hostile? Imported disease and slave-traders.


Interesting how the science of the present is often a rerun of the supposedly less scientific observations of the past:

La Pérouse directed the crew to measure the statues on the island, and described one as 14 feet 6 inches high. He concluded that they were made of a light-weight volcanic stone called lapillo, and he agreed with Cook’s suggestion that the monuments could have been raised by the ancient inhabitants using levers.


http://www.lindahall.org/events_exhib/exhibit/exhibits/voyages/laperouse2.shtml

Man of Easter Island -- from Captain Cook's 1772 voyage:



This striking portrait displays ear piercings in which flexible rings were sometimes worn. Cook notes that the islanders’ "chief ear ornaments are the white down of feathers, and rings…"

http://www.lindahall.org/events_exhib/exhibit/exhibits/voyages/cook14.shtml

Cook thought the Easter islanders were related to other Pacific peoples.

[Initech]

31. That is unbelievably trippy - wonder what the designs on the back mean?

[bluesbassman]

68. "Eat at Joes". Sandwich boards wouldn't be invented for thousands of years.

[Rex]

33. Yes they do and just how old are they?

Amazing.

[Recursion]

44. They were built between 1200 and 1500, and probably caused Easter Island's collapse

Jared Diamond has a chapter on this in Collapse. They were built over a 300 year period and the process of building and transporting them ended up using all the trees on the island.

[Rex]

60. Amazing history!

Thanks!

[burrowowl]

34. Fascinating!

[HiPointDem]

40. Another interesting thing is that there are similar constructions throughout the Pacific and the

names are similar.


On Easter they had MOAI (religious statues) on AHU (ceremonial platforms):





In Hawaii they had MORAI on HEIAU:



Hawaii's HEIAU evolved into temples.


In French Polynesia, MARAE:



The word apparently encompasses both platform and statues.


In New Zealand, also MARAE:



The word has evolved to mean meeting place but used to mean ceremonial meeting place.


In the MARQUESAS, ME'AE with TIKI




Notice the hand position similar to E. Island statues'.



The word apparently means the sacred site and constructions -- not sure if "tiki" is a word that evolved at contact from explorers' mistaken understanding.

[Recursion]

43. "Tiki" is the Maori name of the mythical first man, their "Adam"

And just like with "moai/me'ae" there are similar names in most of Polynesia.

[HiPointDem]

45. thanks. now i'm findi that the easter islanders tattooed, like most of polynesia, and their

tattoos were also quite similar.

there seem to be analogies to the birdman cult too.

i would have expected more dissimilarities given the supposed separation time frame.

[4th law of robotics]

51. Polynesian culture is very interesting

obviously it's many cultures but it had a common ancestor.

They were able to pretty much single-handily settle a huge number of islands that had been out of reach to all other human groups. And they did it without compasses, or iron, or a large industrialized society.

Pretty impressive. I don't think I would have taken even a well constructed sailing ship like the ones they had on a month+ long voyage with no land in sight and really no way of knowing if you were heading towards anything.

[HiPointDem]

58. I've wondered about possible cultural connections between NW coast indians, polynesia, and ainu

since i was a kid and started reading about this stuff.

NW Coast (haida/tlingit) village site




Maori "meeting place"




NW Coast (Tlingit) decorative arts/ceremonial costumes




Ainu:




Maori women's tattoo:




Ainu women's tattoo:




NW Coast (tlingit) women's tattoo (I think in this case it's potlatch facepaint):




Also, like many of the polynesian peoples, some NW coast tribes (Haida/tlingit) practiced body tattooing, and in the same locations as in polynesia:




Also, the tattooing tools are similar:

Upon seeing photos of the Haida tattoo instruments, I was struck by the similarity to the Japanese tools, in particular, the paintbrushes. The Japanese used a stick at least a foot long with needles poking straight out, firmly attached to the end with thread. It would be grasped at the end with the right hand, laid across the web of the thumb and, using this as a fulcrum, jabbed into the skin.

That's about similarity between Japan and NW, but the description sounds like the traditional polynesian tools as well.


and of course, totems:

[Recursion]

42. If you're ever in DC, we have one of these (body and all) in the Natural History Museum

It's one of the smaller ones, but it's the same form.

[Evasporque]

53. "I want some gum gum, dumb dumb..."...nt

[stevenleser]

66. :-) You beat me to it.

Me not dumb dumb, you dumb dumb.

[AsahinaKimi]

54. maybe other parts as well..

Easter Bunnies!!!!

[HiPointDem]

56. how did you know?

[Hubert Flottz]

59. Heck, those things don't look like ancient astronauts,

they look like me!

[Nine]

61. and Snopes confirms it

http://www.snopes.com/photos/arts/easterisland.asp

Incredible.

[HiPointDem]

62. known since the 18th century. explorers' drawings at contact showed full bodies, topknots, and

eye inserts -- all the things anthropologists/archeologists are said to have "discovered" in popular accounts. but those in the field undoubtably knew this history.

[Liberal_in_LA]

64. so this isn't a hoax?

[uponit7771]

65. +1

[cynatnite]

67. OMG! They have no legs! That last guy is wearing a thong!

Okay, seriously, this is very great! Thanks!

[Roland99]

69. read about this a few months ago. interesting this thread just came up again...

looking in the latest Travel and Leisure magazine this morning, there's a shot at night of the heads against a starry sky.

nice shot.

[flamingdem]

70. Tell that to Jan Brewer!

nt

[Javaman]

71. I can't wait to find out what they are standing on. nt

[muriel_volestrangler]

79. A platform

See Wikipedia photo: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahu_Akivi

[pinboy3niner]

73. Now if they could only find...

...Venus de Milo's arms.

[Zanzoobar]

78. Apparently, there are no Mexican drug cartels on Easter Island.