Easter Island: Mysteries of a Lost World

This is Easter Island,

known to its own people as Rapa Nui.

From the vast empty expanse of the Pacific Ocean,

a relentless wind blows across ancient volcanic rock,

sucking moisture and topsoil from the land.

The only fresh water collects in the craters of its extinct volcanoes.

To live in the haunting beauty of this bleak

and lonely landscape presents a challenge.

And yet, the people who settled this island established one of the most

remarkable societies on our planet, developing a richly expressive

visual culture and dramatically changing their environment.

These iconic monuments are the Moai, now as familiar to us as

the Pyramids or Stonehenge, but they are just one part of a sophisticated

landscape created to serve Rapa Nui beliefs and way of life.

The tiny size of the island,

and its limited natural resources were such a contrast to the

majesty of the stone gods that from the moment Dutch explorers

made the first European contact, people questioned how

its inhabitants could have achieved this level of sophistication.

In the 20th century, when archaeologists began to seek

answers to some of these questions, it became clear

that the island had once supported a diverse and rich tree cover.

This barren landscape now suggested a new scenario -

a tragic story of collapse.

What could account for the toppled monuments

and the treeless landscape?

There was no one left to explain.

The Rapa Nui people had almost been annihilated

and their history forgotten.

Gradually, though, one theory became dominant -

ecocide...

ecological suicide.

In this reading of the evidence,

the Rapa Nui people caused their own downfall, over-exploiting

their natural resources to build the Moai, bringing

about an environmental catastrophe that destroyed their society.

Civil strife, starvation and even cannibalism followed -

spelling the end of one of the world's most amazing civilisations.

For centuries Rapa Nui has stood as the closest

example of the human experience in miniature.

Its isolation on our planet mirrors the isolation of Earth in space.

This has profound implications,

not just for the development of this culture, but for our

understanding of how all societies live with their environment.

If the Rapa Nui self-destructed,

then what hope is there for our planet?

This pessimistic view of human nature plays very well

with our current concerns about climate change

and our voracious appetite for limited resources.

Rapa Nui seems like a potent warning from history.

But what if there's another explanation?

You really feel the isolation of Easter Island on the journey in.

The coast of Chile is 2,300 miles behind me,

and it's another 2,600 miles before you arrive in Tahiti.

This is the largest expanse of open ocean in the world

and in the middle of this vast expanse of nothing is

the volcanic outcrop of Easter Island.

The Polynesians called this place "Te pito o te henua",

which means, "the navel of the world."

Flying to Rapa Nui today,

crossing thousands of square miles of featureless ocean,

you can't help but marvel at how anyone ever found this tiny island

in the first place.

This small cluster of houses makes up the only town, Hanga Roa,

and the daily flight from the mainland keeps the population

connected to the global economy.

Everything they need, down to the milk they drink, arrives by air.

Rapa Nui folklore not only tells us the name of the leader

of the first group of colonists, it tells us where he landed.

This is Anakena beach, and the Rapa Nui legends say it's where

a Polynesian King came ashore from an ocean going canoe.

His name was Hotu Matua.

His arrival on this beach had another

significance in the story of our planet,

because it was the final link in the chain of human migration.

Somewhere around 70,000 years ago our modern human

ancestors left Africa and began spreading across the globe.

In the following 60,000 years

they gradually colonised the whole planet,

completing their easterly migration by crossing from Asia

into the Americas.

The last part of this process was the spread of Polynesian people

across the Pacific,

moving on from island to island over the last 2,000 years.

And so when Hoto Matua set foot on this sand,

he was completing the final step of an incredible journey.

To the east is empty ocean until you arrive in South America,

which was already colonised.

So in many ways, this is the final step in the colonisation

of our world.

Whether Hoto Matua was really the name of the first human

settler to arrive here, what is certain is that he

came from the west, and his journey was an extraordinary

feat of navigation, sailing against the prevailing winds.

Taywongaroua, one of the most famous Polynesian anthropologists,

called them, "The Vikings of the sunrise"

and I think that's a great name because they were

surely among the greatest navigators and voyagers in world history.

Technologically, it was the double hulled canoe, the idea of replacing

the outrigger with another hull so you get this big craft,

capable of carrying substantial numbers of people, cargo, pigs,

dogs, chickens, planting stocks for voyages up to a month or so at sea.

Along with that went navigational techniques,

knowing the stars well enough that you could determine your latitude

by stars, so when you go out on exploratory runs and wind

reversals against the normal trades, discover islands, you could get

back on a return voyage by knowing the latitude of your home island.

If you knew latitude, you could run back to your home island,

you were OK.

HE BLOWS THE CONCH SHELL

Hokule'a is a modern replica of a Polynesian voyaging canoe.

And today I'm joining one of its regular training runs

along the coast of Hawaii.

Since its launch in 1975 Hokule'a has completed many open ocean

voyages, sailing across the Pacific using only ancient wayfaring

techniques of celestial navigation.

What we call it is a performance accurate replica of a voyaging

canoe you would have seen a thousand years ago.

Some of the materials are modern.

It was built around the idea that you have the same

kind of carrying capacity as well as speed capacity as well as sailing

characteristics you would have found in a vessel a thousand years ago.

There's a tradition about a canoe load of just young men going out

from the home island, finding Easter island,

planting yams on it, preparing for the colonisation voyage,

then coming back and telling the chief, "Yes, we found this island",

and then they prepared two double hulled canoes

and go and settle Rapa Nui,

and I think that oral tradition encapsulates a lot of the strategy

that was used to settle many of the different islands of Polynesia.

Once you start to get out of sight of land

and you start to use only the clues that you would have many hundreds of

years ago, it really starts to show the brilliance of our ancestors.

That these individuals figured out that these points of light rose

and set with some kind of cyclical manner and allowed us

to navigate many hundred of miles out of sight of land

for sometimes ten or 20 or 30 days

and still find that destination and to see it today is awe inspiring.

There is no feeling like it

when you see land come out of the sea after many days.

When they first arrived on Anakena beach, Hotu Matu'a and his fellow

settlers only had what they had brought with them,

and the resources the island could supply.

The die was cast,

but even on this opening page of the island's history

we come upon a controversy -

when did they arrive?

Certainly in the early centuries AD. Possibly even at 100 AD.

Rapa Nui cause have been settled as early as 800 AD.

We have, I think, very good radio carbon dates to support

Rapa Nui colonisation at about 1000 AD.

I think now the evidence really points to some time in the 1200s.

Do we really need to be any more accurate?

On any other Pacific island perhaps not,

but here we do because of the Moai.

In order to fully understand the achievement of the people who

made these figures, we need some sense of how long it

took their culture to develop.

I think the statue building started small, the shrines were small,

they were individualised family by family.

Over time the sites themselves became more extensive,

the statues became bigger, grander and more standardised.

That doesn't happen in a very short time.

That takes several generations.

The evidence for how this society grew and flourished during this

period has to be pieced together from the fragments that remain.

There is no written record and the oral history is connected to

that distant past by the most fragile of threads.

Scientists are continually uncovering more of this history

but it is already clear that this was a remarkably complex

society, of which the Moai were only one part.

These are the most iconic symbols of Rapa Nui culture,

and a great deal of time has been spent

studying how the Moai were made and moved.

The numbers of people involved in the task of creating them,

the resources used, the time taken.

And they are important.

Because if we could work out the role of the Moai in the Rapa Nui

belief system and how they were made and transported,

we'd be in a much better position to judge whether the conventional

story of a "collapse" holds up against the evidence.

Almost all the statues are carved from a volcanic stone called "tuff",

a compounded volcanic ash,

cut from quarries on the slopes of this volcano, Rano Raraku.

During the main period of quarrying,

probably from around 1,200 to 1,600 AD, a steady flow of statues

left Rano Raraku and moved around the island, some along the roads,

some positioned around the quarry itself but many located

on ceremonial platforms, called "ahu", located around the coast.

The sheer effort involved in making the statues is impressive enough,

but the platforms they stand on are equally challenging to construct.

Consisting of massive cut stones, they are beautifully formed

to knit together without mortar.

They all follow a similar design, with an elaborate plaza of

pebbles from the beach spreading out in front of the ahu, with extended

wings to each side, completing an integrated ritual landscape.

Several of the statues also sported large red "pukau", their topknot

hairstyles or round hats made from scoria, a different stone from

another quarry, and each of these weigh several tons by themselves.

These monumental figures were fascinating and perplexing to

outsiders, including the Norwegian archaeologist Thor Heyerdahl.

In 1955, accompanied by a film crew, Heyerdahl arrived on the island.

He examined the statues and the volcanic rock to

try to understand the process by which the Moai had been created.

It seemed clear how the original sculptors had gone about their task.

An outline was cut into the "tuff", the features carved into the face

and these deep incisions at the sides curved under to form

the body, leaving a keel of rock along the underside of the statue.

The whole Moai would then have been supported,

while the keel was cut away and the statue moved out of its rock cradle.

In an early example of experimental archaeology,

Heyerdahl worked with the Rapa Nui people.

They demonstrated how a group of men could work together on the statues.

In nine days of chipping away at the rock,

a recognisable Moai began to emerge.

What became clear from this decidedly unscientific

experiment was that, despite their size, a relatively small group

of people could manufacture one of the figures in quite a short time.

There are nearly 400 statues standing on the hillside

of the volcano, almost half of the total number on the island, and

in most cases only about a third of the figure is visible above ground.

While Heyerdahl felt confident he understood how the statues were

made, it was, and remains, not so clear what their function was.

The main platforms do have a very big plaza in front of them,

certainly ceremonies would have been carried out there.

We really don't know what kind of ceremonies.

All we have is a little bit of testimony from the very first

European accounts. The islanders did show respect to these things.

Sometimes they knelt before them.

Sometimes they lit fires in front of them but that was about it.

I think what we're looking at is this marvellous, sort of, creativity

that somehow we're unwilling to say or to accept could have

sprung from that community but in fact that probably is what happened.

One or more small groups of individuals who over time

tested and developed this symbol and realised that what

they had created expressed perfectly what people believed

and once you do that, my goodness, you have a really successful object.

All of this signifies a very successful society.

In their first few centuries on the island the Rapa Nui thrived

and the population grew.

The statues and their platforms began to be

built across the whole island. Sometimes in ones or twos,

but sometimes in vastly more complex formations.

The people lived in small settlements based around family

or clan groupings but the communal effort required to construct

and build the statues shows that this was a very cooperative society.

Every year more Moai were erected in honour of the ancestors who

formed such an important part of Rapa Nui cosmology,

reinforcing their shared belief systems.

But these figures don't look out to sea as we might expect.

The Rapa Nui weren't waiting for people to come from overseas.

Instead, they gaze inland watching over the lives of their creators.

We can't be 100% certain

but there's a distinct possibility that once the island was settled

there was no continued contact with other Polynesian groups.

Clearly they turned in on themselves in many ways.

They thought they were the whole world.

Everything else had drowned and there was nothing out there.

This is probably why the statues of the ancestors are placed

around the edge of the island facing inwards.

They're like a protection from whatever unknown is out there

because there is nothing out there that they know of.

This island was the whole world to them.

This extraordinary degree of isolation just adds to the

mystery of this place.

Thor Heyerdahl later published a book with the optimistic title

"Easter Island: The Mystery Solved",

but it didn't satisfactorily answer the first question everyone

asks when confronted by a stone figure weighing many tons.

How was it moved?

Perhaps, the most unlikely suggestion

was put forward by a Swiss hotel manager and convicted fraudster,

called Eric von Daniken,

who wrote a bestseller called "Chariots of the Gods"

that suggested the statues were brought here by extra-terrestrials.

I think the Rapa Nui people moved those statues in the ways

that worked best for the individual statue and the terrain.

I don't think there is one answer,

and I don't think there is one motivation.

I think that each statue had its own individual biography

but logic dictates that they were moved horizontally.

Some of the Moai from the quarry at the Rano Raraku volcano

travelled as much as nine miles to their final

locations on the coastal ahu platforms.

The island is crossed by a network of ancient track ways,

spreading out from the quarry,

and it is thought these "Moai roads" were used to transport the statues.

The islanders who had so confidently set about carving a Moai were

less successful in demonstrating to Heyerdahl how to move one.

They tied ropes to a statue and 180 of them

dragged it a few hundred yards, lying on its back.

But it was immediately clear that this would have significantly

damaged the figure,

some more sophisticated system must have been used.

This puzzle goes right to the heart of our understanding

of the Rapa Nui and what caused the decline of their culture.

Could the statues have dominated the life of the island to such

an extent that the people cut down their trees to provide timber

rollers and levers to move these leviathans?

Was the island cleared to grow food to support a huge workforce,

labouring to keep manufacturing the Moai?

And was there some kind of calamitous collapse,

brought about by the pressures of an expanding population

and diminishing resources?

That is the traditional ecocide narrative.

So the popular story of Rapa Nui that was told really throughout

the 20th century, is that the islanders, quote, self-destructed.

That really began with the work of Thor Heyerdahl,

when he and other researchers had been told this story of collapse

and of wide spread warfare and anarchy, people came very obsessed

with building larger and larger statues, they were very competitive

and that led to them cutting down all their trees and losing sight

of what they were doing in terms of their resource base on the island.

At the core of this narrative of "collapse" is the implicit

suggestion that the Rapa Nui themselves were to blame for the

destruction of the island paradise that they discovered and settled.

I think many things probably went wrong, clearly whatever

happened on the island was very largely bought about by themselves,

it was essentially the destruction of the forest which led to their

decline because once they'd got rid of the forest,

pretty much completely,

by about 500 years ago, there's no timber any more.

They'd lost the ability to make lots of rope, which they'd have needed.

This is why the statue building and moving stopped,

they simply didn't have the means to do it any more.

They had done something quite radical to this environment,

which was irreversible.

It's not difficult to find a Pacific island that

looks like Rapa Nui would have done before it was lost its tree cover.

This is O'ahu, part of the Hawaiian archipelago, and this is just

the kind of dense palm forest that once covered Rapa Nui.

When the first settlers came to the island

they really found a paradise,

they found an island which was covered

by a thick sub-tropical forest,

which consisted of at least 20 species

of trees and shrubs, dominated by a huge palm species,

the palm which provided very nice nuts

which could be eaten.

The palms stems provided a sweet sup like

palm honey and the palms provided, of course, leaves and wood which

could be used for building houses, for building canoes and so on.

The crowns of the palms provided shadow.

They were protected against harsh weather conditions, against storms,

against heavy rainfalls.

We are very sure that far more than half of the forest

consisted of the palms.

It may have been paradise for a few but as the island population

expanded it's evident that more and more forest was cleared.

The Rapa Nui oral traditions,

mostly recorded by Europeans in the late 19th century, tell of a period

of conflict and warfare, which occurred at around the same time.

Once the trees were gone, they recount that the island

became less fertile, leading to a crisis

when they couldn't grow enough food to support themselves.

Ultimately, these legends say,

the islanders began to regard each other as a source of protein

and cannibal feasts became a feature of the conflicts.

Polynesia is well known for constant strife between families

and clans and tribes and islands.

And so it's actually quite miraculous as far as we can tell

Easter Island was a model of peace for its first

maybe 1,500 years, and it looks as if the different

communities of the island must have helped each other

in the building and moving of statues and platforms and so on.

But then when crisis hits it's a very, very different picture

and we have all kinds of different evidence for a flare up of violence.

Quite vicious violence in some cases.

We have the toppling of the statues,

it's very clear to anyone who goes to the island and sees these things.

They were toppled quite dramatically,

tit for tat raids probably.

Then you have the mass production suddenly of these, what are called

"mata'a", these obsidian points which were probably used for all

kinds of different things, for domestic use

but certainly some were spearheads and dagger heads,

and the oral traditions support this.

There was warfare, there was strife that came about presumably through

the deforestation, the loss of resources,

possibly over-population, that we don't know.

But it's just too much of a coincidence that all of these

things suddenly appear in the record.

These circumstantial coincidences may paint a gripping picture of

civil war but in archaeology such bold claims require hard evidence.

The Bishop Museum in Honolulu is the most important

centre for the study of the history of Polynesia in the Pacific.

It has a large collection of items from Rapa Nui,

including several hundred of the mata'a,

the obsidian artefacts found in abundance on the island.

But although the archaeological record clearly contains

potentially dangerous objects,

new evidence suggests that they were not used for violent purposes.

They've commonly been interpreted as spear points

but as you can see, they don't, most of them don't really have a

defined point like we think about in other areas of the world.

And so what evidence has suggested is that these cutting edges

were used to cut plant matter and wood.

What archaeologists have found on the surface of them

is sweet potato and taro.

Which of course were the main stays of the agricultural economy

and that is the economy that really supported the statue building

industry and craft specialists in society.

So, projectile points were seen as one strand of evidence

leading to this idea of intercommunity warfare on Rapa Nui.

Is there evidence for warfare on the island?

Well, in terms of the skeletal evidence,

erm, it's not unsurprising,

we have about 2% of fatalities that bio-anthologists attributed

to violence, in terms of the skeletal population, and so...

so if you look at line of evidence that's not unnaturally high.

Most Polynesian societies are competitive, of course,

and Rapa Nui was probably no exception to that.

Another common group of Rapa Nui artefacts,

often misused to support the idea of a period of general starvation and

environmental collapse, are these wooden figures known as "kavakava".

But perhaps the most persuasive signs of a violent conflict

are the shattered remains of many of the statues themselves.

These Moai, lying toppled from their ceremonial platforms,

are like the fallen monuments of any vanquished civilisation.

In fact, until the 1960s, there were no Moai left standing on their

Ahu platforms. They had all been toppled at some point.

And it's easy to imagine that this is the result of some sort of

intra-island warfare.

But closer examination throws this into doubt.

There's something revealing about the way these statues fell.

They are lying face down in positions that suggest

they were lowered with some care.

Could the anger of whoever toppled these statues have been

directed not at each other, but at the ancestors they represent?

And, if that's the case, what could the ancestors have done

to fail them so spectacularly?

What happened to lead to this sudden loss of faith?

Could it have be that after hundreds of years

of splendid isolation, someone else showed up

that changed their view of the cosmos?

The Dutch explorer Admiral Jacob Roggeveen,

sailing with a small flotilla of three ships

in search of the riches of the fabled great southern continent,

sighted land on the morning of Easter Day 1722.

The following day, as they approached

their newly-named discovery, Easter Island,

they were disappointed by what they saw.

This was plainly not Terra Australis Incognita,

the "unknown land of the South" that Europeans fully expected to

exist in the southern hemisphere.

His commercial backers in Holland would not

be making their fortunes with this discovery.

They circumnavigated the shoreline, but the rough seas kept them

at anchor for several days.

Then, on Friday 10th April,

Roggeveen ordered a party of 134 men

to brave the surf and make a landing.

As Friday mornings go,

it was quite a significant one for the Rapa Nui.

The Dutch spent several hours ashore,

only marred when the islanders seemed to have enthusiastically

mobbed the new arrivals, leading to muskets being fired

and several Rapa Nui getting killed.

Fortunately, peace was very quickly restored,

and the Europeans began to inspect the village and its inhabitants.

They were duly astonished by the statues,

but otherwise only completed a cursory reconnoitre of the island,

recording it in the Admiral's log, before leaving the next day.

But the consequences of this brief visit were far-reaching.

The island now had a name, a latitude and longitude.

It would soon appear on maps in Europe,

ultimately enabling others to follow in Roggeveen's wake,

not least because of the tales of a coast lined with giant idols.

But as the first European visitor to Rapa Nui, Roggeveen was also

the first person to start asking questions.

"At first, these stone figures

"caused us to be filled with wonder,

"for we could not understand how it was possible

"that people who are destitute of heavy or thick timber,

"and also of stout cordage, had been able to erect them."

This visit gives us our first fixed historical pin

on the timeline of the island's story.

So what did Roggeveen tell us?

For such a brief visit, quite a lot, actually.

The Moai were still standing on their ahu,

with no evidence of fallen figures.

Deforestation had occurred, but it was by no means complete.

But, perhaps most significantly,

the people were happy and well nourished.

There were abundant crops of yams, sweet potato, sugar cane.

This doesn't seem like a society who's

just undergone civil war, starvation and cannibalism.

Roggeveen's visit to Rapa Nui coincided with

the first publication of Robinson Crusoe

and tales of cannibalism were

part of the thrill of these voyages of exploration.

But in the unlikely event that cannibalism ever happened here,

I don't believe it was because, as the ecocide narrative argues,

the people had run out of food.

These legends persist, though, and tourists are still taken to

supposed cannibal picnic spots today.

What better place for your cannibal feast

than inside this picturesque cave?

It's one of the many underground caverns and ancient lava tubes

that form in this volcanic rock.

This one is called Ana Kai Tangata,

which means "eat man cave",

but I'm pretty sure that no-one's ever been eaten here.

Well, there's really no evidence

for cannibalism whatsoever.

When we do see it in the archaeological record,

it's fairly clear.

You see butchered bones

and you see people in soup pots and stuff.

We don't find that on Easter Island.

All of the evidence is basically tradition and lore about cannibalism

and all of that lore seems to have come from the 19th century,

when Europeans arrive.

If we look into other cultures,

cannibalism is very seldom

based on the need of food.

It has more a spiritual meaning.

But the reason was, for sure, not lack of food.

So it doesn't seem to have been

the gruesome venue its name suggests,

but there is evidence of human activity here.

The roof of the cave is decorated with colourful rock art.

Far from being the site of barbarous cannibalism,

the walls of this cave once again show

the sophistication of the Rapa Nui.

Roggeveen tells us that the

people showed every sign of friendship.

He saw no weapons.

Not only were the statues still standing,

they were clearly still venerated, as the people were observed

lighting fires in front of them and kneeling before them.

There is nothing in his report that remotely suggests

the culture of the Rapa Nui was in decline.

Far from it - his observations suggest it was flourishing,

with new cultural traditions emerging.

These drawings depict

the Birdman, a human figure with the head and beak of a bird.

Similar images can be found all over the island.

The Birdman ceremonies took place in the most dramatic spot

on Rapa Nui, a dizzying 1,000 feet above the waves

on the southern tip of the island.

This is Orongo, precariously perched on the Rano Kau volcano.

It's a whole ceremonial landscape centred around the Birdman.

They had a competition, the Birdman competition,

which was essentially a stuntman race which involved going out

to the furthest islet, Motu Nui, and waiting there

for the Sooty Terns to arrive and to lay their eggs.

And then the one who could bring an intact egg back

all the way to his sponsor at the top of the cliff would then

turn his sponsor into the Birdman for the year.

Birds were important in their eyes,

because birds could come and go at will,

unlike the islanders.

These low stone buildings are claimed to have been

the site of elaborate ceremonies that took place each spring.

In the 1860s, Catholic missionaries witnessed

the enactment of the final Birdman rituals,

a practice they were largely instrumental in wiping out.

The island is still a largely Catholic community today and

at the harbour in Hanga Roa, Saint Peter stands triumphant

on a pedestal decorated with the motif of the Birdman he superseded.

We still don't know how the Rapa Nui developed these different

strands of their culture.

It has been suggested that the Birdman rituals grew in importance

as the Moai were being abandoned, but whatever the connection,

they both reinforce the sense of a people at one with their landscape.

LIPO: Orango's fascinating because it is very different culturally.

It's very possible that this idea of someone going and getting something

that's rare shows up as a sort of response to European interaction.

When Europeans arrive, they bring private goods with them,

sort of foreign goods, and those goods become very sought after

and you see this over and over and over again,

that people for the first time in their lives could have something that

no-one else could have and it was as simple as a hat or a piece of cloth.

The art inspired by the Birdman rituals is everywhere up here.

Over 1,300 separate low relief rock carvings,

or petroglyphs, cover this site.

This decorative rock art is a way of marking the skin of the earth,

and the Rapa Nui marked their own bodies with tattoos in much

the same way, bringing together the people, the ceremonial sites

and the landscape within which they lived.

TATTOO GUN WHIRRS

That the Rapa Nui tattooed and painted their bodies was

recorded by the earliest European visitors,

and today you'd be hard-pressed to find a Rapa Nui person

who doesn't have some form of tattoo.

-Iorana.

-Iorana.

The most popular images are taken from the visual culture

of the island's history.

IN TRANSLATION FROM HIS OWN LANGUAGE:

A real-life walking moai might sound absurd,

but they do feature in Rapa Nui legend.

And legends can sometimes point us towards facts,

in this case, a plausible explanation

of how the moai were moved.

Two American archaeologists began to look again at the thorny issue

of how the statues were moved

when they noticed significant differences between the moai

on the ahu, and the so-called "road moai" -

the statues that appeared to have been abandoned

whilst being moved across the island.

Were these figures made in such a way that they could

be moved standing upright?

LIPO: The difference between the road statues

and the island statues is night and day.

When you look at just the road statues, you see that they're

shaped in a way that doesn't allow them to stand up.

They carefully constructed these statues and you have to

get all the details right -

the centre of gravity, the basal part,

the angle of its form were all vital in terms of allowing it to move.

It's that falling point that actually makes it

possible for the statue to move.

It puts it in a dynamic position, so that all you need to do is

add the rocking part and it starts to walk.

Heave-ho! Heave-ho!

Using a scaled down statue

based on the dimensions of a road moai,

a small team of students were able to move it, standing upright,

using only its own momentum and equilibrium.

I love it! It really brings them alive.

Yeah, I know, it does!

I must have been an amazing sight to see these things.

Especially the taller ones moving.

Cos they become alive, they really are walking.

And it makes sense - if you're going to move a gigantic thing,

especially ones that are three times this height,

you're going to be really good at it.

Heave-ho!

One intriguing idea is that the process may have changed over time.

As trees became more scarce, the Rapa Nui

may have adapted their techniques...

..maybe even affecting the shape of the moai themselves.

The Museums of Art and History in Brussels have one of the

earliest statues, removed in 1934 by a Franco-Belgian expedition.

LIPO: If you look at the earlier statues,

you find a lot of variability.

You find statues that have big wide heads,

statues with round heads, kind of triangular shaped things,

all kind of weird shapes.

Many of those aren't suited for walking.

The walking shape, this particular sort of bowling pin type shape,

this wide base and narrowing at the top,

you find the larger statues and the later statues

all looking more and more like that shape, which probably

relates to as they get bigger, that's the only way to move them.

There's certain other resources they probably used

when those were more abundant.

You could imagine rails

and something to help slide things along.

But they came upon this walking idea

along the way of moving them.

They are amazing engineers,

amazing talent for taking rock and doing things with it.

So, the Rapa Nui may not have used many trees

to move their moai at all.

But even if they did, it is far from certain

that this alone could have caused their downfall.

-MIETH:

-We have about 1,000 moai on the island.

Maybe half of them were transported,

perhaps with support of palm trunks.

We can figure out

maybe 1,000 trunks per moai,

then we have in total about half a million of trunks

used for transporting moai.

But, on the other hand, we have 16 million palm trees

calculated on the island when the first settlers came.

Where have the other 15 half million palm trees gone?

We don't know yet. We have ideas,

but surely not only for transporting

and constructing of ahu and moai.

If the Rapa Nui were worried about running out of trees,

they certainly didn't behave like it.

Knowing what I do about the ingenuity of these people

in other aspects of their lives,

I find it so hard to believe

that they couldn't see such an obvious problem,

figuratively cutting off the branch that they were sitting on.

The more we uncover about the island's past,

the clearer it seems to me that it wasn't

the moai that led the Rapa Nui to cut down their trees.

And there's even less evidence that there was a civil war

and a collapse of Rapa Nui society.

In fact, the Birdman rituals

suggest their cultural traditions were still evolving.

But regardless, some deforestation did occur.

So why did they do it, and did it lead to their downfall?

What was it about their island

that precipitated such a radical transformation?

What makes Polynesia so fascinating

is this tremendous environmental variation

in the kinds of islands that we have.

Big islands, small islands,

islands that are in the temperate zone, islands in the tropics,

coral, volcanic, and so on.

So we have a kind of set of natural experiments,

if you will, of the way in which the same culture the Polynesians adapted

to and used resources on these very different kinds of islands.

Rapa Nui is a volcanic island of a moderate size,

but it's way down in the southeast of Polynesia,

so it's really getting almost into the temperate.

It's sub-tropical to temperate,

so the climate had a lot of influence,

and the geology is fairly old, so the soils

have less nutrients than they would on very young volcanic islands.

So you have to have other sources of nutrient input in order to

sustain intensive agriculture.

When the first king, Hotu Matu'a,

arrived on his double-hulled canoe with his new island starter pack

of crops and animals, he would have found an island

largely covered by this kind of dense undergrowth.

So you can easily see that his first task

would have been to start clearing the forest.

In this respect, the Rapa Nui would have been no different to

most other new colonists the world over.

Slash and burn clearance for agriculture

is the most common cause of deforestation

and it's still happening today in the world's rainforests.

By felling and burning the trees,

the Rapa Nui not only cleared more land to grow food,

but enriched the soil with nutrients from the wood.

Far from reducing the food supply,

cutting down the trees would have greatly increased

the island's productivity.

The palm itself is extinct.

It does not exist any more.

But we found these carbonised traces here,

coming from when the entire forest was slashed

and remains had been burned.

Charcoal was used for improving fertility of soils.

We can date the charred wood

to find out the chronology of deforestation.

We took samples from all over the island

and we found that deforestation started on the island about 1250

and ended roughly about 1650.

Deforestation involved high labour efforts.

We calculated from the number of about 16 million palm trees

that at least 400 people daily

were involved in the slash and burn activities on the island.

Cutting down and burning the trees may not have been unusual,

however it seems to have gone

far beyond what was necessary for agriculture.

The various theories proposing statues, civil war or

just mismanagement to account for this are still hotly disputed.

Relative to its tiny size, Rapa Nui has probably been

the subject of more conjecture

and speculation than any other place on Earth

and still manages to draw together regular conferences

at which some of the world's leading scientists argue over its past.

Ultimately, whether we prefer

one or other of the theories,

or elements of all of them,

the fact is the island ecology had changed.

The local palm tree had become extinct.

This is the Poike Peninsula

and it was the first area of the island to become deforested.

The soil quickly degraded

and it appears that the Rapa Nui

then abandoned any attempt to grow things here.

The hillsides are scarred with patches of bare ground

without any vegetation, where storm waters

and run-off have washed the soil into the sea.

But though the Rapa Nui gave up the fight here,

elsewhere on the island they fared rather better.

In fact, they showed remarkable resilience

and a technical ingenuity that was easily

the equal of their statue building skills.

Their goal was to maximise

and stabilise agricultural production

and they developed a method that allowed them to

hang on to their topsoil and replenish its nutrients.

The first Europeans to see this landscape would have had

a very clear idea of what fertile farmland looked like.

Back home, you cleared the land of stones and rocks

for the plough to grow crops.

These rock-strewn fields would have struck them

as very poor land for cultivation.

But they were wrong.

These stones aren't the remnants of the weathered bedrock.

Incredibly, they've all been brought here

and distributed deliberately.

And they have a dramatic effect on the land that they cover.

The stone layer protected the soil from wind and water erosion.

It improved the microclimate for the crops they planted,

protected the soil from the drying effects of the sun

and deterred weeds.

300 years later, these stones continue to preserve fertile,

cultivable soils on the land they cover.

This was an ingenious solution to the effect

deforestation had on the soil.

It's a process known as lithic mulching.

Lithic mulching or stone mulching

is a very special technique,

which was invented on Easter Island.

In its kind, unique in the whole world.

The stones now functioned as a protection layer.

They compensated the loss of the palm trees,

which before protected the soils against harsh weather conditions.

Now the stones took over this function.

In much the same way that the Rapa Nui were able to organise

themselves to manufacture the statues

and clear the land for farming,

so to they worked together on the huge task

of covering nearly half the island with lithic mulch.

These people were no shirkers.

We figured out - by calculations

of the number and size and weight of stones -

that over about 400 years daily,

at least 100 to 150 strong men must have been

involved in this technique.

I can see from this that it's entirely possible

the Rapa Nui wanted to clear some of their island of trees,

not to move the statues, but because they wanted to eat.

Lithic mulching was not the only sustainable technique

they developed to increase their productivity.

The French botanist Jacques Barrau

made a distinction between farmers and gardeners.

A farmer grows a multitude of identical

anonymous plants together in a field,

but a gardener cherishes

each plant individually.

I like to think the Rapa Nui would fall into the second category.

Another of their solutions to increase their food supply

were little-protected gardens they called manavai.

A small low wall enclosing a circular space

a few metres across protected a mix of crops,

retaining moisture and providing shelter from the salt wind.

There are thousands of these manavai,

"protected gardens", all over Rapa Nui

and they show that personal solution to the food supply.

And there were other innovations in this landscape too.

A hidden resource, unseen from the surface, are caverns formed by

the collapsed roofs of the island's network of volcanic lava tubes.

Sonia Haoa is a Rapa Nui archaeologist who has spent years

surveying the island to document all its prehistoric sites.

Without extensive tree cover,

many of the crops that need shade to survive

were grown in these caverns.

So this has all been planted, then?

-These are all banana. It's a type of banana.

-Yeah?

-Yeah.

They seem to be growing very well down here.

They're protected from the wind.

Yeah, yeah. They have protection,

but also the nutrition of the rocks

and they create like a...

-how you say?

-Microclimate?

Microclimate inside.

And it's not only good for banana,

but you can put taro, ohe, tea, sugar cane.

And how extensive are these caves?

You can have 3km or 4km of caves

and inside there, of course,

is divide for different reasons.

These caves are the inner landscape of Rapa Nui.

They stretch under as much as 30% of the land surface.

Accounts from Europeans who visited the island in

the late 18th century often mention how few women they saw.

Possibly that may have been

because they were hidden in these caves for protection.

But the most important role these caverns played in

the wellbeing of the islanders

was to offer them more variety in their diet.

At the end, you can understand

the relation of human with the rocks was very important

and they are a way of surviving.

Using and using and using the rocks.

When you are isolated, you need to create.

Yeah? Because you have to survive.

These people, they have to think like a rock.

Yeah? They have to live with the rock.

The sweet potatoes, yams and taro

supplied the carbohydrates the Rapa Nui needed

to support their labour-intensive agricultural practices.

They seem to have had plenty of protein too.

In addition to the chickens that the first settlers brought with them,

they supplemented their diet with sea birds.

The island had one of the largest bird colonies in the Pacific,

though later overhunting would force the birds

to retreat to the offshore islets.

There was one other resource that

the Rapa Nui could rely on - the sea.

They could always fish the waters around the island.

But even here the particular characteristics

of Rapa Nui didn't make it easy for them.

Launching a boat is difficult on this rocky volcanic coast.

Storms are frequent and the shore slopes dramatically

into the ocean, without any reef to provide protection from the surf.

ENGINE RUMBLES

Nonetheless, fishing has always been

a part of the Rapa Nui way of life and still is today.

The wind, which is so noticeable on land, is just as significant

out at sea, where the waters are almost always choppy.

Carlos is a spear fisherman

and we're going to see just what the ocean has to offer.

Don't be deceived by the wetsuit and snorkel -

Carlos' only breathing apparatus are his lungs.

Once beneath the waves, it soon becomes clear just what

a rich resource this would have been.

One benefit of the deep water and the rocky shore is that

the ocean is very clear and spotting your prey is a simple matter.

Taking into account their various ingenious agricultural practices

and considering they were surrounded by an ocean full of fish,

I'm pretty confident that the Rapa Nui

always had plenty to eat.

Through their innovations

and their careful cultivation of their landscape,

they had developed a sustainable way to live

in one of the most difficult places on Earth.

This security allowed them to develop a society in which

cultural expression could flourish.

Even today, we are still uncovering

previously unrecorded aspects of the cultural life of this island.

There are no permanent watercourses on Rapa Nui, but on the slopes of

Mount Terevaka, the highest point on the island, there is an ancient

gully that takes run-off down the hillside after heavy rainfall.

In the last few years,

excavations by a team from the German Archaeological Institute

have uncovered a very elaborate complex of dams

and stone pavements, which have been hidden under the turf for centuries.

You can really see the different kind of material

and how the different layers have formed.

The whole area was all covered with pavement.

A very elaborate pavement with some very interesting structures.

Inside, we have three parallel water channels.

The amount of water that came down this creek

has always been very, very little.

It cannot be imagined like a real river or anything in that sense.

We think that the water could have been channelled as another

aspect of transforming the landscape.

-MIETH:

-We don't know for what purpose

these huge constructions were built.

Perhaps for a very special type of water cult.

But the dam-like structures were not for retaining water behind the dam,

because the stone structure is very loose and lets the water through.

Perhaps this was a culture

connected to the loss of palm forests on the island,

connected to the importance of water after deforestation.

Overlooking this valley, a small ahu with its fallen moai

alludes to the ritual significance of this site.

We found inside the pavement planting pits for palm trees,

which is a really spectacular find,

in that sense that we always hear about

the Rapa Nui having cut down the palm tree vegetation,

but now we also have evidence that they planted them.

That they, in a way, cherished them to have them

as part of a transformed landscape.

How far do you think these pavements spread?

Well, we have pavements all over.

We have them up on the slopes.

And even going up the ravine, you have paved areas,

also hydraulically active structures.

Further up the slope, this stone-lined basin was uncovered -

more evidence that water was at the heart of this complex.

This impression shows how the site might have appeared in the past.

I believe this evidence of carefully engineered water features

and plantations of Easter Island palms fundamentally alters

our ideas about the Rapa Nui's stewardship of their island.

These new discoveries show that

quite late on in the life of their society, the Rapa Nui

were not just cutting palm trees down,

they were planting them.

The picture I get of life here in 1722

when first European contact is made,

is of a people who, above all else, were able to

live with the challenges of a limited and isolated environment.

A people who understood their own island,

its advantages and disadvantages.

Above all, I think there's every reason to believe

that they were thriving.

They could feed a large population and support a rich,

diverse and creative culture into the bargain.

Statue building may even have been in full swing.

The idea that ecocide had brought this society to its knees

just doesn't fit with the available evidence.

But, as we know, this culture was destroyed,

and its story lost to us,

so what is the alternative explanation?

The spotlight that Jacob Roggeveen

shone upon their lives was all too fleeting.

When he sailed off across the horizon,

it would be another 50 years before the next visitors.

And as European contact became more and more frequent,

life was going to get tough for the Rapa Nui.

In 1770, three Spanish ships visited for a few days,

followed in 1774 by Captain Cook,

both looking for the same mythical southern continent

that Roggeveen sought.

But in the 50 years since the Dutch visited,

it seems something dramatic had happened to the Rapa Nui.

"Nature has been exceedingly sparing

"of her favours to this spot," said Cook,

and one of his officers described the people as

"destitute of tools, of shelter, of clothing""

And he couldn't work out how

"the natives had been degraded to their present indigence".

He also notes that several of the statues had been thrown down.

When the Europeans arrived here,

the only contact that the Rapa Nui had with the outside world

beyond the horizon was the occasional arrival

of sea birds and maybe driftwood.

At least for several centuries, the island was devoid of big trees,

so it was impossible to make a sea-worthy canoe.

So when the Dutch arrived,

it would be like aliens coming to planet Earth.

It was the same kind of impact for this tiny environment.

For them, for centuries, the universe was a small island.

That was it.

When the Dutch came, everything changed.

And, mostly likely, these Dutch people brought some disease -

flu, whatever, a cold,

a virus against which the immune system

of the local population had no defences.

So probably this disease decimated

a big part of the population at that time.

I believe that the visit of Jacob Roggeveen was

the trigger for a paradigm shift in the Rapa Nui universe.

We'll never know for sure,

but it seems to me that he unwittingly left behind diseases

that destroyed the basis of their society, and undermined the faith in

their stone gods - the ancestors who they believed would protect them.

When Captain Cook arrived 50 years later, the seeds of this demise

were already evident - there were signs of disease and malnourishment,

and they were beginning the painful process of dismantling the ahu.

Many of the statues, their most extraordinary achievement,

were already lying in the dust,

their faces hidden from the misery their descendants were suffering.

We think that some of the population declines may have been as much as

90% on Polynesian islands within a few decades after European contact.

That had implications in terms of the collapse of social

organisation - in many cases you just can't sustain

all of the elaborate hierarchy and specialised roles of priests

and craftsmen and all this when your society's declining by 90%.

In the first half of the 19th century, a steady flow of ships

visited the island, whalers and merchantmen crossing

the Pacific, and others that would have a more devastating impact.

In 1805, for the first time, an American ship came here

because they needed workers,

and they kidnapped a handful of Rapa Nui.

And from then on, every foreign ship that approached

the Easter Island shore was rejected by the natives, people started

throwing stones against them, made all kinds of menacing gestures.

Sticks and stones were not sufficient to protect

the islanders from the visits of these ships,

and as the century wore on, things got considerably worse.

During this period, the Polynesian islands were all subject to raids

known as "blackbirding", essentially the conscription of indentured

labour to work in the South American mines and plantations.

But, not surprisingly, they could rarely fill their ships

with volunteers so they resorted to kidnap,

taking the islanders by force.

The worst period for sure was the period between 1862 and 1863.

Big expeditions with all kinds of weapons came to the island

and they were able to kidnap, in ten months, more than 1,400 Rapa Nui -

the cultural or intellectual elite, people who knew how to write

and read the ancient script.

So it was catastrophic,

it was a terrible thing, and the ones

who arrived to Peru, most of them died very quickly because of

the diseases that existed there, especially measles and tuberculosis.

After international protests,

including a campaign by the Bishop of Tahiti,

the Rapa Nui were rounded up to be repatriated,

but of those that had been taken, barely a dozen returned,

infected with smallpox.

Most people would say that the Easter Island culture

died there at that time.

Not only because of the death of

so many people, also because of the completely demoralised

state of the survivors,

and because the French Catholic missionaries,

who arrived shortly after the slave trade,

started converting the population to the Catholic religion.

So these two things working in parallel

killed most of the cultural aspects of Easter Island.

But this was not the end of the Rapa Nui's woes.

You might think, having suffered almost complete annihilation,

things couldn't get much worse for these people, but their

homeland was about to suffer one final act of change.

In the late 1860s, a French adventurer called

Jean-Baptiste Dutrou-Bornier began buying land on Rapa Nui

from the islanders for insultingly small sums,

and often at gunpoint.

He used his newly-acquired property to graze 435 head of merino sheep,

imported from Australia.

They would eventually number 70,000.

After a short period of despotic rule, Dutrou-Bornier was

murdered by the islanders,

but his sheep were bought by the Scottish firm of Williamson-Balfour

and they remained the sole permitted agricultural land use.

The remaining Rapa Nui were rounded up and confined in Hanga Roa

while the livestock roamed free, completely destroying

the environment, leaving behind the barren steppe we see today.

The island was all but deserted, a place of ghosts.

In 1877, a French survey ship

recorded only 111 persons living here.

Only 36 of these people had offspring,

and all of the Rapa Nui people today are descended from them.

Just 150 years after the first European sailed

over their horizon, the Rapa Nui had very nearly been wiped from history.

Whatever the future holds, I feel strongly that

by looking back at their past, we can clear

the Rapa Nui of the accusation of ecocide. There is no evidence

that they wilfully destroyed their environment, quite the reverse.

The landscape that they cherished and which worked so well for them

was destroyed by the imposition of an inappropriate monoculture

in the most heartless way by the supposedly civilised Europeans.

In 1888, in a treaty they neither understood,

nor had any choice in assenting to,

the island was finally annexed by Chile.

It seemed as if one of the most remarkable

civilisations in the world

had come to an end, but it wasn't ecocide - it was genocide.

The sheep had the place to themselves.

But even at this darkest hour, there were still memories

to be salvaged from the handful of people who could recall a period

when the island's culture still had a pulse.

Salvation was at hand, in the most unlikely of guises.

On a warm August afternoon in 1910, a middle-aged couple,

Katherine and William Routledge, visited the British Museum

in London to admire the statue known as Hoa Hakananai'a.

This figure was given to the crew of HMS Topaze by the Rapa Nui

in 1868, and subsequently donated by Queen Victoria to the museum.

As a result, it is the single most viewed moai in the world,

visited by more people than any of its companions on Rapa Nui.

Katherine was a wealthy woman with a fascination for archaeology,

formidably well-educated for the time,

and William was keen to persuade her that Easter Island would provide

them with an opportunity to make their names in intellectual circles.

This visit was to have immense consequences for the little island

on the other side of the world. Katherine Routledge

would write a book that would make Easter Island internationally

famous, helping to establish it as one of the world's great mysteries.

Katherine and William commissioned an ocean-going schooner

and set sail for the South Pacific,

arriving on the island 13 months later on 29th March 1914.

For nearly 200 years, every European who had visited Easter Island

had gazed in awe at the moai and wondered about their history.

Katherine Routledge was the first person to come equipped with

the tools to make a modern archaeological survey,

and start to seek some answers.

She was the right woman, in the right place, at the right time,

and she was interested in the archaeology but she was

equally interested in the people and their language and in their history.

I think her contribution is the intuitive way she approached

collecting ethno-historical data on Easter Island.

-PAKARATI:

-I think her presence on Easter Islands

was so positive for many reasons.

Katherine Routledge preserved all this knowledge

for the next generations.

All these elders that she managed to interview, who were born

long before the Peruvian slave trade, long before the arrival

of the Catholic missionaries,

they could give her

information about the lifestyle

in those days, pre-Christian times.

Her translator, Juan Tepano, my great-great-grandfather,

realised that the elders had something interesting to tell.

Lots of people realised only after Katherine Routledge's visit that

people abroad, people in other parts of the world found Easter Island

culture and the achievements of the Rapa Nui as something interesting.

The most extensive dig Routledge was able to conduct

was inside the crater at the quarry in the Rano Raraku volcano.

She called these two statues Mama and Papa.

Despite being a self-financing amateur,

Katherine Routledge ultimately put Easter Island on the map,

publishing a book about her time here under the inevitable title

The Mystery Of Easter Island.

Though her archaeology was helpful in the early understanding of

the island, it was the information she recorded by talking to

the Rapa Nui people that constitutes her most valuable legacy.

She was obviously an empathetic listener,

and became quite involved in the day-to-day concerns

of the villagers imprisoned in Hanga Roa, unable to visit

their own ancestral lands which they could see beyond the pale.

In the summer of 1914,

during the first months of her stay on the island, there was

a native uprising led by a charismatic woman known as Angata.

Angata's rebellion in 1914 had a very strong religious aura.

Everything was done in the name of God -

of the Christian god. But this Christian god

had lots of Rapa Nui traits. I mean, he wanted sacrifices of sheep.

When she gave the order, "Bring 100 sheep from the company

"and kill them in the name of God," and they made all kinds of big

feasts just like in the time of the Birdman competition.

So lots of people thought she was like a priestess

or she was a prophet.

The uprising was diffused partly by the calm, level-headed

negotiations between Katherine and Angata,

but ultimately by the arrival of a Chilean warship.

The sense of injustice remains, though.

The theft of their land, and their barbaric treatment by successive

groups of outsiders, have left a legacy that simmers to this day.

In 2009, the airport was closed for two days by a pro-independence

sit-in, and other protests have resulted in violent clashes

with the island's largely Chilean police force.

Working out how a post-independence island would function

is a challenge.

Devising some fair way to redistribute the land amongst

the Rapa Nui families has been a hot topic in this parliament chamber.

IN TRANSLATION FROM HIS OWN LANGUAGE:

This map, that delineates these territories supposedly drawn up

by Hoto Matu'a a thousand years ago, is in reality

based on one drawn by Katherine Routledge only a century ago.

In many ways, Rapa Nui has recovered.

Its population is approaching 5,000, just over half

of whom can trace their ancestry back to the original families.

The statues have given it a source of income,

but tourism is both a blessing and a curse.

A programme to re-erect some of the statues

and restore their ahu was begun in 1960.

A member of the Heyerdahl expedition, William Mulloy, stayed

behind on the island and became the driving force behind this process.

Using Rapa Nui ingenuity and muscle

and employing only modest lengths of timber and rope, they showed

once more how effective these simple techniques were, allowing

a small group of men to erect the figures with relative ease.

This undoubtedly makes them more impressive to visitors,

but what the 18th-century Rapa Nui would have thought of this process,

having spent so long lowering them to the ground, we'll never know.

The construction of the airport in the 1960s completed

the infrastructure under which the island operates today,

accessible to tourists, but dependent on the global economy.

The extraordinary isolation of this island,

which was such a significant factor in its history, is no more,

and the environment is changing with increasing speed.

Even those running the island during its time as a sheep ranch

recognised that deforestation was a problem, but their well-intentioned

attempts to introduce non-native trees have often made matters worse.

These eucalyptus groves were planted in the 1870s,

but though they provide some shelter from wind erosion, they draw

large amounts of moisture from the soil,

and their bark and leaves create

a highly acidic layer of litter

in which no other plants can grow.

The most shocking evidence of erosion damage

is on the northern slopes of the Poike Peninsula, where the run-off

from the frequent storms washes the red volcanic soil into the ocean.

This soil is not a renewable resource,

and once it has gone, it cannot easily be replaced.

IN TRANSLATION FROM HER OWN LANGUAGE:

So what are the lessons we can learn from this extraordinary tale?

Is it really helpful to saddle this island with our own fears

for the future of the planet?

Well, maybe - but only if you stop the clock on Good Friday, 1722.

Had they been left to develop by themselves -

with no contact to the outside world,

no foreign diseases,

no slave raids, no missionaries and no sheep -

passing their wisdom

down the generations through an oral tradition and growing fat

on the produce of their innovative farming techniques,

then they might make a good stand-in for the Earth,

because so far, no-one else has contacted this planet,

and we too are isolated in the cosmos.

As we know, that's not what happened.

But there seems one respect in which the island

has a lesson for us, even if the Rapa Nui themselves coped with

it in the most ingenious of ways.

The island has now lost its trees.

Its ecology has changed.

It has now moved beyond the tipping point

where it can no longer recover.

The basic lesson is very clear

in that they thought this island was the whole world.

From the highest point of the island, Terevaka,

you can see the whole thing,

they could see what was happening.

And so we on our planet,

which is the only world we know of with our species on it,

we can see very clearly what we're doing to the planet.

Our population is rocketing up and we are using natural resources at

an ever-increasing rate, and there is going to come a crunch at some time.

And we just hope and pray that science will be able to make us

sustainable and keep us going beyond that crisis, but we shall see.

One of the single most important ways in which Rapa Nui people

adapted to the changing circumstances of their island

was they pushed the envelope of creativity,

they pushed the envelope of belief,

they caused people to question the very ideas

that they had held sacred,

and then they created new symbols for enacting

those new beliefs. So this is a remarkable intellectual and artistic

way of addressing a very real economic and social problem.

I think the most important message that people could

get from Easter Island would be the resilience.

And I think it is because people here learned how

to survive and they have survived with the chin up,

always with...seeing the bright side of things,

and I think that's the best message we can give to the outside world.

IN TRANSLATION FROM HER OWN LANGUAGE:

If the young people of Rapa Nui can marry this kind of optimism

and the intelligent management of their ecology with political

solutions to their disputes with the Chilean government, there is every

reason to believe they will have a home to be proud of once more.

Their ancestors, whose faces lay buried in the earth for so long,

not seeing the loss of their incredible inheritance

and hidden from the pain and sorrow visited upon their descendants,

might finally have a reason

to stand tall once more, in silent respect for their achievements.

If this island is to rediscover a sustainable future, it's not

going to happen any time soon.

The ecological timescales for recovery will

stretch into the future, beyond the lifetimes of its young people today.

But Rapa Nui is a magical place, complex and intriguing,

challenging and enigmatic,

and if it is to stand as a metaphor for our planet, then we have a great

deal to learn from its extraordinary history and remarkable people.