Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island has never suffered a devastating population collapse, according to a ancient DNA analysis of 15 ancient inhabitants of remote island in the Pacific Ocean .
The analysis also suggested that inhabitants of the island, located about 3,700 kilometers off the coast of South America, arrived in the Americas in the 1300s — long before Christopher Columbus arrived in the New World in 1492.
Colonized by Polynesian sailors 800 years ago, Rapa Nui, now part of Chile, has hundreds of monumental stone heads that echo the past. The island has always been an intriguing place.
Some experts, such as geographer Jared Diamond in his 2005 book “Collapse,” have used Easter Island as a cautionary tale of how exploitation of limited resources can result in catastrophic population decline, ecological devastation and the destruction of a society through internal conflict.
However, this theory is controversial, and other archaeological evidence suggests that Rapa Nui was home to a small but sustainable society.
The new analysis marks the first time scientists have used ancient DNA to address the question of whether Easter Island faced a self-inflicted social collapse, helping to shed light on its mysterious past.
Easter Island Genomes
To further investigate Rapa Nui’s history, researchers sequenced the genomes of 15 ancient inhabitants who lived on the island over the past 400 years. The remains are housed at the Musée de l’Homme, or Museum of Man, in Paris, which is part of France’s National Museum of Natural History.
Researchers found no evidence of a genetic bottleneck corresponding to a sharp population decline, according to the study published Wednesday in scientific journal Nature.
Instead, the analysis suggested that the island was home to a small population that gradually increased in size until the 1860s. At that point, the study noted, slave raiders from Peru forcibly removed a third of the island’s population.
“There was definitely not a major population collapse, as has been argued, a collapse where 80% or 90% of the population died,” said study co-author J. Víctor Moreno-Mayar, an assistant professor of geogenetics at the Globe Institute at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark.
The genomes also revealed that Easter Islanders had exchanged genes with a Native American population, suggesting that the inhabitants crossed the ocean to South America between 1250 and 1430, before Columbus arrived in the Americas — and long before Europeans reached Rapa Nui in 1722.
Between 6% and 11% of the genomes of the individuals studied can be traced back to ancestors from coastal South America, the study found. The team’s analysis provided information about when these two groups met and had descendants. The authors estimated that this occurred 15 to 17 generations before the individuals studied.
Polynesian navigators
The discovery isn’t entirely surprising. Oral histories and DNA analysis of the island’s current inhabitants have suggested such ancestry, and remains of sweet potatoes, an import from South America, have been found in the region that predate European contact, Moreno-Mayar explained.
Some experts, and the general public, are reluctant to abandon the doomsday stories about Easter Island, said Lisa Matisoo-Smith, a professor of biological anthropology at the University of Otago in New Zealand.
However, the ancient genomes add to a growing body of evidence that the idea of a self-inflicted population collapse in the area is a false narrative, said Matisoo-Smith, who was not involved in the study.
“We know that the early Polynesian navigators who discovered and colonized Rapa Nui at least 800 years ago were among the world’s greatest navigators and explorers,” she said in a statement released by the New Zealand Science Media Centre.
“Their ancestors spent at least 3,000 years living in an oceanic environment. They sailed east across thousands of miles of open ocean and encountered nearly every habitable island in the vast Pacific. It would be even more surprising if they did not reach the coast of South America. These results provide intriguing evidence about the timing of that contact.”
Matisoo-Smith noted that scholars based in Pacific regions had already questioned the narrative of ecocide and social collapse, based on a variety of archaeological evidence.
“But now, we finally have ancient DNA evidence that directly addresses both of these questions and perhaps allows us to focus on a more realistic narrative of the history of this intriguing, though in fact quite typical of Polynesian islands,” she said.
One study published in Junebased on satellite images of land previously used for growing food, came to a similar conclusion.
DNA analysis of human remains
The human remains used in the new DNA analysis were collected by French scholar Alphonse Pinart in 1877 and Swiss anthropologist Alfred Métraux in 1935, according to the latest study, which cited museum archives.
The circumstances under which the remains were taken are unclear, the study said, but they were part of a broader trend of collecting in colonized regions during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The research team worked with Rapa Nui communities and government institutions to obtain consent for the study. The scientists said they hope the results will help facilitate the repatriation of the remains so that the individuals can be buried on the island.
This content was originally published in DNA study disproves theory of intentional collapse on Easter Island; find out more on the CNN Brasil website.
Source: CNN Brasil
Charles Grill is a tech-savvy writer with over 3 years of experience in the field. He writes on a variety of technology-related topics and has a strong focus on the latest advancements in the industry. He is connected with several online news websites and is currently contributing to a technology-focused platform.
