[HN Gopher] Dried Lake Reveals New Statue on Easter Island
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Dried Lake Reveals New Statue on Easter Island
Author : Brajeshwar
Score : 73 points
Date : 2023-03-01 16:34 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.smithsonianmag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.smithsonianmag.com)
| behnamoh wrote:
| > 2000 miles off the coast of Chilli.
|
| I wonder how did the ancient people get there? I find it hard to
| believe that they just got on boats heading east deep into the
| largest ocean on the planet hoping that they would find an
| island? Unless of course, they were already there and humans'
| history dates way back (i.e., before the island shifted east due
| to tectonic plates movements)?
|
| The island does not have much resources either, so how could they
| survive? Did they cut down all the trees to use and rails for
| these huge pieces of stone? And why can we only see the heads,
| not the entire body buried under the ground?
| danans wrote:
| > I find it hard to believe that they just got on boats heading
| east deep into the largest ocean on the planet hoping that they
| would find an island?
|
| Considering that they did exactly that in order to colonize all
| of Polynesia, it wasn't a belief without solid priors. They had
| gotten pretty good at picking up signs of land, like by
| watching migrating birds. Also, many of them probably tried and
| failed to find new land. We can only see the successes in what
| were likely many attempts.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| It's not 'exactly that' though, as they had clues to where
| there might be land, star bases navigation systems etc
|
| In a sense it's still based on luck but it's far removed from
| choosing a direction and hoping for the best.
| reactspa wrote:
| Polynesians are Asian in origin.
|
| Easter Islanders are believed to be Polynesian.
|
| Here's a strange thing: there's some Asian-origin DNA in some
| of the indigenous people of Latin American. For some strange
| reason this is not discussed much.
| asdff wrote:
| It is discussed though, people write articles about it and
| very recently more evidence seems to support it. The sweet
| potato could also be supporting evidence for some contact.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Columbian_trans-
| oceanic_co...
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Datura metel is another one.
| tmn wrote:
| What's strange about that? It seems pretty likely(i'm not
| even saying it's true, just intuitive), that indigenous
| american and south america peoples are more closely related
| with east Asian folk than with indo European or African folk.
| Due to visual similarities as well as conceivable migration
| routes.
| aeyes wrote:
| The first settlers most likely made it to Rapa Nui from East
| Polynesia, this trip has been done in 19 days in a replica
| canoe in 1975.
|
| The island used to be almost completely covered by a forest, it
| got deforested over time. Initially it wouldn't have been hard
| to survive, there are lakes and caves with drinkable water and
| you can easily catch fish, there were also several species of
| land and sea birds.
|
| You can only see the heads in this picture because they were
| carved out of stone hundreds of years ago and got buried by
| sand and soil over time. Winds are very strong on the island
| and they blow directly towards this place most afternoons, it
| is also situated right under the crater wall of the volcano so
| material will naturally accumulate there. If you walk down a
| few minutes from the quarry statues lay in the ground almost
| completely uncovered. This only happens at the quarry location,
| many statues stand erected (or toppled over) all over the
| island.
| soperj wrote:
| > I find it hard to believe that they just got on boats heading
| east deep into the largest ocean on the planet hoping that they
| would find an island?
|
| At that point they would have known the island was there.
| People with boats usually used them for fishing first.
| stonemetal12 wrote:
| I think they reference Chili because that is who claims
| ownership of the island. The island closest to it is only 250
| miles away.
| permo-w wrote:
| >Unless of course, they were already there and humans' history
| dates way back (i.e., before the island shifted east due to
| tectonic plates movements)?
|
| this hypothesis' timeline is way way way off. modern humans
| have been around on the scale of hundreds of thousands of
| years. significant tectonic shifts are on the scale of tens of
| millions
|
| sea level changes? maybe. tectonic shifts? definitely not
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Islands may be detectable from 100+ miles away, based on how
| they affect wave, wildlife, and cloud patterns. Rapa Nui is
| 2000 mi from Chile, but "only" 1000 mi from Pitcairn islands,
| which were occupied by Polynesians in ~1000AD.
|
| Also, consider how many expeditions probably went out into the
| Pacific and everyone died there. Calories are relatively easy
| to harvest in many polynesian islands, leading cultures to send
| excess people on expeditions to discover and colonize new
| islands.
| dghughes wrote:
| Polynesians made it to what is now Chile in the early 1300s.
| They left chickens there the bones were discovered in
| archaeological digs. Chickens are are native to SE Asia. And
| they took back sweet potatoes native to S. America which
| appeared in SE Asia a few decades later.
| swayvil wrote:
| Seriously? Those heads have bodies?
|
| I never knew.
|
| So did they build them and then plant them? Or did they dig a
| pit and then build it in the pit and then filled in the pit.
|
| I suspect they were built. Then lots of time passed. Sea levels
| changed. Sediment collected, partially burying them.
|
| So ya, tons of time.
|
| ---
|
| Also, yr reply got strange downvotes. Maybe you hit a dogma
| nerve.
| strangeloops85 wrote:
| You could just look this up:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_Island - it's all pretty
| well understood at this point.
|
| Rapa Nui arrived between 300 and 1200CE, from eastern
| Polynesian islands (Cook and/or Marquesas). Both genetics and
| cultural similarities confirm this. Tectonic plate movements
| take (hundreds of) millennia more to have a meaningful impact
| here.
| kwere wrote:
| The Austronesian people (kinda) had ocean sailing tech before
| the foundation of Rome (753 BC), as they settled fiji and Samoa
| at that time. If i rember correctly they mapped the sea using
| weaved twigs and stones in correlation to the stars.
|
| Easter island is home of an ecological collapse as all trees
| and most fauna were extinguished resulting in (necessary)
| cannibalism
| strulovich wrote:
| Everything suggests this is what happened. Polynesian people
| had for centuries boats that could make such voyages. It's
| possible the original settlers got lucky/unlucky but the
| technology needed for it existed for them.
|
| There's also plenty of history showing smaller pacific islands
| that are colonized, so it looks like living of fish and the sea
| is possible and not a problem.
|
| There's plenty of information about this in Wikipedia.
| Alternatively, you can watch Moana.
| pengaru wrote:
| > I find it hard to believe that they just got on boats heading
| east deep into the largest ocean on the planet hoping that they
| would find an island?
|
| Considering the historic transgressions of humans done unto
| other humans, I find it rather easy to envision situations
| where escaping by boat into the unknown is the most attractive
| option.
| simoneau wrote:
| Did I miss it or is there no photo of the new statue?
| dumpHero2 wrote:
| It looks like a stone jutting out of the ground:
| https://twitter.com/GMA/status/1630195005569523714
| bombcar wrote:
| I wonder how much it would cost today to erect an Easter Island
| style statue (either there or anywhere).
| aeyes wrote:
| The only cost is the time it takes you to sculpt it out of the
| rock.
|
| The statues differ a lot in size so you can't easily answer
| that question. The biggest are very close to the quarry. Many
| didn't even make it to their final destination, they got
| abandoned or broke on the way. The picture in the article which
| is very common is just below the quarry, some 400 statues got
| left there and approximately 1000 exist in total.
|
| On the other side of the island some statues are only standing
| about 1m tall while the tallest (but unfinished) statues
| measures around 20m in height.
|
| Putting the Pukao (hat) on some of the statues is also an
| additional complexity, they were made in a different quarry.
| itronitron wrote:
| What would cause the stone statues to shrink as they move
| further from the quarry?
| bombcar wrote:
| They don't shrink, it's just that moving them was harder
| the bigger they were, so the smallest ones got moved the
| furthest (at least easiest).
| dtgriscom wrote:
| Smaller statues can be carried further without herniation?
| mattlondon wrote:
| Transport would also be a major cost. I don't think they are
| entirely sure how they were moved around, but one suggestion
| is a team of approx 20-30 men rocked/walked them to their
| final positions (i.e. upright, two teams on either side
| alternating pulling on ropes etc) over a period of days.
|
| UK minimum wage is PS10.42/h so:
|
| 10.42 * 30 men * 8 hours * 5 days = PS12,500 just for
| delivery. That doesn't include installation costs.
| cbb330 wrote:
| UK minimum wage takes into account the current supply of
| labor and many layers of politics / economic theory. This
| is not comparable to the cost of labor wrt supply in
| ancient Maori culture.
|
| And disregarding the fundamental error in comparison, the
| currency needs to be converted to the present Easter Island
| conversion rate -- does that even exist?
|
| Additionally, total cost is probably not the bottleneck.
| These were allegedly hunter gatherer's, so TIME was more
| precious than cost because current theory is
| hunter/gatherer's didn't have spare time to spend on
| statues until agriculture.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| I'm genuinely curious what would cost the most; the stone,
| transport, or the sculptor?
| saalweachter wrote:
| It's a different style of work, but check out Opus 40. An
| artist bought an old slate quarry north of New York and spent
| nearly 40 years turning it into a drystone sculpture garden.
|
| One person can make something fairly impressive given enough
| time.
| OscarCunningham wrote:
| It would depend if you had to use traditional methods or if you
| could use modern tools. In particular if you could pour it from
| concrete.
| arthurcolle wrote:
| No that's cheating. You get a 6.5x1.75x1.75m block of granite
| and a small chisel, that's it
| NoImmatureAdHom wrote:
| Lol. They weren't carving granite though, it was some very
| soft volcanic rock.
| bombcar wrote:
| Yeah, I'd consider carving something out of stone to be
| the minimum, "building" one out of cast concrete or
| whatever seems a different project.
|
| I wouldn't consider the Bass Pro Shops Pyramid to be the
| "same thing" as the Pyramids at Giza, for the same
| reasons.
| r2_pilot wrote:
| I may be dating myself a bit here, but when I was growing
| up I used to go see Disney on Ice shows at the Memphis
| Pyramid rather than it being a Bass Pro Shop...
| akiselev wrote:
| There are giant CNCs [1] that can cut marble and other stone so
| between the machine and transportation to Easter island, in the
| ballpark of a few hundred thousand dollars. Most of that is
| setup cost for the first one though, since a block of stone is
| significantly cheaper than a CNC.
|
| [1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=iI8OmfEK8cE
| raldi wrote:
| I wonder if, at the height of Rapa Nui civilization, their
| average citizen knew that there were vast continents full of
| unfathomable numbers of varied people out there, or if that
| seemed like hokey myth and most of them believed their island was
| the entirety of the world, or at least a significant portion
| thereof.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| Well, Rapa Nui mythology speaks of the original settlers coming
| to the island, so one presumes they mostly believed that they
| came to the island from another, named location, so presumably
| they believed that there were or at least had once been other
| people somewhere.
| raldi wrote:
| My understanding is that they believed they simply came from
| another, similar island. I wonder if they knew that the world
| consisted of more than just a handful of tiny islands in a
| vast ocean.
| heywherelogingo wrote:
| [flagged]
| smaddox wrote:
| Your conclusion is not supported by your premise. Reversion to
| a mean implies convergence to a stable, unmoving equilibrium.
| This requires that all forces are restoring forces in the
| vicinity of that equilibrium. While Earth's climate does have
| several restoring forces around the current equilibrium, there
| is one force in particular that is being relatively rapidly
| shifted away from the current equilibrium: the greenhouse
| effect. Both simulation and observation provide evidence that
| this force is sufficiently strong to destabilize the current
| climate equilibrium.
| TrainedMonkey wrote:
| You are traveling towards a concrete wall at 100 mph. It's all
| fine, we've been here before... moving at 1 mph.
|
| Yes, Earth had been hotter and cooler, oceans had been higher
| and way lower... What is objectively novel is velocity of the
| current climate change. That is terrifying because we don't
| know if planetary feedback mechanisms can handle that. Looking
| at Venus, the worst case scenario is pretty bleak, but probably
| unlikely given further distance from the sun.
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| Venus's atmosphere is 96.5% carbon dioxide, orders of
| magnitude more than the 0.04% found on Earth.
|
| Most of Earth's original CO2 is tied up in the kilometers of
| carbonate rocks that cover a substantial portion of the
| Earth's surface. That's not going anywhere.
| TrainedMonkey wrote:
| I would love to know more about that, what resources would
| you recommend? Concur that mostly CO2 atmosphere is highly
| unlikely, what do you think about melting Siberian
| permafrost releasing localized methane and accelerating
| melting feedback loop?
| lelandfe wrote:
| Not GP, but
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_carbon_cycle
| triyambakam wrote:
| Conspiracy theories are really entertaining to me, however true
| or false they are. And there is no shortage surrounding Rapa Nui
| and the moai. The latest I've heard is that there is a connection
| between Gobekli Tepe and Rapa Nui.
| permo-w wrote:
| not to be instantly dismissive, but how could ruins in Turkey
| have any connection whatsoever to statues built on an island in
| the middle of the Pacific 10,000 years later, besides, you
| know, being built by humans?
| earlyam wrote:
| [flagged]
| DougWebb wrote:
| The connection would have to be truly ancient. We all
| ultimately came from the same population in Africa, and
| things like fire making and stone tool making are cultural
| ideas that date back even further than that time. So maybe
| other cultural things that pop up in widely different places
| are really old too.
| canadianfella wrote:
| [dead]
| triyambakam wrote:
| Not that I am promoting the theory as true, but to steel man
| it: the same way that you find evidence of Vikings in Italy,
| or Tamils in Australia before colonization from Europe. I.e.
| that people traveled and we don't at this time have a clear
| idea exactly when and where they traveled, but more and more
| we are understanding that our modern perspective has grossly
| underestimated people of the past.
| permo-w wrote:
| evidence of Vikings in Italy is not comparable. that's a
| seafaring society, known for migration, unbound by a time
| period. now if you found evidence of some connection
| between the Vikings and the big pyramid at Giza, then that
| would be _more_ comparable, but still geographically and
| temporally closer, by at least double.
|
| by Tamils in Australia, do you mean the bell they found in
| New Zealand? I couldn't find anything significant pointing
| to evidence of Tamils in Australia from a search, but I'd
| be interested to read about it if there is?
|
| >more and more we are understanding that our modern
| perspective has grossly underestimated people of the past.
|
| while I completely agree with the sentiment, this is such a
| classic pseudo-archaeological buzzphrase. even the way you
| phrased it specifically sounds like it's coming from
| someone trying to sell me books. the connotations of it are
| off-the-charts levels of off-putting
| triyambakam wrote:
| > Northern Aboriginal Australians can trace as much as
| 11% of their genomes to migrants who reached the island
| around 4,000 years ago from India, a new study suggests.
|
| [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2013.12219
| selimthegrim wrote:
| ASI (Ancestral South Indian) population wasn't
| necessarily Tamil (but rather ancestors of Tamil) if they
| were before Dravidian speakers/Elamites migrated to
| India. Probably more akin to Sri Lankan Veddas.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| I could believe residents of Anatolia ended up in the
| Polynesian Islands somehow. I find it hard to believe a
| cultural statue pose survived all those years without
| having a massive historical record littered throughout
| Asia. Ten thousand years is a really long time to secretly
| keep some custom going.
| strangeloops85 wrote:
| There is absolutely no connection. Carbon dating and genetics
| alone disprove any such connection.
| cbb330 wrote:
| Inorganic materials can't be dated using radiocarbon
| analysis and genetics don't account for civilization
| collapses.
|
| After all, I'm in America with 0 percent of my genes
| attributed to Native American.
| DougWebb wrote:
| I'm going off memory here, but I believe the link is that some
| moai have arms and hands still visible, with the hands holding
| the belly. This same detail is also visible on some other
| ancient statues, including some at Gobekli Tepe. It's a
| specific detail that you wouldn't expect to find so similarly
| in carvings so unrelated.
| wood_spirit wrote:
| An off the cuff plausible explanation is that sticking out
| arms are challenging because they would easily break off due
| to gravity etc, whereas arms touching the body are
| straightforward. So we end up with statues that are very
| vertical all over the world because it's easier.
| [deleted]
| earlyam wrote:
| That doesn't seem so specific to imply a connection. For most
| of human history we spent our time trying to not starve.
| Hands holding a contented belly seems like a universal
| symbol.
| aprinsen wrote:
| Also could be a pregnancy/fertility motif?
| strangeloops85 wrote:
| As entertaining as they are, unfortunately these conspiracy
| theories are usually a bit racist since they deny agency to the
| actual cultures that have made this monumental architecture.
| Which is to say, the implicit comment in many of these
| ridiculous theories (including ancient aliens or whatever) is:
| "there's no way Polynesian culture could accomplish this".
|
| Of course, there is plenty of archeological evidence of
| precisely how the moai were built, and why they were later
| toppled.
| canadianfella wrote:
| [dead]
| tmn wrote:
| What are these conspiracy theories? If I'm on the same page
| as you, these discussions are all around trying to reason
| about forgotten history. No conspiracy required.
| triyambakam wrote:
| I haven't come across that at all. And actually it's the
| opposite. That the conventional view is that the ancient
| culture is very primitive, while the alternative ("conspiracy
| theorist") views are that the people were more
| technologically advanced than given credit for.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| It's not always opposite; "aliens built the pyramids"
| theories often rest on "the Egyptians couldn't have built
| it this big/precise", for example.
| swayvil wrote:
| That ism logic has always tickled me.
|
| Thing X is popular. Therefore disassociating group Y from X
| is rude to Y. But never a thought that X might not actually
| be so cool.
|
| It says something about the way our minds work.
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