[HN Gopher] More evidence against the "ecocide" theory of Easter...
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More evidence against the "ecocide" theory of Easter Island
Author : pseudolus
Score : 55 points
Date : 2024-06-21 18:33 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| Jiro wrote:
| The article says this, but it then goes on to say:
|
| >To increase yields, the natives initially cut down the island's
| trees to get nutrients back into the soil.
|
| >When there were no more trees, they engaged in...
|
| That sounds to me like the theory is correct, at least to the
| extent of the islanders using up their trees unsustainably. The
| fact that they then found other methods of surviving and their
| population didn't go down after using up the trees doesn't mean
| that they didn't permanently damage the environment.
| SamPatt wrote:
| They didn't need trees to survive, as proven by their survival.
| The claim is that their population hit a plateau due to the
| space available for farming, instead of dramatically collapsing
| as previously claimed.
|
| If survival is the metric for success, then they didn't
| permanently damage their environment. As much as we love trees
| that's hard to imagine, but that's my interpretation of the
| study.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _That sounds to me like the theory is correct_
|
| No, because the theory posits that this led to a _collapse_.
|
| What this article is arguing is that there was no collapse --
| the population hadn't been higher when there were trees.
|
| You can argue that the environmental damage was bad for other
| reasons, but then you're talking about something totally
| different.
| mrighele wrote:
| > What this article is arguing is that there was no collapse
| -- the population hadn't been higher when there were trees.
|
| But that is not the definition of ecocide. Ecocide is only
| about the destruction of the ecosystem, and the article
| itself says that it happened.
|
| What is disproven is the theory that after the environmental
| destruction the population collapsed. I don't know what this
| theory should be named, but I think "ecocide theory" is a
| poor choice.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Oh that's an interesting point. The article seems to be
| treating the collapse hypothesis and the ecocide theory as
| the same thing, and I guess I was too. I suppose you could
| separate them out as two parts.
|
| Although if it continued to support the same human
| population, is it really fair to call it ecocide? The
| environment was transformed but certainly not "killed" as
| the "-cide" would require.
|
| I mean I guess it really depends on whether you would call
| cutting down forests in New York State to grow fields of
| corn "ecocide". Yes you eliminated one environment but
| those fields of corn are very much alive. So I don't think
| many people would call that "ecocide".
| csours wrote:
| > "They estimate that the island could support about 3,000 people
| --roughly the same number of inhabitants European explorers
| encountered when they arrived."
| karaterobot wrote:
| > He and Hunt concluded that the people of Rapa Nui continued to
| thrive well after 1600, which would warrant a rethinking of the
| popular narrative that the island was destitute when Europeans
| arrived in 1722.
|
| Wait, so the thesis here is that they never actually collapsed,
| that the 3,000 person population noted by Europeans was always
| the stable population of the island?
|
| It also suggests that they _did_ cut down all their trees, but
| they did so not to build Moai statues, but to sort of kickstart
| their lithic agriculture.
|
| I don't know enough to know whether cutting all your trees down
| and not being able to grow them back counts as an ecological
| collapse, or whether that was the only way they could sustain
| even three thousand people.
|
| I'd love to hear the other side of this argument. I'm no expert,
| but this sounds weird to me.
| avar wrote:
| It counts as ecological collapse, but that's not being
| discussed here, but whether the island became destitute,
| triggering _population_ collapse.
|
| Imagine paving over the entire Amazon and replacing it with
| monocrop greenhouses. It would be massive ecological collapse,
| but in terms of producing food calories for humans it might
| become more productive.
| yreg wrote:
| There were also other kinds of collapse - they forgot writing,
| they forgot how they've made/transported the statues, perhaps
| other technology as well.
|
| They have also toppled the statues and gave up on their gods so
| there must have been some major societal shift.
| soperj wrote:
| How did they topple them? they were buried up to the head?
| onlypassingthru wrote:
| People just knocked them over. If you grew up on a farm,
| you've probably heard of cow tipping. If you grew up on
| Rapa Nui, you've probably heard of moai tipping.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| Cow tipping is, according to all reputable sources,
| largely an urban myth about what takes place in the rural
| regions.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| As someone who grew up in cow country, I would always
| hear about cow tipping from people who _didn 't_ know
| anything about cows. The story would almost always go
| like this:
|
| Some Dude: We went cow tipping last night, it was
| hilarious
|
| Me: So, you actually tipped a 1300 lbs cow over?
|
| Some Dude: Well...I didn't, but Jake did.
|
| Me: So you saw Jake tip a cow over?
|
| Some Dude: Well...no, but Jake told me that he did it and
| I believed him.
| armada651 wrote:
| In actuality Jake was making a pun and had simply fed a
| cow a $5 bill.
| contingencies wrote:
| _they forgot writing, they forgot how they've made
| /transported the statues, perhaps other technology as well._
|
| Boats come to mind.
| pvaldes wrote:
| > I don't know enough to know whether cutting all your trees
| down and not being able to grow them back counts as an
| ecological collapse, or whether that was the only way they
| could sustain even three thousand people.
|
| Knowing the genus of those palms is essential to answer this
| question
| onlypassingthru wrote:
| It wasn't palms, it was toromiro.
|
| [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophora_toromiro
| alephnerd wrote:
| Here's the original article -
| https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.ado1459
|
| and the thesis:
|
| > Rapa Nui (Easter Island) is often used as an example of how
| overexploitation of limited resources resulted in a catastrophic
| population collapse. A vital component of this narrative is that
| the rapid rise and fall of pre-contact Rapanui population growth
| rates was driven by the construction and overexploitation of once
| extensive rock gardens. However, the extent of island-wide rock
| gardening, while key for understanding food systems and
| demography, must be better understood ... We show that the extent
| of this agricultural infrastructure is substantially less than
| previously claimed and likely could not have supported the large
| population sizes that have been assumed.
|
| Tl;dr - Any argument about population collapse doesn't make sense
| as the maximum population is overestimated.
| agarren wrote:
| The excellent "Fall of Civilizations" podcast covers this well,
| too:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCyzrie_les&list=PLR7yrLMHm1...
|
| Takeaway: Jared Diamond's Easter Island collapse theory seem
| remarkably out of touch.
| timeon wrote:
| Takeaway there is bit more serious.
| pvaldes wrote:
| I can think on several alternative explanations to the stone
| gardens that are simpler, logical and don't involve fertilizing
| the soil.
|
| Easter Island is the closer situation that we have to a Mars
| colony. Ecocide don't needs people deliberately chopping every
| single tree. Just triggering an irreversible process that can
| slowly evolve for a couple generations.
|
| Human stupidity started the process, but rats alone would be more
| than capable to finish it and kill every single inhabitant on the
| island by thirst or diseases
| pvaldes wrote:
| The presence of stone gardens can be explained simply because
| everybody in that place was cutting rocks to build giant
| sculptures, and this should be done somewhere or dumped
| somewhere. The really strange part would be not finding rubble
| and stone gravel accumulations in many parts of the island.
| IainIreland wrote:
| This seems unlikely, given that the moai were mostly carved
| from tuff from a specific crater
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rano_Raraku), whereas the
| stone gardens are made of "fresh basalt quarried at nearby
| valley rims" (https://evols.library.manoa.hawaii.edu/server/a
| pi/core/bitst...). There's a lot of research supporting the
| conclusion that these stone accumulations were agricultural.
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