Post #220174 by Satan's Sin on Sat, Mar 11, 2006 9:34 AM

Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed spends a whole chapter on Easter Island as a prime example of his "theory" (that humans arrive in a place, scratch out a living, and if this scratching-out works they start having lots of offspring, and as long as the living is good a society begins to emerge with leaders and worker bees, religion and art becomes not only important but an occupation, buildings and temples are built, but oops, what do you know, the population's reached the point where there's not enough food for everybody, in fact the ground has over time been robbed of nutrients, food is now all of a sudden a huge big deal and so it's time for war and then yes, cannibalism, the society "collapses," and whatever humans remain after that are tiny in number with but dim memories of the salad days.)

That Easter Island was settled in 1200 as opposed to 800 years earlier seems to me to make no difference in the validity of Diamond's theory. But the part of this new information cited in the posted article that the collapse happened after European contact with the Easter Islanders is I think simply not true. If I recall my history correctly, when Europeans came across Easter Island it was already deforested and with a very small population barely scratching out an existence and no longer erecting their wonderful statues. I'm pretty sure about this, but I could be wrong.