The famous Moai statues of Easter Island
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DNA analysis of ancient ruins on Easter Island has revealed that the population was actually growing when Europeans arrived, rather than plummeting as some history books have reported.
The findings also indicate that there was contact between the inhabitants of this island and those of South America long before the arrival of Europeans. This island and its people are also known as Rapa Nui.
Located in the Pacific Ocean 3,500 km from South America, Rapa Nui is one of the most isolated inhabited islands on Earth. Polynesians first settled here around 1200 AD, when palm forests covered 164 square kilometers of the island.
By the time Europeans arrived in 1722, rats and excessive logging had almost completely destroyed the vegetation, and the island’s history has often been portrayed as an example of the unsustainable exploitation of ecosystems and their subsequent collapse after human population growth.
The researchers worked closely with representatives of the Rapa Nui community, and one of their aims was to verify that the people on display at the museum were in fact from the island, as efforts to repatriate remains are underway, led by modern residents.
The findings showed that 15 people who died in the past 500 years were from Rapa Nui.
Populations that are experiencing bottlenecks due to population decline will show signals in their DNA that indicate reduced genetic diversity, Moreno-Mayer said.
“We use statistical methods that allow us to reconstruct the genetic diversity of the Rapa Nui population over the past few thousand years,” he says, “and intriguingly, we find no evidence of the dramatic population decline around 1600 that would be predicted by collapse theory.”
Instead, the findings suggest that Rapa Nui’s population grew steadily until the 1860s, when slave traders abducted hundreds of islanders and many more died in a smallpox epidemic.
The study also identified regions of DNA in the ancient Rapa Nui genome that were of Native American origin, and the analysis suggests that mixing between these populations occurred around the 1300s.
“Our interpretation is that the ancestors of Rapa Nui first settled on the island and then returned to the Americas shortly thereafter,” Moreno-Mayer says.
Previous studies have also cast doubt on the idea of population decline. Carl Lipo The researcher, from New York’s Binghamton University, said it was
“fantastic” to see that a completely independent body of evidence points to the same conclusion his team reached in a paper published earlier this year using radiocarbon and archaeological evidence.
He said the research confirmed that the island was inhabited by people who lived resilient and successful lives before Europeans arrived.
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Source: www.newscientist.com
