They rule out that there has been an “ecocide” on Easter Island

A study on the cultivation of sweet potatoes on Easter Island concludes that there was never, as was believed until now, an overpopulation that caused an “ecocide” for the first inhabitants of Polynesian origin of that remote Pacific territory, belonging to Chile.

The authors, who published their study on Friday in the journal Science, point out that the missing civilization of Rapa Nui, the island’s native name, never “reached unsustainable levels” that caused its supposed collapse.

Rather, the Polynesians who arrived about a thousand years ago to the remote island territory, located 3,700 km from the Chilean mainland, “found ways to cope with the island’s severe limitations and maintained a small, stable population for centuries.”

The researchers are based on “a new and sophisticated inventory of ingenious rock gardens,” where the Rapanui people grew sweet potatoes, a staple food in their diet.

A small town

According to the researchers, the surface of these crops could only support about 2,000 or 3,000 people, a number that the Europeans found when they arrived on the Island in the 18th century, and not the 17,500 or even 25,000 that were estimated to date based on the need for labor to sculpt its famous stone sculptures called Moais.

Scientists have searched for decades for the cause of the disappearance of the civilization behind these monoliths: “This shows that the population could never have been as large as some of the previous estimates,” the study’s lead author, Dylan, said in a statement. Davis, a postdoctoral researcher in archeology at Columbia.

“The lesson is the opposite of the collapse theory. “People were able to be very resilient in the face of limited resources, modifying the environment in a way that helped them,” she added.

Technique to protect crops

To protect themselves from adverse conditions, early settlers used a technique called “rock gardening” or “lithic mulching,” which involves scattering stones on low surfaces to protect crops from salt spray and wind.

The technique has also been used by indigenous people of New Zealand, the Canary Islands or the southwestern United States.

Carl Lipo, an archaeologist at Binghamton University and co-author of the research, added that accumulated evidence based on radiocarbon dating of artifacts and human remains also does not support the idea of ​​large populations.

Easter Island, formed of volcanic rock, is possibly the most remote inhabited place on Earth and one of the last to be colonized.

It is located about 5,000 km west of the Cook Islands, from where it is believed that settlers set sail around the year 1200 AD.

Currently, the island is inhabited by about 8,000 people, to whom about 100,000 tourists join each year.