Civilization (dawn of)

What if Easter Island was a sustainable success story instead of an ecocidal disaster?

Photo by Horacio_Fernandez

By Jo Nova

It was always the Posterchild Catastrophe of Doomsters, but two new studies suggest Easter Island might be (mostly) a story of remarkable human achievement instead.

In environmentalist legends, Easter Island was The Ecocide: they built nearly 1,000 giant stone statues but stupidly chopped down all its trees, and died in horrible wars. It was the sorry tale of ecological collapse and deforestation that we could tell small children at bedtime. After the last trees were sliced and diced, a catastrophe of horrors surely followed as the population of 15,000 people ran out of food and no one could make a boat to escape. Obsidian flakes across the island were interpreted as weapons of war and one anthropologist claimed there was a huge civil war that ended in the battle of 1680. Environmental hell on Earth was here…

But new research on the genomes of some islanders suggests that the population was probably small all along. When the Europeans arrived there were only about 3,000 people, and a genetic analysis suggests there are no signs of a recent collapse in the population. Another study of the fields suggests they made some very sophisticated […]

Rewriting the dawn of civilization

If National Geographic had more stories like this one, I’d be inclined to subscribe. This is fascinating stuff.

Seven thousand years before Stonehenge was Göbekli Tepe in southern Turkey, where you’ll find ring upon ring of T-shaped stone towers arranged in a circle. Around 11,600 B.C. hundreds of people gathered on this mound, year after year, possibly for centuries.

There are plenty of mysteries on this hill. Some of the rocks weigh 16 tons, but archaeologists can find no homes, no hearths, no water source, and no sign of a town or village to support the hundreds of workers who built the rings of towers. The people apparently, unthinkably really, were nomadic, as far as we know, they had no wheels, and no beasts of burden. True hunter gatherers, whose first heavy building project was not a home to fend off the elements, but a religious sacred site.

Perhaps we should not be so surprised, after all, we know the pyramids, the largest and oldest surviving buildings didn’t house people or grain either — the only humans they keep warm were dead ones. In a sense, the theme repeats. It takes extraordinary expertise and effort to move tons of rock, […]