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By Aristos Georgiou
Science and Health Reporter
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A genetic study has revealed that a self-inflicted population collapse is unlikely to have caused the decline of the ancient inhabitants of Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island.
The latest findings, published in the journal Nature, provides further evidence against the popular and controversial "ecological suicide" or "ecocide" theory.
Rapa Nui—a special territory of Chile in the Polynesian region of the southeastern Pacific Ocean—is one of the most isolated inhabited places in the world, located more than 2,100 miles west of the South American continent, and around 1,100 miles east of the closest inhabited island. It has long captured the imagination thanks to its archaeological remains, which include the iconic stone statues known as moai.
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Despite the remoteness of Rapa Nui, archaeological and genetic evidence shows that Polynesian peoples from the west had already reached the island by sea around 800 years ago.
But two prominent points of contention have arisen from the extensive study of the island's history. The first is the "ecocide" theory, which proposes that the ancient population suffered a major population collapse thanks to resource overexploitation in the 1600s—prior to the arrival of Europeans in 1722 and Peruvian slave raiders in the 1860s.
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The second is the possibility that the inhabitants of Rapa Nui reached the Americas—after crossing the Pacific—and had contact with Native Americans before Europeans arrived in 1722.
In order to address these questions, the study authors reconstructed the genomic history of the Rapanui, the inhabitants of the island.
They did this by taking samples from the remains of 15 Rapanui individuals using a minimally invasive method and analyzing their genomes. The remains, which are housed in the French National Museum of Natural History, were collected in 1877 and 1934-35. (The study was conducted in collaboration with representatives of the Rapanui community on the island.)
The work revealed no evidence of a genetic bottleneck that would correspond to a major population collapse in the 17th century, as proposed by the ecocide theory.
Instead their analysis suggests that Rapa Nui was home to a small population that steadily increased in size after the initial peopling of the island until around the 1860s.
"Our genetic analysis shows a stably growing population from the 13th century through to European contact in the 18th century. This stability is critical because it directly contradicts the idea of a dramatic pre-contact population collapse," study first author Bárbara Sousa da Mota, a researcher at the Faculty of Biology and Medicine at University of Lausanne, France, said in a press release.
"Over the years, European visitors had a devastating impact on the Rapanui as they killed local inhabitants and introduced deadly pathogens that the islanders had not been exposed to before," the authors wrote in the study. "Furthermore, in the 1860s, Peruvian slave raiders kidnapped a third of the population, and only a few were repatriated after international condemnation of the slaving practices. Subsequently, a smallpox outbreak decimated the Rapanui population and it fell to an estimated 110 individuals."
Although it has been well established that the environment in Rapa Nui was affected by human activity—for example, via deforestation—after the initial peopling of the island and prior to European contact, it remains unclear whether or how these changes would have led to a population collapse.
Several lines of evidence have been used to challenge the ecocide scenario. For example, an analysis of satellite imagery, published in a separate Science Advances paper earlier this year, revealed the extent of rock gardens on the island. The work suggested that the inhabitants found ways to manage the land sustainably and protect it from erosion.
"The [Science Advances] study concludes that there were never more than 3,000 people living on Rapa Nui—a number close to that observed by the first colonizers and far from a previous estimate of 15,000 inhabitants—implying that the hypothesized collapse was always a fantasy," Stephan Schiffels and Kathrin Nägele from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, who were not involved in the Nature paper, wrote in an accompanying News & Views article.
But despite this kind of evidence, the collapse hypothesis has remained "very popular," according to the authors of the latest study, which proposes instead that the Rapanui population was resilient despite a changing environment.
The team also found that the island's ancient inhabitants exhibited Native American DNA, indicating contact. This mixing appears to have occurred somewhere between 1250 and 1430. While the study cannot reveal where this contact occurred, when viewed alongside archaeological evidence and oral histories, the finding suggests that ancient Polynesians may have reached the Americas long before Columbus, as well as the arrival of Europeans in Rapa Nui.
"Many thought that present-day Rapanui carry Indigenous American genetic ancestry due to European colonial activity. But instead, the data strongly suggests that Rapanui and Indigenous Americans met and admixed centuries before Europeans made it to Rapa Nui or the Americas. We believe this means that Rapanui were capable of even more formidable voyages across the Pacific than previously established," da Mota said.
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Update 09/11/24, 1:51 a.m. ET: This article was updated to include additional information from the Nature study, the accompanying News & Views article and the press release.
Reference
Moreno-Mayar, J. V., Sousa da Mota, B., Higham, T., Klemm, S., Edmunds, M. G., Stenderup, J., Iraeta-Orbegozo, M., Laborde, V., Heyer, E., Hochstetter, F. T., Friess, M., Allentoft, M. E., Schroeder, H., Delaneau, O., Malaspinas, A.-S., Duployer, B., Coqueugniot, H., Dutour, O., Higham, T., & Sikora, M. (2024). Ancient Rapanui genomes reveal resilience and pre-European contact with the Americas. Nature, 633(8029). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07881-4
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