A new study puts what a researcher calls the "final nail in the coffin" regarding a longstanding narrative about Rapa Nui, aka Easter Island. Researchers who examined the preserved DNA of ancient islanders found no evidence that the population suffered a sudden and steep decline, reports CNN. That runs counter to the idea that the islanders depleted their own resources and triggered an "ecological collapse" of their society, per Smithsonian. Instead, the new study, coupled with another in June, suggests that the islanders actually did an admirable job of managing what meager resources they had.
The new study published in the journal Nature "serves as the final nail in the coffin of this collapse narrative," says Kathrin Nagele of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, adding per Nature News that "it's correcting the image of Indigenous people." DNA holds telltale clues about how a population has progressed, and "our genetic analysis shows a stably growing population from the 13th century through to European contact in the 18th century," study author Barbara Sousa da Mota of the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, tells the AFP. "This stability is critical, because it directly contradicts the idea of a dramatic pre-contact population collapse."
For years, Easter Island has been used as an example of what can happen if a population mismanages its resources and lives beyond its means. The book Collapse in 2006 by Jared Diamond particularly popularized the idea of a population crash before the first Europeans arrived in 1722, notes Nature News. But "there is definitely not a strong population collapse, like it has been argued, a population collapse where 80% of the population or 90% of the population died," study coauthor J. Víctor Moreno-Mayar of the University of Copenhagen's Globe Institute in Denmark tells CNN. (More Easter Island stories.)
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