Easter Island and Pacifica. Secrets of forgotten civilizations

Between Eurasia and Australia in the north and South and North America in the south is the Pacific Ocean - the largest and deepest on Earth. It is here, scientists and mystics suggest, that you need to look for the ancient sunken continent - pacifida.

Easter Island is surrounded on all sides by the ocean. To Chile, to which the territory of the island belongs, - 3703 kilometers, and to Tahiti - 4500 kilometers. The island is very small, its area is only 163.6 square kilometers.

In 1578 spanish navigator Juan Fernandez set off in search of the unknown South Land. Due to the storm, the ship went off course and arrived at strange island, inhabited by white, richly dressed people, completely unlike either the inhabitants of Peru or the inhabitants of Chile.

The sailors decided that the goal had been achieved and returned to Chile to prepare for a serious expedition to an unknown land. The preparations were kept secret, so when Juan Fernandez died suddenly, no one could continue his work. For many years mysterious land was forgotten.

In 1687, the English pirate Edward Davies discovered a low Sandy shore, and a few tens of kilometers to the west - a long strip of land. However, the pirate did not go ashore.

In 1772, a small rocky island was spotted from the ships of the squadron of the Dutch Admiral Jacob Roggeveen. Since the day was a holiday, Easter, this name was given to the newly discovered land.

All sailors seem to have seen different lands. But, perhaps, nevertheless, it was originally a large piece of land, which gradually flooded and changed its shape over the course of decades? Perhaps this land was nothing more than a Pacifida living out its last days?

The hypothesis that Easter Island was previously part of a vast land on which representatives of a highly developed civilization lived has a number of circumstantial evidence. Following dead culture there may be an original writing system - the still undeciphered hieroglyphs kohau rongo-rongo.

A lot of controversy is caused by various found wooden figurines, petroglyphs, small plastic in stone and, of course, the famous giant moai stone sculptures.

“In all houses there are wooden planks or sticks covered with some kind of hieroglyphic signs. These are figures of animals unknown on the island; the natives draw them with sharp stones (obsidian). Each figure has its own name; but since they rarely make such tablets, it makes me think that the signs - the remains of ancient writing - have been preserved with them according to the custom that they follow, without looking for meaning in it.
Eugène Eyrat, the first missionary to arrive on Easter Island

In addition, the islanders have rites (for example, the rite of choosing a “bird-man”) that are not practiced by any other Pacific people.

Polynesians call Easter Island "Rapa Nui", that is, "Big Rapa", as opposed to "Rapa Iti", that is, "Little Rapa" - an island located southwest of Easter. The British traveler James Cook recorded the name "Vaihu", but most likely, this word was not used for the entire island, but only for part of it.

The natives also called their island "Mata-ki-te-Rangi" (Eye of Heaven) and "Hiti-Ai-Rangi" (Edge of Heaven). But most often the name "Te Pito-o-te-Khenua" was used, which translates as "The Navel of the Earth." Thor Heyerdahl believed that the self-name of the island reflected its true position. A highly developed people lived here. It was from here that culture and scientific knowledge spread among other tribes of the islands of Oceania.

So, maybe, in fact, at first glance, a fantastic theory is confirmed? Was the tiny island once the center of a huge continent, the heart of a highly developed ancient civilization?

If Easter Island was part of the Pacifida, which once went under water, the memory of this, as well as of a grandiose catastrophe, would certainly have been preserved in myths, legends, and traditions. And such legends do exist.

True, it is necessary to make a reservation: most likely, these legends have little in common with ancient legends - in the 19th century, Peruvian slave traders attacked the island and took all the men out of there to be sold into slavery; at the request of the governments of England and France, the surviving islanders were returned to their homeland, but a smallpox epidemic broke out on the ship, and only 15 people survived; they brought the disease to Easter Island, and soon there were only 111 people left of the entire population.

And they, in turn, were very quickly and very cleverly converted to Christianity, so that the last threads that connected the islanders with their ancient culture, were broken. Even ancient tablets with inscriptions were burned as "pagan" or safely hidden from prying eyes.

Later, the Bishop of Tahiti, Jossan, got a few miraculously preserved wooden tablets. However, he "did not see any writing on them that would connect individual concepts with each other." There was nothing like "unknown animals on the island" either.

Jossan did not find any convincing evidence that the tablets and the writing system belonged to extreme antiquity. The Bishop wrote:

“If they did exist, as Brother Eiro's message seems to indicate, it can only be assumed that they all fell victim to the flames. How sad that none of the ancient tablets has come down to us! Those that I have rescued clearly belong to a later time, and I am almost sure that they are only the remains of the writing of the past, because we see on them only what is in the nature of this small island.

To date, attempts to decipher the writing of Easter Island have not yielded results. At the very least, this kind of research does not help answer the main question: Was Easter Island part of the greater Pacific continent?

Jossan interpreted one of the signs as an image of a rat. Thor Heyerdahl, in the same hieroglyph, saw a jaguar-like feline: "A round head with a fiercely gaping mouth, a thin neck and a strongly arched torso resting on long bent legs." However, there were never cats on Easter Island, so Heyerdahl suggested that the writing of the islanders is of South American origin. The researcher von Hevesy "read" the same sign as "monkey", which gave him reason to associate the writing of Easter Island with ancient civilization that existed about 5,000 years ago in the Indus Valley. There is also an opinion that this hieroglyph denotes a person.

For many years, science has not come to an agreement on the correct interpretation of this sign.

However, the very fact of the presence of writing testifies to many things.

The emergence of writing is a sure sign of the birth of the state. The once united tribe is stratified into classes, it becomes necessary to regularly and accurately record the facts, to describe the events taking place. Therefore, if writing existed on Easter Island, then there was also a state - at least a primitive and nascent one.

In 1913, Macmillan Brown, exploring the islands of the Pacific Ocean, met with a tribe living on the small atoll of Woleai, in Micronesia, at the opposite end of Oceania from Easter. The tribe consisted of only 600 people. Five members of this tribe owned a unique script, not similar to any of the existing ones. It would be strange to assume that the author of this letter is one of those five people.

Of course, there were cases when the natives of the North and West Africa, as well as Alaska, invented their own script, but only after getting acquainted with the European letter writing, and in the new icons, elements of the Latin alphabet or the outlines of objects of sale were guessed. The writings of the Voleai people were unique.

Brown was convinced that this writing was created by representatives of a large, well-organized community, residents major state that once existed in this part of the Pacific Ocean.

It turned out that two small peoples lived on opposite ends of Oceania, possessing original writing, which indicates the existence of their civilization and state. Maybe Micronesia and Easter Island are the last oases where the remains of a lost highly developed civilization, the Pacifids, have been preserved? Maybe they trace their history from this lost continent?

gigantic stone statues moai - the famous symbol of Easter Island - are one of the the greatest mysteries our planet. Moai (heads and bodies without legs) are monolithic, carved from a single stone (from whole piece compressed volcanic ash). They all have similar features: heavy square chins, elongated earlobes and high foreheads.

However, each moai has a special, unique appearance, as if the sculptors were trying to convey a portrait resemblance. Now the statues have empty eye sockets, but scientists have proven that moai once had eyes made of coral.

Most of the statues stand on the coast and look inland, but seven moai are turned to face the sea and are quite far from the water.

Scholars are hotly debating whether moai are images of humans or aliens from outer space.

Moai height ranges from 3 to 21 meters, and weight - from 10 to 90 tons. An unfinished statue was found on the island - 20 meters high and weighing 270 tons. In total, there are 997 moai on the island, 394 of which are unfinished and abandoned in quarries.

Some of the statues were placed on ahu - special stone platforms, probably intended for certain rituals. The stone blocks are not fastened with any mortar, but they are so precisely fitted that even a thin knife blade cannot be inserted into the gap between them. The heads of the statues are crowned with pukau - cylindrical caps made of red stones.

Moai were made in quarries located in the depths of the island, in the craters of volcanoes, and then delivered to the installation site. Some of the statues remained in the quarries. It seems that the work on the construction of the moai was hastily stopped, and the statues were left to fend for themselves.

Perhaps it was a natural disaster disaster, after which there was no one to continue working. Or maybe uninvited guests appeared on the island, again, people or aliens who destroyed most indigenous population.

There are no rivers, streams or lakes on Easter Island. source fresh water serve as volcanic craters located along the edges of the island. They have several lakes with rainwater.

By official version, giant statues were created by order of the ruling elite of the island - the so-called long-eared ones (it was they who had those very elongated earlobes - the aristocrats wore massive jewelry that stretched the lobes). Short-earedness was a sign of belonging to the poor strata, to the mob - it was this very mob that created the moai on the orders of the rulers. In the 16th century, the short-ears raised a rebellion that ended in victory and stopped making moai.

However, how did the islanders, who did not know iron, carve out multi-ton statues and how did they manage to deliver them to the place of installation? The aborigines claimed that the moai moved by themselves. Perhaps the ancient inhabitants of Easter had telekinetic abilities and could force the statues to move with the effort of thought?

Thor Heyerdahl conducted an interesting experiment. He asked the last representatives of the long-eared clan to reproduce all the stages of the creation of the moai. A group of natives went to the quarry, where they carved the statue with the help of stone hammers. Hammers that quickly became unusable were immediately replaced with new ones.

Then the natives moved the 12-ton statue to the installation site. The statue was dragged by drag, in a horizontal position, having mobilized for this large group assistants, then raised to a vertical position with the help of a device made of stones and logs - the stones were placed under the base of the statue, three logs were used as a lever.

The islanders who participated in the experiment told Heyerdahl that, although the moai had not been built for a long time, the secrets of their creation were passed from mouth to mouth, from older to younger, with the old people forcing the youth to repeat what they heard over and over again until they were convinced that the knowledge was firmly internalized. .

In 1986, Heyerdahl, together with the Czech engineer and experimental archaeologist Pavel Pavel, set up another experiment. It turned out that a group of seventeen people were able to drag a vertically placed 20-ton statue, tied with ropes, turning it over.

There is also an opinion that the islanders "brought" moai to the installation site on a bed of rolling round logs.

So, to move the moai, you do not need to have extraordinary abilities, such a task is quite within the power ordinary people, and even not knowing technical progress.

In the 18th and early 19th centuries, according to European travelers who visited Easter, most moai statues stood upright. But something or someone overthrew the stone giants from their pedestals. And again, an obvious, at first glance, answer arises. The statues fell due to a natural disaster or an invasion of conquerors, that is, for the same reasons that the natives abandoned their work in the quarries.

According to the testimonies of navigators who visited Easter Island during the 18th-19th centuries, the statues fell gradually. Everything remained year after year fewer statues that maintained a vertical position. In 1838, Admiral Dupetit-Thouare reported nine standing moai, and soon all the stone giants of Easter Island were on the ground. This fate has passed only the statues dug into the ground near the Rano Raraku quarry.

So who are they portraying? stone giants? And why for decades, and even centuries, they were created and placed on the seashore?

The first answer that comes up is that moai are the figures of the gods. A perfectly reasonable hypothesis. True, there is one "but". Today, only 4,888 people live on the small island. Hardly in old times the Easter population was significantly larger. It turns out that for every ten people there was one statue. Are there too many sacred images?

There is a version that stone moai- Ancestors of the Easter Aborigines. This hypothesis explains why statues have different height: supposedly the size of the moai reflects the merits of this or that ancient islander.

There is also an opinion that the moai were supposed to protect the island from the oncoming sea: either as breakwaters, or as magical guardians.

Finally, some researchers believe that Easter Island once served as a temple for guests from a parallel universe, where they performed religious rites, and stone statues served precisely for these purposes. When, for unknown reasons, the window to the parallel universe slammed shut, work on the creation of new statues ceased.

For the first time, paleogenetics managed to "resurrect" and decipher the DNA of the ancient inhabitants of Easter Island. This discovery gave scientists from the University of California at Santa Cruz (USA) the opportunity to conclude that the population of the island was related to the Polynesians.

However, before the first appearance on this mysterious island Europeans, its inhabitants have never been in contact with other groups of people, scientists write in an article published in the journal Current Biology. According to them, there are no traces confirming the contacts of the inhabitants of Easter Island and the Indians. South America was not found. However, many hints of such contacts have been found.

On Easter Island, full of mysteries, about two thousand years ago, there was a bizarre civilization of the Polynesians. After themselves, they left numerous traces in the form of giant moai idols. Most likely, the idols are the deified figures of the ancestors and relatives of the ancient inhabitants of the island. This civilization disappeared even before the arrival of the first colonizers. The reasons, as scientists suggest, are two: the depletion of resources as a result of the predatory extermination of forests and animals by the Polynesians, and the related war between different tribes of the natives.

These wars ended with the fact that the moai culture almost disappeared, and a more primitive culture of "birdmen" took its place. Due to the destruction in the 19th century of the remnants of the former civilization, no one has been able to decipher unique system writings of the ancient inhabitants of the island.

But the most mysterious is the origin of the inhabitants: the absence of "pure" lines of the islanders did not allow geneticists and historians to understand whether the inhabitants of the island are purebred Polynesians who migrated to Rapa Nui from Australia and New Guinea, or whether they are descendants of mixed marriages of ancient Indians and migrants from Oceania.

Most scientists support the second theory. But in general, fierce debates on this topic did not stop among researchers.

It turns out that geneticists from the University of California were able to resolve these disputes with the help of DNA obtained from the bones of five ancient inhabitants of the island. Three of them, according to scientists, lived before the arrival of Europeans on Easter Island, in 1445-1624 AD, and two others - shortly before or already during the rule of slave owners, in the early 19th and 20th centuries.

By reconstructing and comparing their DNA, geneticists hoped to figure out which of the two hypotheses was correct and find, if possible, the home of the Easter Island civilization. Of course, the task was not easy, says one of the American researchers, Lars Feren-Schmitz.

However, he and his colleagues managed to restore full version mitochondrial DNA from all these people and get some information on the 30,000 mutations in the rest of their genome, which is enough to find their genetic roots. Their conclusions were unequivocal: the inhabitants of Easter Island lived in isolation for several thousand years after their arrival on this land, and did not contact the Indians or other peoples of the planet until the early 18th century, when the island was discovered by sailors from Europe.

To the question of where to look for the homeland mysterious people there is no definite answer from Easter Island today. Feren-Schmitz and his colleagues are very hopeful that a detailed study of the genome of the inhabitants of southern Polynesia will help find an answer to this question.

Between Eurasia and Australia in the north and South and North America in the south is the Pacific Ocean - the largest and deepest on Earth. It is here, scientists and mystics suggest, that one should look for the ancient sunken continent - Pacifida.

In 1578, the Spanish navigator Juan Fernandez set out in search of the unknown South Land. Because of the storm, the ship went off course and arrived at a strange island inhabited by white, richly dressed people, completely different from either the inhabitants of Peru or the inhabitants of Chile.

In 1687, the English pirate Edward Davis discovered a low sandy coast south of Chile, and a long strip of land a few dozen kilometers to the west. However, the pirate did not go ashore.

In 1772, a small rocky island was spotted from the ships of the squadron of the Dutch Admiral Jacob Roggeveen. Since the day was a holiday, Easter, this name was given to the newly discovered land.

All navigators seem to have seen different lands. But, perhaps, nevertheless, it was originally a large piece of land, which gradually flooded and changed its shape over the course of decades? Perhaps this land was nothing more than a Pacifida living out its last days?

The hypothesis that Easter Island was previously part of a vast land on which representatives of a highly developed civilization lived has a number of circumstantial evidence. A trace of a lost culture may be an original writing system - the still undeciphered hieroglyphs kohau rongo-rongo.

A lot of controversy is caused by various found wooden figurines, petroglyphs, small plastic in stone and, of course, the famous giant moai stone sculptures.

“In all houses there are wooden planks or sticks covered with some kind of hieroglyphic signs. These are figures of animals unknown on the island; the natives draw them with sharp stones (obsidian). Each figure has its own name; but since they make such tablets in rare cases, this makes me think that the signs - the remains of ancient writing - have been preserved by them according to the custom that they follow, without looking for meaning in it.

Eugène Eyrat, the first missionary to arrive on Easter Island

In addition, the islanders have rites (for example, the rite of choosing a “bird-man”) that are not practiced by any other Pacific people.

Polynesians call Easter Island "Rapa Nui", that is, "Big Rapa", as opposed to "Rapa Iti", that is, "Small Rapa" - an island located southwest of Easter. The British traveler James Cook recorded the name "Vaihu", but most likely, this word was not used for the entire island, but only for part of it.

So, maybe, in fact, at first glance, a fantastic theory is confirmed? Was the tiny island once the center of a huge continent, the heart of a highly developed ancient civilization?

True, it is necessary to make a reservation: most likely, these legends have little in common with ancient legends - in the 19th century, Peruvian slave traders attacked the island and took all the men out of there to sell them into slavery; at the request of the governments of England and France, the surviving islanders were returned to their homeland, but a smallpox epidemic broke out on the ship, and only 15 people survived; they brought the disease to Easter Island, and soon there were only 111 people left of the entire population.

And they, in turn, were very quickly and very cleverly converted to Christianity, so that the last threads that connected the islanders with their ancient culture were cut off. Even ancient tablets with inscriptions were burned as "pagan" or safely hidden from prying eyes.

Jossan did not find any convincing evidence that the tablets and the writing system belonged to extreme antiquity. The Bishop wrote:

“If they did exist, as Brother Eiro's message seems to indicate, it can only be assumed that they all fell victim to the flames. How sad that none of the ancient tablets has come down to us! Those that I have rescued clearly belong to a later time, and I am almost sure that they are only the remains of the writing of the past, because we see on them only what is in the nature of this small island.

Jossan interpreted one of the signs as an image of a rat. Thor Heyerdahl, in the same hieroglyph, saw a jaguar-like feline: "A round head with a fiercely gaping mouth, a thin neck and a strongly arched torso resting on long bent legs." However, there were never cats on Easter Island, so Heyerdahl suggested that the writing of the islanders is of South American origin. The researcher von Hevesy "read" the same sign as a "monkey", which gave him reason to connect the writing of Easter Island with an ancient civilization that existed about 5000 years ago in the Indus River valley. There is also an opinion that this hieroglyph denotes a person.

For many years, science has not come to an agreement on the correct interpretation of this sign.

However, the very fact of the presence of writing testifies to many things.

The emergence of writing is a sure sign of the birth of the state. The once united tribe is stratified into classes, it becomes necessary to regularly and accurately record the facts, to describe the events taking place. Therefore, if there was a letter on Easter Island, then there was a state - at least a primitive and emerging one.

Of course, there were cases when the natives of North and West Africa, as well as Alaska, invented their own script, but only after they got acquainted with the European letter writing, and in the new icons, elements of the Latin alphabet or the outlines of objects of sale were guessed. The writings of the Voleai people were unique.

Brown was convinced that this writing was created by representatives of a large, well-organized community, residents of a large state that once existed in this part of the Pacific Ocean.

It turned out that two small peoples lived on opposite ends of Oceania, possessing original writing, which indicates the existence of their civilization and state. Maybe Micronesia and Easter Island are the last oases where the remnants of a lost highly developed civilization, the Pacifids, have been preserved? Maybe they trace their history from this lost continent?

Giant stone moai statues - the famous symbol of Easter Island - are one of the greatest mysteries of our planet. Moai (heads and bodies without legs) are monolithic, carved from a single stone (from a single piece of compressed volcanic ash). They all have similar features: heavy square chins, elongated earlobes and high foreheads.

Most of the statues stand on the coast and look inland, but seven moai are turned to face the sea and are quite far from the water.

Scholars are hotly debating whether moai are images of humans or aliens from outer space.

Some statues were installed on ahu - special stone platforms, probably intended for certain rituals. The stone blocks are not fastened with any mortar, but they are so precisely fitted that even a thin knife blade cannot be inserted into the gap between them. The heads of the statues are crowned with pukau - cylindrical caps made of red stones.

Perhaps the reason for this was a natural disaster, a natural disaster, after which there was no one to continue working. Or maybe uninvited guests appeared on the island, again, people or aliens who destroyed most of the indigenous population.

There are no rivers, streams or lakes on Easter Island. The source of fresh water is the volcanic craters located along the edges of the island. They have several lakes with rainwater.

According to the official version, the giant statues were created by order of the ruling elite of the island - the so-called long-eared ones (it was they who had the very elongated earlobes - the aristocrats wore massive jewelry that stretched the lobes). Short-earedness was a sign of belonging to the poor strata, to the mob - it was this very mob that created the moai on the orders of the rulers. In the 16th century, the short-ears raised a rebellion that ended in victory and stopped making moai.

Then the natives moved the 12-ton statue to the installation site. The statue was dragged by drag, in a horizontal position, mobilizing a large group of assistants for this, then raised to a vertical position with the help of a device made of stones and logs - the stones were placed under the base of the statue, three logs were used as a lever.

There is also an opinion that the islanders "brought" moai to the installation site on a bed of rolling round logs.

So, in order to move the moai, you do not need to have extraordinary abilities, such a task is quite within the power of ordinary people, and even those who do not know technical progress.

According to the testimonies of navigators who visited Easter Island during the 18th-19th centuries, the statues fell gradually. From year to year there were fewer and fewer statues that remained upright. In 1838, Admiral Dupetit-Thouare reported nine standing moai, and soon all the stone giants of Easter Island were on the ground. This fate has passed only the statues dug into the ground near the Rano Raraku quarry.

So who are the stone giants depicting? And why for decades, and even centuries, they were created and placed on the seashore?

The first answer that comes up is that moai are the figures of the gods. A perfectly reasonable hypothesis. True, there is one "but". Today, only 4,888 people live on the small island. It is unlikely that in ancient times the population of Easter was significantly larger. It turns out that for every ten people there was one statue. Are there too many sacred images?

There is a version that stone moai are the ancestors of the Easter natives. This hypothesis explains why the statues have different heights: allegedly, the size of the moai reflects the merits of one or another ancient islander.

There is also an opinion that the moai were supposed to protect the island from the oncoming sea: either as breakwaters, or as magical guardians.

This tragedy reminds us that if humanity does not change its attitude towards nature, it will face the same fate.

The reason for the death of once flourishing civilizations is one of the most burning mysteries of history, and among the lost ancient cultures, perhaps the most mysterious is the civilization of Easter Island.

This island of only 165 square kilometers is one of the most secluded inhabited islands. He lies in pacific ocean about 3,500 kilometers west of the nearest mainland, South America. The island has a subtropical climate, fertile volcanic soil. He could be paradise. Why is it now a deserted piece of land, on which only a few hundred people live, although, judging by the giant stone statues, a fairly developed civilization once existed here?

This issue is considered by the American biologist J.Diamond, using data from the latest research conducted by archaeologists and paleontologists. We bring to your attention an abridged abstract of his article in the popular science journal Discover.

The island was opened Dutch navigator Jacob Roggeveen in the spring of 1722. This piece of land reminded the traveler more of a desert than a paradise: “From a great distance, the island at first seemed to us sandy; but it turned out that what we took for sand was actually dried grass, hay, or other burnt vegetation. General desert view gave the impression of extreme poverty and barrenness.

The island was covered with grass, without a single tree or bush more than three meters high. Now botanists find only 47 species of non-introduced plants on Easter Island, most of which are ferns, grasses and sedges. Only two types of low trees and two types of bushes are known. With such a flora, the islanders had no source of good fuel. Of the animals on the island, only insects were found. There were no lizards, no bats, no birds, not even snails or slugs. Of the domestic animals, there were only chickens.

European travelers who visited the island in the 18th and early 19th centuries estimated the number of its inhabitants at about 2000. As Captain Cook, who briefly landed on the island in 1774, established that its inhabitants were of Polynesian origin (the Tahitian accompanying Cook was able to talk to them). But, despite the well-deserved fame of the Polynesians as a people of navigators, the Paschalians were able to swim towards the ships of Roggeven only by swimming or on very fragile boats such as canoes.

The islanders were completely isolated from the rest of the world and did not know that people existed anywhere else. In subsequent years, this isolation was proved: not a single object was found on Easter Island that was not brought here by the first settlers or Europeans who sailed later, and, in turn, no items typical of the island were found in any corner of the world. Meanwhile, the islanders kept the memory that their ancestors once visited uninhabited island Sala y Gómez, 260 nautical miles from their island (the closest land to Easter Island).

Easter Island is famous for its huge stone statues. More than two hundred such idols once stood on massive stone platforms along the coast. No less than seven hundred others, in various stages of manufacture, are thrown into the quarries or along the ancient roads leading from these quarries to the shore. Most of the statues were carved in one quarry, and from there they were able to move up to ten kilometers to the ocean. And they weighed up to 82 tons with a height of up to 10 meters. The pedestals for them have a length of up to 150 meters, a height of more than three meters, and their stone slabs weigh up to 10 tons. “These stone images amazed us, because we could not understand,” wrote Roggeveen, “how this people, who did not have thick strong logs for the manufacture of any machines, nor strong ropes, could still erect such statues.” The presence of statues speaks of a completely different society than the one found on the island of Roggeveen. First, to create such rows huge statues, the population of the island must have been well over 2,000. Secondly, this required a complexly organized society. The resources of the island are very scattered: the best stone for statues was quarried in the northeast, the red stone for the "crowns" crowning some of the statues in the southwest, tools for sculptors were made from stone quarried mainly in the northwest of the island. The most fertile soils lay in the south and east, and best places for fishing were located near the northern and western coast. The extraction and distribution of all these resources required complex social organization. How could it have arisen on this deserted island, and why has it disappeared?

Many Europeans thought it incredible that the Polynesians, with their "low" culture, could create such monuments. In the 1960s, Swiss writer Eric von Däniken, a fervent believer in alien astronauts visiting the Earth, even suggested that the statues of Easter Island were the creation of aliens.

What happened on the island after human settlement? They told about it latest research archaeologists and paleontologists.

Radiocarbon dating showed that the first traces of human activity on the island appeared around 400-700 years, which agrees well with the data of linguists about the time of the emergence of the language spoken by the Paschals. The peak of the construction of the statues fell on the years 1200 - 1500, later they were almost never erected. The size of the population can be estimated from archaeological finds: the most common estimate is 7,000, although some say 20,000 people, which, given the size of the island and the fertility of its soil, does not seem incredible.

With the participation of living islanders, archaeological experiments have been carried out showing how stone statues could be cut down and transported. It turned out that in a year twenty people, using only stone chisels, can make even the most a large statue found on the island. With enough logs and ropes, teams of several hundred people could load the statues onto wooden drags, pull them along wooden "rails" or log rollers, and then raise them to a vertical position with the help of log levers. The ropes could be twisted from the fibers of a small local pow-pow tree, related to the linden, from which we also made a bast. But pow-pow is now very rare on the island, and it would take hundreds of meters of rope to transport one statue. Maybe there were enough trees here before?

This question can be answered by palynology, the science that studies ancient pollen buried in sediment layers in swamps and ponds. The age of each layer can be determined by radiocarbon dating. By examining the pollen found in these layers under a microscope, one can find out what plants bloomed here in previous centuries. This work was recently done by New Zealander John Flandley and Englishwoman Sarah King.

It turned out that once Easter Island looked very different. For the first time after the arrival of the Polynesians, the island was covered with a powerful subtropical forest with various types of trees, bushes and herbs. Among other species, the pow-pow and the toromiro tree grew here, which provided excellent firewood. A special type of palm trees prevailed in this forest, which is now completely absent on the island. The lower layers of sediments are downright stuffed with its pollen. This species is related to the Chilean wine palm, which still lives on the American mainland, reaching a height of 25 meters and a diameter of 180 centimeters.

What, besides palm products, could the inhabitants of the island eat? Excavations recently carried out by the American archaeologist David Steadman have shown that animal world islands was no less diverse than the vegetation. Stedman studied the so-called kitchen heaps, garbage heaps that accumulated near the places where food was cut, prepared and consumed. In Polynesia, these heaps are 90 percent fish bones. But the waters around Easter Island are not very rich in fish. In the period from 900 to 1300, less than a quarter of the mass of kitchen piles is fish bones, and more than a third of the bones belong to dolphins (less than a percent in Polynesia). The inhabitants of Easter Island hunted dolphins with harpoons, but the species of dolphins common here lives far from the coast. This means that the Paschals had boats suitable for going out into the ocean.

In addition to dolphins, Stedman discovered, the first settlers ate seabirds. The bones of albatrosses, frigatebirds, boobies, fulmars, petrels, terns and other birds were found in heaps. At least 25 species of birds nested on the island, possibly the largest bird rookery in the entire Pacific.

So about 1600 years ago, after stepping ashore after a long voyage, the Polynesians found here untouched paradise in which there was everything necessary for a normal life. What happened next?

Pollen from the sediments showed that already four centuries after the landing of people, the destruction of the forest had gone quite far. Charcoal appeared in the sediment columns, a witness to forest burning, and pollen from palm trees and other trees began to decline until it was almost completely replaced by grass pollen. Shortly after 1400, the palm tree died out completely, not only because people cut it down, but also because rats did not allow it to multiply. Dozens of nuts gnawed by rats have been found in caves on the island. The pow-pow tree was also cut down, so that eventually the material for the ropes disappeared. By the time Thor Heyerdahl arrived on the island on a wooden raft (the scientist wanted to prove by this voyage, made in 1947, that the ancestors of the Paschalians sailed here from America), there was only one, almost dried-up toromiro tree left on the island, and now it is gone. Fortunately, specimens of this species have been preserved in various botanical gardens peace.

In the 15th century, the forest itself also perished. People cut down trees for firewood, to build pirogues and erect statues, to build houses, and just to make room for their fields. Apparently, local birds that carried pollen and seeds of plants have disappeared. Not only did the forest die, but most of the plant species that made it up died out.

It was not easier for the animals either. All local forest bird species have disappeared. Even large snails were caught off the coast of the island, so we had to switch to collecting small species. Dolphin bones abruptly disappeared from kitchen piles starting around 1500: there was no material for building large ocean pirogues, and harpoon hunting also ceased. More than half of the seabird species nesting on Easter Island were completely destroyed.

In order to keep meat in the diet, the Paschalians increased the breeding of chickens, which had previously been few in number. And in the kitchen heaps, human bones began to be found quite often. Surviving oral traditions speak of cannibalism. The available products were cooked on fires from sugarcane pomace, from grass and sedges - there was no other fuel.

All these facts add up to a whole picture of the decline and extinction of society.

Several centuries after their arrival on the island, the descendants of the first settlers began to build huge stone statues on platforms, similar in style to the smaller sculpture of their Polynesian ancestors. Years passed, and their pedestals grew larger, ten-ton "caps" of red stone appeared on the heads of the monuments. Apparently, there was an unspoken competition between families or clans who would put up a larger sculpture that would glorify the wealth and power of the creators.

Gradually, it turned out that the growing population is reducing the forest faster than it can recover. And soon the islanders began to lack not only wood and ropes, but also water: rainwater, not retained by the forest, began to quickly drain into the ocean. The springs and streams dried up. The soil has lost its former fertility. Of the food resources, in fact, grass roots, chickens and ... people remained.

The island could no longer feed the chieftains, officials and priests necessary for the functioning of a complex society. The surviving islanders told the first European aliens how the centralized government was replaced by the chaotic rule of the heads of individual small clans. Finally, those who had power, the warrior caste, took over the leadership. The island is still littered with stone spearheads and daggers lost in the battles of the 17th-18th centuries. Around 1700, a sharp decline in population began ...

This is how a highly developed civilization on Easter Island perished. But this island is a miniature model of our planet. Our population is also growing and the supplies necessary for life are declining. natural resources. We also often build gigantic structures or undertaking projects designed primarily to splurge. If the development of mankind continues on its former course, our children will already see how fish will cease to be caught in the oceans, how the treasures of the bowels will dry up, forests and fertile soils will disappear. We also have nowhere to move - there are no habitable "islands" nearby.

But there is one, but a very important difference between our large civilization and a small island one. if the entire “information bank” of the inhabitants of Easter Island consisted of wooden tablets with prayers and legends written on them, and they had no science at all, humanity has libraries, archives, scientific institutes. There is enough knowledge about how the mechanisms that allow us to exist on Earth function. Are we really not smart enough not to break these mechanisms? Surely the death of the Paschal civilization will not be a lesson for us?