Name: How the Civilization On Easter Island Collapsed
Uploaded: 2021-05-19T14:14:26.000Z
Duration: 10 min 53 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

located in the southeastern Pacific Ocean.

Adverbs of manner

If you know only one thing about Easter Island,

it's that it has those giant stone heads all over the place.

But you might not know that building those stone heads

may have inadvertently destroyed the culture of the people who

at how the civilization on Easter Island collapsed.

But before we get started, be sure to subscribe to the Weird

History channel, and let us know in the comments

below what other lost cultures you would like to hear about.

OK, prepare to get heady about Easter Island.

When the Polynesians first discovered Easter Island,

the land was nothing short of a tropical paradise.

Covered by a vast palm forest, the tiny island

was inhabited by roughly 30 different species of birds.

While most of the soil was too low in nutrients

to be useful for agriculture, the island's coastal plains

made it possible to grow crops such as yams, taros,

Over time, these people, known as the Rapa Nui,

And for reasons that remain unknown to this very day,

on one of the most unique building projects

the construction of the large stone sculptures known as moai.

under the direction of a Dutch explorer named Jacob Roggeveen.

It was then that the name Easter Island was adopted, as he first

happened upon the mysterious island on Easter Sunday,

Roggeveen reported seeing about 2,000 to 3,000 inhabitants

But by the mid-19th century, the population of the Island

It was sometime around 1200 CE that a small group

on a tiny 63 square mile island in the southeastern Pacific

to have been covered with roughly 16 million trees.

had to burn down more and more trees in the palm forest

Before too long, there were too many inhabitants and too few

This theory suggests a man-made ecological disaster

that some believe is one of the clearest known examples

of a society unintentionally destroying itself

by over-exploiting its natural resources.

Standing at an average height of 13 feet tall

apiece, moving the moai around the island was no easy feat.

To accomplish the task, the islanders reportedly

used wood from the palm forest to clear the paths

One theory states that after clearing the land for crops,

they used the leftover logs to both move the huge stone

sculptures and build their deep sea fishing canoes.

really led to their starvation is still an open question.

However, when Captain James Cook visited the island in 1774,

he and his crew noted that the Rapa Nui were

According to Cook, the canoes were worn ragged and pieced

build new canoes, which supports the deforestation theory.

While the slash-and-burn agriculture theory

In fact, two anthropologists, Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo

from the University of Hawaii, have a completely different

theory about the collapse of the Easter Island civilization.

they argue that despite the popularity of the agriculture

believe the cause was actually an infestation of rats.

and decimated the environment, including the trees.

Regardless of what the cause may have been,

the effect of the rapid loss of trees on the island was clear,

The topsoil began to slowly wash away each time it rained.

the space they needed to grow enough crops to feed everyone.

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How the Civilization On Easter Island Collapsed

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