Jakob roggeveen biography of christopher
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DNA suggests that the Rapa Nui arrived in the Americas two centuries before Columbus
DNA extracted from 15 corpses stored in a Paris museum has yielded a monumental surprise: the Rapa Nui, inhabitants of Easter Island, the most isolated place on Earth, reached the Americas by sailing two centuries before the caravels captained by Christopher Columbus. The study provides a mind-blowing twist to the history of the tiny territory lost in the immensity of the Pacific. To the east, Easter Island is more than 3,500 kilometres (2,175 miles) from Chile, the country to which it belongs. In the opposite direction, the nearest land is the Pitcairn Islands, 1,900 kilometres (1,180 miles) away.
The first inhabitants of Easter Island were originally from Polynesia, from where they are believed to have arrived by boat around the year 1200 A.D. From that moment on, and without anyone quite knowing how, the Rapa Nui carved, transported and erected more than 900 moai, imposing human torsos that reach 10 metres in height and weigh 80 tons. DNA analysis of current members of the Rapa Nui shows that they are 90% Polynesian and 10% American. But, in 2017, the study of the remains of Rapa Nui who had lived centuries ago found no trace of American DNA, adding to the mystery.
Since 2014, Víctor Mor
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In 2011, I posted an article in The BMJ “Will we follow Easter Islanders into extinction?” It was a deeply pessimistic piece, and now I need to correct it with a more optimistic version of the story of Easter Island. (I also posted a version of the Easter Island story on my own blog.)
I must begin by explaining what I’m correcting. The “story” of Easter Island has been used by many, including Jared Diamond in his best-selling book Collapse, to illustrate how humanity is headed towards extinction. I took the story from A Short History of Progress by the Cambridge archaeologist Ronald Wright.I described the book as “pithy, witty, erudite, highly readable, full of marvellous quotes, and ultimately devastating.” I stand by all that, but my description does not include the words “true” or “correct.”
Wright’s version of the Easter Island story is that this pinprick of an island in the vastness of the Pacific Ocean was first populated in the fifth century, but growth of the population and “ideological pathology” that consumed the islanders with building the famous heads ruined the island. I wrote: “The building of these images became ever more competitive and extravagant, and trees were felled to aid the building faster than they could be replaced. By 1400 the trees and tree
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