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(C) Photo by Sheela Sharma
Three teams, one on each side and one in the back, maneuver an Easter Island statue replica down a road in Hawaii, hinting that prehistoric farmers who didn't have the wheel may have transported these statues in this manner. The experiment was led by archaeologists Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo and is reported in the July issue of National Geographic magazine.
Did Easter Island's famous statues rock, or roll? After doing a little rocking out themselves, researchers say they're sure the natives raised the monumental figures upright, and then rocked them back and forth to "walk" them to their positions.
Their findings mesh with a scenario that casts the Polynesian island's natives in the roles of resourceful engineers working with the little that they had on hand, rather than the victims of a self-inflicted environmental catastrophe.
"A lot of what people think they know about the island turns out to be not true," Carl Lipo, an archaeologist at California State University at Long Beach, told me today.
Lipo and University of Hawaii anthropologist Terry Hunt lay out their case in a book titled "The Statues That Walked" as well as July's issue of National Geographic magazine. Their story serves as a counterpoint to a darker Easter Island saga, detailed in "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed," a better-known book by UCLA scientist-author Jared Diamond.
Two scenarios
In Diamond's scenario, Easter Island's society is portrayed as one that chose to fail through overpopulation, conflict and deforestation. Polynesians colonized the island as far back as 1,600 years ago, and cut down forests of palm trees as part of a slash-and-burn strategy that led to intensive farming, soil degradation, conflict, cannibalism and massive depopulation. By the time the Europeans arrived in the 18th century, Easter Island's society was on the ropes.
The island's statues, known as moai, play a significant part in this scenario. Diamond relies on the findings of other researchers who say the monoliths, weighing as much as 90 tons, were dragged into place by hundreds of islanders, using downed trees as sleds, rollers and levers. Rival chieftains recruited whole tribes to erect monuments to their glory. The broken statues found along the island's path were a testament to the stone-carving society's final failure.
Recent excavations are revealing new discoveries about the towering statutes of Easter Island. Msnbc.com's Dara Brown speaks with Jo Anne Van Tilburg, archaeologist and director of the Easter Island Statue Project, about the findings from recent excavations.
Hunt and Lipo take a different view: The way they see it, Easter Island was never that great a place to live. "It was never verdant, and there were never very many people on the island," Lipo said.
In this scenario, the Polynesians settled on the island about 800 years ago — and brought rats along with them. The settlers ate the rats, but because the rodents were an invasive species with no other natural predators, they took over the island and feasted on palm nuts, hastening the pace of deforestation. The population remained relatively stable for centuries, but when the Europeans arrived, the islanders who were there fell victim to diseases that their immune systems couldn't fight.
(c) Photo by Sheela Sharma
Archaeologists Carl Lipo and Terry Hunt stand in front of a full-scale replica of a stone statue from Easter Island. Their research into Easter Island's past is featured in the July 2012 issue of National Geographic magazine.
Hunt acknowledged that, "from a biodiversity standpoint, it was a catastrophe." But he said the farming methods used by the ancient islanders were designed to make the best of a bad situation. Rocks were piled up to create circular garden plots known as "manavai," and crops were planted within the circles. Nutrients would quickly leach out of the soil, but fresh rock was pulverized and added to the soil as a mulch.
"They were able to engineer their lives in a way that was really stable and sustainable," Lipo said.
The statues play a different role in the two scientists' alternate scenario. They said it wouldn't take all that many people to move the statues if they were raised up vertically and then rocked down the road. Taking on the task would have helped blow off steam, and might have served as a kind of social glue, Hunt said.
"You're actually putting a lot of your effort into the process of moving a statue rather than fighting," he told me. "Moving the moai was a little bit like playing a football game."
Trial by transport
After "The Statues That Walked" came out, Diamond sharply disputed the conclusions reached by Hunt and Lipo, declaring on climate expert Mark Lynas' blog that they were "considered transparently wrong by essentially all other archaeologists with active programs on Easter Island." Diamond addressed the debate in detail, including the idea that the statues could have been moved vertically.
"This seems an implausible recipe for disaster," Diamond wrote. "Imagine it yourself: If you were told to transport a 90-ton statue 33 feet high over a dirt road, why would you risk tipping and breaking it by transporting it vertically with all its weight concentrated on its small base, rather than avoiding the risk of tipping by laying it flat and distributing its weight over its entire length?"
Lipo and Hunt had their own counter-rebuttal published on Lynas' blog as well, and the debate over the historical record depends on sophisticated interpretation of radiocarbon dating tests, pollen analysis and tooth marks on palm nut shells. But the part about the horizontal vs. vertical transport? That could easily be tested.
UCLA's Jo Anne Van Tilburg had previously shown that the horizontal method was workable, as long as you had lots of laborers and logs. Lipo and Hunt set up their own experiment: They built a 5-ton moai replica, with the weight distributed as it was in a real statue. Then they tied ropes around it, raised it up using a crane, and got ready to let it stand free.
They could immediately see that the statue would fall forward if the crane relaxed the tension on the line. Hunt said he and Lipo were just about to walk away in disgust when the crane operator slipped a 2-by-4 under the front edge of the statue and had it standing. "As soon as we saw this, Carl and I said, 'Of course! This makes perfect sense!"
An experiment on Easter Island, chronicled for a TV documentary, shows how the statues could have been "walked" to their locations. Watch the video on National Geographic's website.
National Geographic
National Geographic's iPad presentation on the Easter Island statues, part of the July 2012 issue, shows how the vertical-walking method might have been employed centuries ago.
The researchers found that the statue's fat belly produced a forward-falling center of gravity that facilitated vertical transport. A crew of as few as 18 people could use ropes to rock the statue back and forth, and forward. (In comparison, Van Tilburg's team used 60 pullers.) The vertical-transport trick worked with four rope-pullers on each side, plus 10 people to pull on the statue from behind, as if they were holding back a dog that was straining forward on a walk.
"It's really unnerving and beautiful, all at the same time," Hunt said.
Of course, a 90-ton statue is bigger than a 5-ton statue, but Hunt found that the technique was scalable. "With the physics of the taller statue, you have greater leverage," he told me. "It almost gets to the point where you would have to do it that way."
'We're not failures'
The statue-walking experiment alone doesn't prove that the entire scenario put forward by Hunt and Lipo is true, but it's consistent with the claims in the islanders' oral tradition that the statues "walked" down the road in ancient times. It also provides an alternate explanation for the ruined statues that littered the roads: When you lose control of the ropes, that's what happens, and you don't have any good way to move the broken pieces.
So did the statues rock, or roll? The debate over the two scenarios surrounding Easter Island's past could well continue for generations. But it's clear which scenario is preferred by the islanders themselves.
"The young people ... they're celebrating. I don't think there's any other word for it," Hunt said. "One came up to me and said, 'It's so important for my generation to know we're not failures.' That brought tears to my eyes."
More about Polynesia:
- Yes, the Easter Island heads really do have bodies
- Rat DNA helps trace Pacific migrations
- Ancient fashion explains snail mystery
Hunt and Lipo are scheduled to discuss "The Statues That Walked" at the National Geographic Society's headquarters complex in Washington on Thursday. The presentation is sold out.
"The Mystery of Easter Island," a Nova-National Geographic special focusing on the research conducted by Hunt and Lipo, is scheduled to air on PBS on Nov. 7.
Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.
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To say that it is simply easier to roll the statues ignores the role that religion may have played. Many suggest that the moai may represent dead relatives and were erected to pay respect. If so, it would be quite a funeral procession to have the family and friends take part in seeing their dearly departed walk to his/her final resting place. A religious custom as simple as that could easily have driven the practice of walking.
Stinking rats. If it isn't the plague its palm nuts.
Someday attention will be paid to the getting the well paid members of United States Congress to move. Their positions are fixed, a curiosity that may be explained by placement of the "attached strings", if those strings are drawn taught by campaign donations, then it is not the Congress who is responsible for a problem stuck in stone. It is rather the weight of those counter veiling donations, than like a force balance that keeps the Congress in a fixed position. Then when the current location was arrived at it could be similar to today's problem, the islanders ran short of resources, whereas we have done the same, drained every source of energy and material, tried ever form of money and religious worship. They have literally fought themselves out of existence. The last clue we have is the fact that we have stones, harder, more lasting and more impervious to action than Congress, We could start making stone statues replace each sitting Congress with a rock, but not all looking like the Senate Minority Leader.
i really dont care how they got them in place....i just love them for the way they look and the glaze they put on towards the heavens
. are they trying to tell us something or are they waiting for the end of the world as they know it??
just wondering....
That video is convincing enough for me. I've seen people rock and balance 2,000 pound artillery projectiles and 55 gallon drums of oil on their edges and walk them across the floor. People just have to use their minds and imagination, as they did when these statues were moved long ago. Good for them. The only negative thing I see in this article is why doesn't the roll them guy just congratulate the walk them guy and admit he is right? Instead they never give in to each other do they? Too bad.
You are correct. But I think you may miss an important point. It's not so hard for US to imagine TODAY how to move these massive objects, given what we think we know about these stone-aged people. The trick is to imagine how to do it using only the knowledge that stone-aged people would have had, which is a tremendous guess, at best. IMO, this leveraging technique is too advanced for stone-aged people, based on the little we know about that time period.
And yet people carved and moved these Maoi, and built Stonehenge by moving stones from many miles away, and the pyramids, the great wall of China, the Roman aqueducts,.....
Not to mention the ancient stone age hunters learning how to heat temper spear tips, learning enough aerodynamics to build boomerangs that return, how to smelt metal,....
We are the benefactors of a lot of what these so called stone age people learned how to do.
Tony; There is another option - we can admit, we have absolutely no clue about our earth's past!
Ok, so the people who (allegedly) made these statues had no concept of the wheel... yet they understood momentum, leverage, social organization, group coordination and leadership enough to "walk" massive statues inch by inch along supposedly flat, smooth terrain, to their final resting places, perfectly oriented with respect to the spacing and facing of other adjacent statues.
Sure. And dinosaurs blew themselves out of existence with nuclear weapons.
Hahaha! So true! And there were more than 1000 of them... Like as if Puma Punku could've been built by Inca who didn't have written language!
hmmm, seems that I remember that these are carved out of rock flat, so how did they get them upright? Also if they fell over in route then how would they get them upright again? Some of these were 90 tons!.
Why not just tie long logs around the statute in a way to make it somewhat round and then roll them to their destination?
90 tons is a rediculous number even for a 33 foot tall statue. They were no granite, more like a poor quality concrete, 30 tons tops.
Roland -
As an engineer having been to the Easter Islands, you were probably made aware of the stone most used for the making of the statues. Most were made of tuff, but a few of the largest were carved from basalt. Since most of us are not engineers and are not aware of the density and weight properties of various Easter Island tuffs (e.g. Welded, Rhyolite, Trachyte, Andesitic, Ultramafic, etc.) it would have been helpful if you had given us a range of weights for a statue 32 to 33 feet tall.
Interesting theory about how they moved the Moai. Of course, if their civilization wasn't near collapse when Europeans arrived, they could have told them with certainty how they moved the statues, in fact, they would have still been doing it.
SL CABBIE:
You're right. It was Thor Heyerdahl and he wrote a book about it in the early 1950's. The book is entitled Aku-Aku. He and the natives on Easter Island made a statue of their own in an attempt to explain how it was done so many years ago. They succeeded, using nothing more than what the early inhabitants of the island might have used. Mr. Heyerdahl and a not so large group of Easter Island natives dragged the statue they made to it's resting place and used a leverage system to guide it into the hole they dug for it. As for me, I like Mr. Heyerdahls theory better because many of those statues on Easter Island are on the sides of hills, which I would think makes walking them into place difficult if not impossible. And as the article says, the statue used for this "walking" technique was not large compared to many on the island.
I've put a lot of thought into this and have come up with a better theory, or at least a much easier way to pull this off. I've drawn it up and posted it here:
I've put a lot of thought into this and have come up with a better theory, or at least a much easier way to pull this off. I've drawn it up and posted it here:
And for the link:
I've put a lot of thought into this and have come up with a better theory, or at least a much easier way to pull this off. I've drawn it up and posted it here: facebook dot com slash sillyideas
All well and good on a flat surface, but how did they get them down hill? How did they get them through the mud?
At some point they still needed skids and rollers.
I know I'm late to the game here but given the poor environment for agriculture, how could they have grown enough fibrous plant material to make the kind of rope pictured here? What is theorized here is a way to move the sculptures, but it may not be the way.
To all of you super intelligent scientists. The statues were not (logically) moved as depicted.I get really irritated at the scientists. You obviously lack in the common sense area, just terribly.Your goals are not to figure out why but how could things happen with the most illogical and complicated solutions.
Here is what slipped past your ( all involved collaborators) thinking. Your theory could not have worked because : there would have had to be a hardsurfaced roadwaythat was also very smooth. The elevation from quarry to destination would have to be less than a 10% grade from start to finish.Did you intellitcs know that it rains there? Rain as I have known, causes dirt 'roads' to be soft and slick. I've even seen mud holes. Okay now they have resumed 'walking' the statues because the rain has dried on the roadway ooops the statue is on the ground the water has washed a rut in the 'superhighway' that they built and suppose it was erected and head broke or cracked.Now erected again they 'walked' it a little further. Damn it toppled over again, can't see any 'more damage' the statue was once again erected. I imagine by now there are hernias amongst the the men.Once again erected the head was not only cracked a little more but this time it fell off and statue fell and broke up and left about or used as something else.
Now I will tell you intelligent? persons how this was done. They were hewn in a quarry ( guessing. miles away) in a configuration of a 'let's say' squared rectangle, one side was hand hewn fairly smooth. It (not erected) was rolled onto a series of 'roller logs' you know the process. Then pulled,pushed to it's current location , erected "once" and the statue was carved in it's today ( with out wear ) configuration and location.
Why do you make things so hard? because you can? Why is our country's money spent on Mars research? And there were no alien visitors from faaaaaaar away. Think inside the BOX.
True story here on Oct 12th I was in Cloudcroft NM. There is a village near there named Sun Spot nm. there are telescopes ther studying sun spots etc. ( I agreed with their work and studies,)occupied by scientist . These people werte out walking as if that was their first day outside and with the absense of any personality. It was a scary tour.
I'm not a genius but several IQ tests ,even very recently, I scored a 129 and given a cert.I have a very near photographic memory with a highability of recall. I don't know what that all means but I am proud of my common sense and ability to apply my gift. Thank you for your (hopefully) reading this , my theory.
Owen d Blackman, Graham,Tx
I can see this, Just the other day I "walked" a refrigerator back into a garage corner. The only thing is that the ground needed to be really hard as to not sink otherwise it would be imposable to move. ... and if that happens the Aliens would have to lift it up with their tractor beams! (yea, I know, but I had to put it in there)
that replicas are smaller and possible has lesss density than the real thing, of course there is something suspicious when they are interested in showing they know something they dont. the only real explanation is someone much bigger than the humans we know, did. but of course, as I said, if they need much effort proving the opposite, is because they dont want the average of people to know the truth...
What truth? That ancient people were more ingenious than we want to admit? That is pretty much the truth.