Original subtitles

[intense music playing]

[flames crackling]

[soft music playing]

[dramatic music playing]

[narrator] A team of truthseekers is on a mission.

Scientists.

Historians.

Archaeologists.

All on the trail of history's enigmas.

[dramatic music playing]

Searching for the truth

behind the greatest mysteries known to humanity.

It is one of the most remote places on the planet.

This barren rock in the South Pacific

was once home to an extraordinary civilization:

the Rapa Nui of Easter Island.

They created a paradise on Earth

and carved great stone sentinels

to watch over them.

And then they vanished.

Where did they come from?

Why did they carve such monumental statues?

And what happened to those who built them?

In London, our team assemble.

Our four truthseekers combine decades of experience

in different fields.

But they all have one goal:

to apply their knowledge and reveal the truth.

There are mysteries, and then there are mysteries.

I have always loved uncovering the secrets of the past.

We need to go back and unpick the untruths from the truths.

Age-old problems that we've been asking ourselves

for over 100 years really, can now be solved.

[narrator] They'll follow the clues left behind,

unravel the secrets of the past,

separate fact from fiction,

and together they'll uncover the truth...

[dramatic music playing]

...behind the greatest mysteries ever.

[device clicking]

[intense music playing]

[Tony] Easter Island is one of the remotest places on Earth

and with an incredibly visual culture,

these massive stone heads looking forlornly out to sea.

And it's also, most fascinating,

one of the last places on Earth

to be colonized by human beings.

One of the greatest mysteries

about the people on Easter Island

is where do they come from?

Was it originally from China, via Polynesia to Easter Island?

Or did they come from Latin America,

as some believe.

And then, what happened to them?

What caused the catastrophic fall of this civilization?

Easter Island is a really remote dot of land.

An island community

is always going to be of interest to anthropologists

as it tends to develop

distinct ecology and cultural systems

as compared to the mainland.

And it makes it a really ideal place

to look at processes of social change.

[Mark] Given this isolation,

it's been of great fascination to archaeologists.

It was once a lush environment, lush island,

supporting a lot of people.

By the 19th century,

it was a desolate island

with very few people living on it.

Could it foretell our own future?

Could it be a kind of warning

to our own planet's potential demise?

[soft, tense music playing]

[narrator] To solve the mysteries of this small island,

the team is examining three main sources.

There's the archaeological record,

the buried remnants of the past

uncovered by scientists.

There are the stories told by the European outsiders,

the first explorers to reach the island.

And then there are the people of Rapa Nui itself.

Dr. Fern Riddell has been taking a closer look

at the culture which lived on the island

and built the strange standing stones

it's famous for.

[Fern] Easter Island is formed of three extinct volcanoes.

And it was created about 400,000 years ago

when the largest of these volcanoes,

Terevaka, burst out of the sea.

These eruptions joined with the two smaller volcanoes

and created Easter Island.

[narrator] Much like the Pacific Ring of Fire,

Hawaii, and other oceanic islands,

Easter Island is volcanic and built on basalt rock.

Its volcanic birth from the ocean floor

is also the reason for its isolated location.

The reason why Easter Island is so fascinating

is because it's one of the last places in the world

that humans colonized,

and it really is the birth of its own civilization.

[energetic music playing]

And it's absolutely unbelievable as a microcosm of society.

[narrator] Easter Island is located

deep in the Pacific Ocean.

The island measures just 24 kilometers from end-to-end.

It is 12 kilometers wide.

The nearest mainland is South America,

more than 3,000 kilometers east.

But even the nearest inhabited island

is 2,000 kilometers away.

Easter Island is located

in one of the most remote places in the world.

It's in the eastern corner

of what we call the Polynesian Triangle,

which is this vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean.

[narrator] The dates are disputed,

but there is general agreement

that after leaving Africa around 100,000 years ago,

humans spread across Asia and Europe.

Within 75,000 years,

they had populated the Eurasian landmass

and began to cross the Bering Land Bridge

from Eurasia to the Americas.

[soft, tense music playing]

The Polynesian expansion began around 4,000 years ago

when people left the Southeast Asian Mainland

and over the next 3,000 years set off to populate

the largest expanse of water on the planet:

the Pacific.

Polynesians managed to navigate, discover,

and colonize huge numbers of islands

within the Pacific Ocean.

The last place they get to is Rapa Nui,

or Easter Island.

[soft, tense music playing]

[narrator] Reaching the island must have been an epic journey

for the first settlers of Rapa Nui.

When that happened, and from where,

has long been debated.

The people of Rapa Nui believe they are Polynesian,

the descendants of the men and women

who left that Asian coastline thousands of years ago

and spread across the Pacific

in a wave of migration from island to island.

But how did they do it?

So before Stonehenge and before the Bronze Age,

we know that Polynesians left the coast of Asia

and began navigating the Pacific Ocean by stars.

[narrator] Polynesian wayfinding

is the ancient art of celestial navigation.

With no modern sextant,

compass, or evidence of any navigational equipment,

these master sailors were able to navigate

huge distances over empty oceans

using an ingenious combination of techniques.

[soft, tense music playing]

[birds chirping]

They would note the flight paths of birds

native to each island or atoll,

knowing when they migrated or flew out to sea,

and follow their paths.

Being located largely in the equatorial seas,

they had a full view of the celestial sky

and could remember and recall the locations

of over 100 stars

and which islands they corresponded to.

They could even tell which islands they were near,

from the changing nature of the waves.

As a cultural historian,

one of the most important sources that I use

is oral history and tradition.

And with the Rapa Nui,

we have incredible stories and songs about their origin,

life on the islands,

and their own history to draw from.

[narrator] Like lots of Polynesian cultures,

the Rapa Nui told of their history

through story and song.

One of the most important

described how their ancestors embarked

on such an epic journey into the unknown.

[Fern] The origin story of the Rapa Nui

comes from one of their kings, Hotu Matu'a,

and his people are looking for a new home.

And he finds that one of his advisors

has had a dream of this incredible three-point island.

So he sends them off to hunt for it.

[narrator] Seven men left in a canoe

stocked with food for a long voyage.

Five weeks later, they discovered Rapa Nui.

There are no records of when this king lived

or what year the Polynesians

first stepped foot on the island.

Whenever it was,

the Polynesian settlers then brought in their catamarans,

everything they needed to start a new civilization.

Bananas, root vegetables, and sugar cane.

Saplings to plant, and small animals to breed and eat.

They're not a shipwrecked people.

They're people with an incredible civilization

and culture, and a huge skill set

that they are bringing to Rapa Nui's shores.

[narrator] Cut off from the rest of the world,

over the generations,

the people of Rapa Nui developed a unique culture

of their own.

Unlike other Polynesian societies,

they mastered the art of writing.

Their script is known as Rongorongo.

It was learned only by the ruling classes

and by priests.

To modern scholars it is a riddle,

but they've established that they compiled lists

of important events

and of people killed in battle or at sea.

But without the help of the Rapa Nui themselves,

the curious symbols

have defied all attempts to decipher them.

But it is not their mysterious writing

that the Rapa Nui are most famous for.

The Moai.

Hundreds of these statues were carved with stone chisels

directly from the crater of a volcano.

These were the "aringa ora ata tepuna,"

the living faces of the holy ancestors,

the islanders that had gone before.

Carved out of the bedrock with stone chisels,

it's thought each Moai took up to a year to make.

Some were as tall as ten meters high.

They could weigh more than 80 tons.

These giants were dragged to the edge of the volcano quarry

and then carefully slid down the grassy slopes beyond.

From there, somehow the Rapa Nui

transported the Moai up to twenty kilometers

across their island's rough terrain.

They stood them on the coasts,

on great stone pedestals called "ahu."

The silent faces stared inland.

They watched on as the community flourished

and Rapa Nui brimmed with life.

And they watched on as that society crumbled.

[Fern] When the Rapa Nui arrived at Easter Island,

they saw deep forests, palm, and hardwood trees.

Now, that's nothing like the Easter Island

that we see today.

So the question is, what happened?

[soft, tense music playing]

[narrator] By the mid-18th century,

the once lush island was barren.

Its windswept hills were covered

only in grass and shrubs,

the trees were gone,

and the once thriving community

that had built the magnificent Moai

had withered away.

When we ask how the Rapa Nui civilization collapsed,

people tend to look at deforestation

and say that this is why the civilization

no longer exists.

[narrator] For centuries, it was believed

that the Rapa Nui had committed "ecocide."

They had over-exploited the resources

of their tiny island.

This had provoked an ecological chain reaction

that destroyed the local environment,

and their way of life forever.

The reason for this destructive path

was said to be the Moai themselves.

It was assumed that each of the massive Moai

had to be dragged across the island on wooden rollers.

The obsession with crafting these stone heads

was blamed for the felling

of hundreds of the island's precious palm trees,

so many that eventually a tipping point was reached,

and the environment could not recover.

[Fern] And that's very much to do with our own culture

and what's happening within it,

because we're facing deforestation

across the world today.

But when you actually listen to the Rapa Nui themselves

and they tell us how the Moai were created,

it doesn't work.

[soft, tense music playing]

[narrator] According to the Rapa Nui,

there was no mass felling of trees for the Moai.

The great statues were not dragged along the ground

on rollers at all.

Instead, the islanders claimed that the mighty stones

reached their distant perches in a far simpler way.

They walked.

What these songs and stories give us

is tantalizing glimpses into the factual historical past.

In the case of the Rapa Nui,

it is absolutely key that we listen to them,

that we understand their culture

and the world that they created.

[narrator] Without an understanding

of their written history, Rongorongo,

the potential key to their lived experience,

oral history is all we have to rely on.

Though it can be an unreliable source

of historical information,

the truthseekers can begin to build a picture

to get to the truth.

What's incredibly important about these songs and stories

is they help us try to understand

when the Rapa Nui first arrived at Easter Island.

But we have to be really careful.

Myth and legend and stories and songs

always go hand in hand,

and they can be deeply contradictory.

[narrator] The Rapa Nui stories of walking stones

were dismissed for centuries as mere legends.

But it's recently been revealed

that there is more to the tales than previously thought.

Stunning recent discoveries by scientists

have overturned centuries of wisdom

and forced historians to rewrite this story.

The Moai did walk the craggy hills of Rapa Nui.

And its people did not commit ecocide at all.

But if ecocide isn't the answer,

then what happened on the island?

Who, or what, was to blame?

[intense music playing]

[nocturnal creatures chirring]

The shores of Easter Island: Rapa Nui.

Above the crashing surf,

their backs turned towards the mighty Pacific Ocean,

stand the Moai.

These great stone carvings

were the work of a remarkable people.

A people who built a flourishing society

with a strong and enduring visual culture

on the most remote island on the planet.

A people who then almost entirely disappeared.

Dr. Fern Riddell has examined the oral tradition

of the Rapa Nui for clues to this mystery.

Anthropologist Dr. Karen Bellinger

has been investigating what modern science can tell us

about the truth behind those old tales.

What I'm really excited about

in exploring the Easter Island mystery

is to dig down into the weeds

of these competing theories that have arisen

as to what happened to these people.

[narrator] Rapa Nui legend

tells of a Polynesian King, Hotu Matu'a,

who sent his people out to find a new home.

That home was Easter Island.

But not all modern scientists have agreed

with this telling of the story.

In the 1940s,

one Thor Heyerdahl set out to prove it wrong.

Thor Heyerdahl was the first to re-examine Rapa Nui

from an academic standpoint with his Kon-Tiki expedition.

[soft music playing]

[narrator] Heyerdahl was an anthropologist

with a controversial theory.

The Rapa Nui themselves

always said that they came from Polynesia.

And, in fact, linguistic and genetic data

supported that theory, not Heyerdahl's.

[narrator] He believed that the Polynesians

who inhabited the islands of the Pacific

were not the descendants of migrants from Asia.

Heyerdahl claimed instead that their roots

stretched across the ocean in the opposite direction,

towards South America.

According to Heyerdahl,

the islands were first occupied around 500 AD

by settlers from Peru.

This theory relied on some linguistic, genetic,

and other scattered archaeological evidence

to claim that Easter Island's remote location

was accessible from the Southern American mainland

which had likely human habitation

for 13,000 years by this point,

plenty of time to develop

the requisite seafaring capability

for a 4,000-kilometer journey.

To prove his theory,

Heyerdahl mounted a daring experiment.

He built a primitive raft out of balsa wood, mangrove,

and other native materials of Peru,

and used the indigenous designs

recorded by the Spanish conquistadors.

He called it the Kon-Tiki.

Kon-Tiki is a raft that Heyerdahl built himself

according to methods

that would have been available at the time.

And he sailed it from South America

to an island in the vicinity of Easter Island,

proving that it would indeed have been possible

for prehistoric people from South America

to have reached Easter Island.

[soft music playing]

[narrator] Heyerdahl and his five companions

set off from the city of Callao in Peru

on the 28th of April, 1947.

They sailed their raft for 101 days,

almost 7,000 kilometers across the Pacific Ocean.

This rather sensational bit of experimental archaeology

captured the public imagination.

And, you know, it did prove that it was theoretically possible

for a person to do that with limited technology.

But the conclusions Heyerdahl drew from this are, at best,

a bit controversial in academic terms.

[narrator] Heyerdahl returned to Easter Island in the 1950s.

He was the first to conduct

archaeological digs on the island,

and he made some bold claims about what he found.

He identified a resemblance between the ahu,

pedestals the famous Moai statues sat upon,

and stonework seen on Inca structures in Peru.

And he uncovered on the east of the island

the remnants of an ancient hearth

covered in charcoal, which he dated to 400 AD.

This, he claimed, all backed up his theory

of the original settlement from South America.

More modern studies, however,

have cast doubt on Heyerdahl's conclusions.

In the late 1970s,

Rapa Nui was visited by another team of scientists.

John Flenley was an expert in pollen

at the New Zealand University of Massey.

[Karen] Flenley examined pollen samples

from cores he took from the lake beds on the island

and he discovered that in fact

the island had been forested heavily

for tens of thousands of years

and that the pollen evidence further suggested a process

of deforestation beginning only in about 800 AD

and concluding by 1500.

And this moved forward the settlement of Easter Island

by 400 years from what Heyerdahl had believed.

[narrator] Heyerdahl's theories took another blow

in the early 2000s.

Excavations began on a sandy beach

on Rapa Nui's northern shore.

A team of archaeologists was led by Terry Hunt

from the University of Hawaii

and Carl Lipo from California State University.

[Karen] Hunt and Lipo examined an area of sandy beach

on the north part of the island that they theorized

would have been a logical landing place

for the first settlers from Polynesia.

And what they found were habitation layers

that dated to absolutely no earlier than 1200.

And that pulled our timeline up by 400 further years,

refining even further

our understanding of the settlement history.

[narrator] But Hunt and Lipo didn't only uncover

new information about the beginnings

of Rapa Nui society.

They also uncovered tantalizing hints

about the island's greatest mystery.

How did such a flourishing society

fall so fast?

How did their Pacific island paradise

become a barren rock?

[Karen] The Moai have always been central to theories

about the ecological demise of Easter Island.

And the work of Hunt and Lipo

has gone a long way to help us understand

not just the construction of the Moai,

but how they were transported throughout the island.

[narrator] It was long assumed

that the Rapa Nui people themselves

were responsible for the deforestation

of the island and the collapse

of their island civilization.

The ecocide theory has been popularized in recent years

by the work of American geographer

Jared Diamond.

In his best-selling book, Collapse,

Diamond described Rapa Nui

as "a society that destroyed itself

by overexploiting its own resources."

The island's population grew too large

and the obsession with building Moai

trumped all other considerations.

According to Diamond,

hundreds of trees were felled for use as rollers

to help transport the statues across the island.

But the work of archaeologists Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo

cast doubt on the theory.

The clues, they realized,

were lying out in the open all around the island.

Only around a fifth of the Moai carved in the volcano quarry

ever reached the pedestals by the coast.

Easter Island is littered with hundreds of statues

which didn't make it.

These were either abandoned unfinished,

left in the quarry,

or they seem to have fallen by the wayside

on their perilous journey across the island.

Hunt and Lipo identified a clear pattern

in the way that abandoned Moai

lay on roads throughout the island.

When a Moai had been abandoned on an uphill slope,

it would have fallen backwards,

and then, conversely,

when it was located on a slope going down,

they found that it would have fallen forward,

and this led them to the amazing realization

that the Moai were transported upright.

[soft, tense music playing]

[narrator] The people of Rapa Nui

had always claimed the Moai

walked across the island from the quarry.

Perhaps, this was what they meant.

Hunt and Lipo decided to try an experiment.

[Karen] They undertook experimental archaeology

in the effort to understand better

how the Moai were moved, and found, to their amazement,

that by attaching ropes strategically

and rocking the Moai much the way

one might rock a bowling pin back and forth,

causing its bottom to move along the ground,

that even small groups could move these multi-ton Moai

as much as a kilometer a day.

[narrator] These findings blew the ecocide argument

out of the water.

Few, if any, palm trees were required to move the Moai.

It took hundreds of years for us to realize

what the Rapa Nui had been saying all along,

beginning with the first European visitors who asked.

The Moai walked to their Ahu.

And it's a classic case of ethnocentrism.

When something doesn't fit our cultural frame of reference,

we just assume it can't possibly be true.

[mellow music playing]

[narrator] But if an obsession with Moai wasn't responsible

for the dramatic transformation of Rapa Nui,

then what caused the ruin of this island paradise?

Hunt wasn't satisfied with the idea

that humans alone could have deforested Easter Island

quite so quickly,

and he went back to consider those deposits

he and Lipo had excavated on the beach.

And he came up with an extraordinary hypothesis.

[narrator] Among the human remains,

tools, and charcoal deposits found on the beach

were countless tiny bones.

They belonged to an animal that wasn't native to the island,

but one that had hitched a ride with the first settlers:

the Polynesian rat.

The Polynesian rat loves to eat tree seeds and saplings,

and it's been estimated that, at minimum,

their feeding habits on Easter Island

consumed 10% of the forest.

[narrator] Introduced into an environment

with abundant food and no natural predators,

the rat population would have exploded.

Any trees cut down by the humans of the island

wouldn't have been replaced as the rats ate the seeds

and saplings that would have grown in their place.

Destabilized by this new arrival,

the island's environment began to collapse.

The birds and animals that relied on the trees

began to die off along with their habitat.

The rats were taking over.

As satisfying, in a way,

the conclusions that we can draw from all this granular data

about what actually happens at Easter Island,

I think it's important to not forget the people

that really suffered a tragedy here.

And that's the real story I take,

that these people suffered terribly

at the loss of their island paradise.

[narrator] It was not the rats alone, however,

that were responsible for the demise of Rapa Nui

and its unique civilization.

There was another, far more dangerous new arrival

that threatened the people of the island:

Europeans.

[intense music playing]

The people of Rapa Nui, Easter Island.

For hundreds of years, they lived in isolation.

They farmed, they hunted, and they fished in the waters

surrounding their island paradise,

until the 18th century,

when lumbering ships crewed by strange, pale-faced men

sailed over the horizon.

Life on Rapa Nui would never be the same.

Could this first contact be to blame

for the demise of Rapa Nui?

Historian Tony McMahon has been tracing the accounts

of early European explorers and merchants for clues.

The Rapa Nui were unknown to the whole world,

given their isolation, until in the year 1722,

a Dutch explorer called Jacob Roggeveen

arrives on the island.

And because he arrives there on Easter Day,

he gives it the name that we all know:

Easter Island.

[soft, tense music playing]

[narrator] Roggeveen was leading an expedition

funded by the Dutch West India Company.

He was searching for a trade route

to the Spice Islands of Indonesia

when his fleet of three ships stumbled onto Rapa Nui.

Well, this is an age in which the Spanish,

Portuguese, the Dutch, British, and French

are all vying against each other to carve up the world,

to further their economic interests,

to build their empires.

[narrator] Roggeveen's expedition was on the lookout

for strategic staging posts in the deep Pacific,

places where company ships could stop and resupply

before continuing across this vast oceanic wilderness.

[Tony] What Roggeveen found on this island

was a fertile landscape that could sustain

the growing of yam and sweet potato,

a wooded interior, and also these enigmatic statues,

these heads.

So, sending his reports back,

Roggeveen painted a very positive picture.

He said it was a fertile land of abundance.

[intense music playing]

[narrator] But this first encounter

was also marked with violence.

The Dutch explorers shot one islander by mistake

and drew their muskets at a dozen others

when a fight broke out.

It was the first but sadly not the last time

visitors from the outside would

bring bloodshed and destruction.

But such was the remote location of the island

that the Rapa Nui were left to return to their lives

in relative peace.

Almost 50 years later, the Viceroy of Peru,

which is part of the Spanish Empire,

sends somebody called Don Felipe de Ahedo

to the island to investigate it.

He discovers 3,000 people approximately living there.

He notes their script, Rongorongo,

an undeciphered language,

and he plants three crosses on the island

and the Spanish flag

and claims it for the King of Spain.

[narrator] The Spaniards were amazed by the standing stones

they saw across the island.

They passed five days ashore,

surveying its coasts and annexing its lands,

claiming it for the King of Spain.

Ahedo is also the first to record the Rongorongo script

which was used by island elders to sign the Annexation Treaty.

They then departed

and left Rapa Nui once again in solitude.

But the open ocean was a far busier place

than it had ever been in history,

and after waiting hundreds of years

for their first visitor

and another 50 years for their second,

the next visitor to the island would come much sooner.

And he would find a very different Rapa Nui.

Four years later, the famous Captain James Cook

arrives on Easter Island,

and it's a very different spectacle that he finds.

It's one of desolation.

[narrator] The British explorer wrote in his diary:

"Thursday the 17th of March, 1774:

No nation will ever contend for the honor

of the discovery of Easter Island,

as there is hardly an island in the sea

which affords less refreshments

and conveniences for shipping than it does.

Nature has hardly provided it

with anything fit for man to eat or drink,

and the natives are but few and plant

no more than sufficient for themselves."

The lush woodlands seen

by the Dutchman Jacob Roggeveen's expedition

just 50 years before were gone.

And that was not the only thing that had changed.

When Roggeveen encountered the people of the island,

they seemed welcoming.

Captain Cook's welcome would not be so warm.

[intense music playing]

When Cook turned up,

the natives met his party

armed to the teeth with clubs and long spears.

Now, this was very different to the reception

that the Dutch had got decades before,

so something had clearly changed.

[narrator] In just four years,

a catastrophe seems to have taken place

on Rapa Nui.

According to Cook,

the population of Easter Island

had fallen to around six hundred.

The standing stones that once stood

as silent guardians of Rapa Nui,

which all had a common appearance

and were found across the island,

had been toppled from their pedestals.

[energetic music playing]

A strong and shared identity

that had once dominated Rapa Nui had shattered.

Cook's expedition found the smashed remnants

of the great carvings scattered all across the island.

Worship had turned to anger.

A new cult appears to have risen around the time,

that of The Birdman or Tangata Manu,

a more warrior-like cult,

distinct from the traditional religion

and based on the ritual and dangerous harvesting

of seabird eggs.

Their ceremonies were deadly

and their social structures divided on territorial lines.

The fall of the Moai was a sign

that Rapa Nui society itself had splintered.

Symbols and social structure were all changing rapidly.

Perhaps, it was disease.

Perhaps, it was a long-brewing civil war

stimulated by a scarcity of resource.

But one thing seems certain:

The sudden arrival of outsiders in their world

had thrown Rapa Nui society into chaos.

Their old beliefs and certainties

had fallen apart.

And worse was still to come.

[Tony] In 1786, the French aristocrat

Jean-François de Galaup, comte de Lapérouse,

arrived on the island.

By 1789, he had published navigable maps of the area

with Easter Island on it.

Well, this would prove to be the beginning of the end.

[narrator] With the expansion of empires,

the development of maritime trade,

and the mapping of the globe,

it was the beginning of the end

for traditional Easter Island society.

By the 1800s, we'd entered a period

of aggressive commerce on the high seas

and particularly the whaling and seal hunting industries

which now had maps of the area.

Now they overfished off the East Coast of America.

So they were heading southwards into the South Pacific,

into the area around Easter Island.

[narrator] The boom in commerce took a grisly turn.

The Rapa Nui people themselves became commodities

to be bought and sold.

The whalers venturing into the Pacific

sometimes came ashore at Easter Island

to kidnap slaves for their ships.

Men and women from Rapa Nui

were forced to work on the seas

their ancestors once called their own.

But it was not only whalers who came but slavers too,

known as blackbirders,

who would kidnap Pacific Islanders on boats

and transport them to work on plantations

on the Peruvian mainland.

In late 1862,

eight ships appeared off the coast of Rapa Nui

and took 1,407 Islanders,

over a third of those who remained.

[Tony] The population of Easter Island, the Rapa Nui,

was massively denuded by this slaving activity

by the Peruvian blackbirders.

When news got out of what was going on,

there was an international outcry

and pressure was put on Peru

to return the Islanders to their birthplace.

[narrator] But for most of those kidnapped from the island,

it was too late.

By the time it was agreed to return the people to Rapa Nui

in late 1863,

the majority had already died in servitude in Peru.

Of the 100 who made the journey home,

just 12 survived the voyage across the sea.

This was not just a physical genocide,

it was a cultural genocide as well.

The blackbirders particularly prized

the literate class of priests.

Every single one of them on Rapa Nui was enslaved.

But the priests were the only ones

who understood Rapa Nui's mysterious script,

Rongorongo.

Without them, that knowledge was lost forever.

The stories and histories that must have been recorded

have remained trapped in the undeciphered writings

ever since.

[Tony] By 1866, there were only 111 indigenous Rapa Nui people

left on the island,

and only 36 of them had children.

Which means that everybody on Easter Island today

is essentially descended from those 36 people.

[narrator] There was another humiliation left

for the people of Rapa Nui, however.

In November 1868,

a British Royal Navy frigate dropped anchor at the island.

The crew from the HMS Topaze went ashore.

By now, the islanders were too few

and too brutalized to resist the newcomers.

In a village on the southwestern tip of the island,

the British sailors found a gigantic Moai

half-buried in the ground.

It was a rare specimen,

carved not out of soft volcanic rock, known as tuff,

but the far harder kind: basalt.

This must have been a labor of love for its creators.

But that made it all the more tempting

for the crew of the HMS Topaze.

[Tony] So what do they do?

They took it on board the ship, back to London.

And if you go to the British Museum today,

you can see it's still there.

[narrator] The British were not the only ones

to plunder the island.

The French, Americans, and Belgians

all followed in their footsteps

and carried off Moai

to display in museums back home.

The Moai had failed to protect the people of Rapa Nui

from disaster, disease, and slavery.

The great carvings had fallen from their pedestals,

been broken and abandoned.

And now, they too were captives.

[soft, tense music playing]

By the end of the 19th century,

the Pacific island of Rapa Nui had been transformed.

What had once been a verdant island paradise

was barren and windswept.

The standing stones,

which its people had lovingly carved

and raised on pedestals around the island,

now lay broken on the ground.

What happened to Rapa Nui has long been disputed.

The truthseekers have been examining

everything from ancient tales

to the latest archaeological studies

in order to unravel the mystery.

[Mark] Rapa Nui, or Easter Island,

has been of great interest to archaeologists.

In the most recent phase of exploration on the island,

we've become much better at really refining the timeline

when Rapa Nui was undergoing tremendous change,

both social and environmental.

[narrator] For decades, it was thought

that the people of Rapa Nui

brought the environmental and social disaster

upon themselves.

More recent studies have pointed the finger elsewhere.

Dr. Mark Altaweel has been looking

at how the impact of Europeans on Rapa Nui can be measured.

Easter island, or Rapa Nui,

is one of these places that's relatively isolated.

It's--it's far away from almost any other inhabited islands.

It may have been, in fact,

one of the last places settled by humans on Earth.

We see different kinds of studies,

such as DNA, archaeology,

environmental studies, each by themselves,

may not necessarily give us that much information.

But when you bring it all together,

we learn a lot about Rapa Nui and its history and its past

and how it really evolved due to European contact.

[narrator] In order to get a full picture of the Rapa Nui,

Mark has been investigating the most personal artifacts

the Rapa Nui people left behind: their skeletons.

Analysis of human remains from the island

has confirmed that, before contact with the Western world,

the people of Rapa Nui were thriving.

[Mark] In terms of the timeline of Rapa Nui,

linguists have determined that perhaps Rapa Nui

or Easter Island was settled by around 400 AD.

Some geoarchaeologists, for instance,

have suggested around 800 AD.

More recently, archaeologists have suggested around 1200 AD.

Regardless of the timeline,

we know that it was certainly settled

quite late in its history.

Analyses of skeletons found on Easter Island

have determined that whenever the island was settled,

the population was actually quite healthy.

The diet they ate was well balanced.

They ate a marine-based as well as a plant-based diet.

So they ate a good protein, low-carb,

relatively high-energy protein diet.

So, they were quite healthy individuals.

[narrator] The Rapa Nui people may have had help

in sustaining this lifestyle from an unexpected source.

For a long time it was thought

that the Moai had helped propel Rapa Nui towards disaster.

But a recent study has suggested

the opposite was true,

that in fact the Moai were crucial

to maintaining life on the island.

In 2014, American archaeologist Dr. Jo Anne Van Tilburg,

a world expert on the Moai,

teamed up with a soils specialist to investigate.

Dr. Sarah Sherwood analyzed samples

from around the Rano Raraku quarry,

which is the origin of 95% of the Rapa Nui's Moai.

[Mark] They basically determined that the statues

didn't just have a spiritual

or ancestral kind of benefit.

They certainly did have that kind of cultural connection

to the people.

But there was a very practical reason

as to why you may excavate the statues.

When the statues were removed from the quarry,

they actually also brought upon nutrients,

beneficial soils that could have been deposited

across the island.

So it would actually be a way to renew the soils

across the island so that they can be used

for growing crops and other kinds of useful plants.

[narrator] For a long time,

historians and scientists had suspected

that the Moai were linked to the fertility of the land.

The people worshipped them to secure good harvests.

This recent discovery by Van Tilbury

and Sherwood suggests the relationship

between the stones and agriculture

was even more direct than had been thought.

But by the 18th century,

the lush island paradise

that the Moai had helped support was dying.

The forests were disappearing and the rich animal life

sustained by the trees was dying out.

The potential culprit has been identified

as the Polynesian rat that came to the island

with its first settlers.

But Rapa Nui's dramatic transformation

did not lead to a collapse in the health

and well-being of the people who lived there.

That's the finding of Robert DiNapoli,

an anthropologist from the University of Oregon,

and a team of scientists.

They use Bayesian analysis

to look at population change over time.

They in fact demonstrate that the population of Rapa Nui

or Easter Island didn't really change that much,

despite the fact that the island began to degrade

in terms of its environment.

The population density was actually quite comparable

to places such as New Zealand or Sweden

or even Colorado in the United States.

[narrator] The birds they had once hunted were dying out.

And deep-sea fishing was impossible

without tree-trunks to build boats.

But the Rapa Nui people adapted.

Their diet shifted.

They took advantage of the one thing

they had plenty of: rats.

The rats on Rapa Nui were quite devastating

to the island in many ways.

We know that the rats probably ate seeds of plants,

which would have meant that deforestation

would occur over time.

However, at the same time,

the rats were also a source of meat.

So, the population may have adapted

to the fact that rats were there

and simply ate the rats as a way to sustain themselves.

[narrator] Despite the abundant supply of rats,

the Rapa Nui no longer had access

to a high-protein, fish-based diet.

On an increasingly barren island,

the Rapa Nui people struck on another ingenious solution.

They use the pumice rock, this volcanic stone,

effectively, to basically be slightly ground up,

put into little clumps, little islands.

And these volcanic rocks would basically retain moisture

and other nutrients which would then be used

to grow crops upon these volcanic rocks.

They were kind of using them

as a way to really trap nutrients

so that plants can grow and then be used to be eaten.

[narrator] In these gardens,

a collection of basalt pebbles, cobbles,

and boulders were placed on the ground

over planted seeds.

This process is called "lithic mulching."

It helps prevent soil erosion

by creating microclimates which create shade,

trap moisture, protect plants from the wind,

and stabilizes temperature.

These rock gardens covered up to a tenth of the island.

Using them, the Rapa Nui were able to grow sweet potato,

yams, and taro, all high in vitamins,

carbohydrates, and proteins.

So it was a really effective way

to utilize those local resources

to really live on the island as best as you can,

and despite the fact that the environment began to degrade.

[narrator] But even as the Rapa Nui adjusted

to the changing world around them,

another threat emerged once more on the horizon:

Europeans.

[Mark] Now, after European contact,

there's a tremendous change

that really begins to occur on the island.

People begin to be affected in terms of disease,

some literally taken away by Europeans to be enslaved.

And a lot of the elites were removed,

people who had important, really, social connections.

The social networks within the island become disturbed.

People who would have had knowledge,

both in terms of language, writing, spiritual knowledge,

connections to the ancestors,

even those people in many cases were removed.

And so at one point,

the Rapa Nui inhabitants certainly were able to adapt

to environmental stress.

But European impact really begins to break down society

because it removed that social structure

that enabled it to succeed.

[narrator] Weakened by new diseases, exploited by slavers,

and murdered when they tried to resist,

the people of Rapa Nui dwindled in number.

This fatal decline was reflected

in the Moai themselves.

[Mark] We know that most of the Moai statues

have been erected and sort of carved out

between 1400 and 1700 AD.

Now, after European contact in the 18th century,

that's when we begin to see Moai statue activity

decrease substantially.

There may have been some activity,

but it certainly decreased substantially.

And, in fact, that's the point

in which Rapa Nuian society begins to break down.

[narrator] But by the late 19th century,

there were few Rapa Nui people left.

Their way of life had been stamped out,

their songs and stories almost forgotten.

On the 9th of September, 1888,

the island was annexed by Chile.

The few remaining indigenous people

were corralled into a town on the west coast.

They were forbidden to leave.

The hills where they and their great Moai once walked

were given over to a new invader.

For the next 60 years,

thousands of sheep roamed Rapa Nui.

They destroyed what was left of the ecosystem,

stripping the remaining vegetation and topsoil

from the island.

The destruction of what had once been paradise

was complete.

What a catastrophic fall

from the civilization that had been found in 1722.

[Karen] This case study of Easter Island

just proves the truism

that any time you've got human interaction,

things are going to get complicated.

[Fern] One of the things that we can draw

from these oral traditions

is just exactly the influence of European culture

on the Rapa Nui and how much damage we have done.

[Mark] We can see a society that was quite successful

in sustaining themselves using local knowledge,

local resources.

But when we begin to bring ideas from the outside

that are not suitable to a given environment,

that's when things begin to break down.

[narrator] The people of Rapa Nui were not without blame.

They introduced the rats

which decimated the island's once dense forest.

But they adapted to the changes.

Their society continued.

It was the arrival of Europeans

that doomed them and their magnificent Moai.

Those standing stones were once accused

of causing the collapse of the Rapa Nui.

They were dismissed as a foolish obsession

of a people driving themselves towards disaster.

But the Moai were not the villains of this tale.

Instead, they were witnesses to a crime,

a tragedy, a genocide.

[dramatic music playing]