Fall Of Easter Island Research Paper

Intro:

The fall of Easter Island has been claimed to be one of the biggest mysteries in the world. Many people have debated if Easter Island turned into a small inhabitable island due to mass ecocide? Or, did the society fall because the tribes stated turning against each other, so was it genocide? Or was it a story of success, were the inhabitants adapted to the harsh conditions and limited food, surviving off rats and small vegetables. Was the problem one of the people due people, or people due land. Personally, I believe that the collapse of Easter Island is more complex than only one of those, but an inter-relationship between the two. Where the islanders first thrived off the natural land and its abundances, but quickly, in only a few

Some more eccentric than others. One major cause that contributed to the fall of Easter Island was environmental degradation. Many scientists have come up with numerous reasons as to how the environmental damage was caused, but they all agree that it lead to the eventual collapse of the society on Easter Island. According to Jared Diamond in his recent book ‘How societies chose to fail or succeed’, He states that “In just a few centuries the people of Easter Island wiped out their forest, drove their plants and animals to extinction, and saw their complex society spiral into chaos and cannibalism”. Diamond theorises that the fall of Easter Island was purely caused by the Native Islanders destroying their land completely. While there is some evidence out there supporting this claim, and it does fit the ecocide theory. where it was purely the fault of the islanders, they were the ones who felled the trees, they forced their system into a collapse with rival clans fighting over resources and turning to cannibalism. This theory relies on the carrying capacity of the Island changing, due to the nature in which the islanders treated the land. Taking all of the resources from the island without letting the land

The Polynesian rats that they brought with them to the island would have thrived without any natural predators and an apparat abundant supply of tree seeds and nuts. The rat population quickly grew vastly surpassing that of the Easter islanders that brought then there. Then there is evidence of European contact, how the natives of the island were taken for the slave trade. There is sufficient evidence to support the claim that when the Polynesians first came to Easter Island, they unknowingly brought Polynesian rats with them. These rats who faced no natural predators on the island, quickly devastated the natural population of over ’20 forest plants, six land birds and several sea birds’ were now extinct due to the infestation of