The massacre on Easter Island should have gone down as one of the most dreadful episodes in human history. It was ethnic cleansing ... the total and complete slaughter of a small ethnically distinct group by the overwhelming masses of a competing tribe. The scale was only modest but the event was especially notable for the genealogy of the massacred group ... they were the Ariki, the last of the legendary lords, the mighty men of old, the children of Aeneas. They were totally wiped out leaving behind only the enigmatic stone statues of their forefathers. And even worse was to follow. Around 1770-1774 on the tiny speck of Easter Island in the furthermost corner of the south-east Pacific, the majority of the Hoto Iti ‘lesser’ peasants rose up …show more content…
The cranial capacity of the long-headed skulls was larger than normal and, the examiner added wryly, had a brain capacity higher than the inhabitants of Whitechapel (London). Dutch explorer Roggeveen in 1722 and Spaniard Gonzalez in 1770 had both emphatically remarked on the mixed-type population, and that the Ariki chiefs were ‘quite white’ and very tall. Gonzalez measured two individuals at 6ft 5 and 6ft 6½ inches tall (196-199 cm), one with red hair. But by the time English Captain James Cook visited in 1774, after ‘discovering’ New Zealand and Australia, he made a great point of stressing that the population was entirely typically Polynesian, of the Tahitian type. The tall Ariki were nowhere to be seen ... but there were obvious signs of civil conflict with a scarcity of crops and food, damaged canoes on the shore, and many toppled moai statues. Not to put too fine a point on it ... there is incontrovertible evidence that until 1770 Easter Island was ruled by a small group of Miru royalty including people who were of European appearance; tall, white, angular featured and ‘long-headed’ with above average cranial capacity. A totally anomalous situation in the far reaches of the southeast Pacific. Then somewhere between the visits of Gonzalez in 1770 and Cook in late 1774 there was a civil war in which the Miru people and their Ariki chiefs were wiped