Easter Island History facts

Yes, because only few know that there is an island on this planet that gave its name to the Christmas celebration.

When Pyramiden and Stonehenge blow you off your foot, don't wait any less for this special island. This UNESCO Worl Cultural Patrimony is one of the most secluded and populated isles in the whole wide underworld. Rapa Nui is the name of Easter Island.

Volcanically originating from a tree less island, it is a triangle island in the South Pacific between Chile and Tahiti. How did the name Easter Island come about? It was the work of the Netherlands discoverer Jacob Roggeveen, who encountered this remote landmass on Easter Sunday of the early eighteenth centuary.

You' ll need to discover the section below to know what makes the island so fascinating. These are some facts about Rapa Nui Easter Island:

The Easter Island facts and history

The Easter Island is encircled by tens of thousand nautical mile of oceans on all sides and several asteroids. Some facts about Easter Island - the island is triangle, of vulcanic origins and contains 3 extinguished volcanos. They called it the Rape Nui by Tahitians. It was Easter Sunday 1722 when the first European, a Flemish seaman by the name of Jacob Rogaveen, arrived there and was called Easter Island.

There is no known how or why the natives abandoned their houses between 400 and 600 AD. Skeleton residue testing has shown that the initial population was of Polyynesian ancestry, although most of the population is of contemporary Filipino origins. This island is lined with large human-like sculptures (moai) ranging in height from 14 to 33 ft and weighing up to 80t.

Up to 150 persons are thought to have been needed to move the sculptures cut from the island's craters. A further necessary addition would have been palms, which were used as tracks and rolls for the transportation of the sturdy sculptures. They worshipped the sculptures that surrounded the island in a worship.

Humans were possessed by sculpting these sculptures (often one per family), and like our own societies they began to deplete their own natural resource. They became desolate as they reaped every single one of the island's saplings. Much of the land was lost after the disappearance of the forest, and only a little bit of greenery was left as food.

They began to make arms from the vulcanic rocks and engaged in a clan war to apply for nourishment. Most of the trunks withdrew into easy-to defend vulcanic burrows and sockets. Since there was no timber remaining to make vessels, some of the trunks used a cannibalistic approach to meet their diet.

When the first civilised discoverers arrived and written about Easter Island, they were writing about a lucky, healthful nation with sweet potato paddies. So how did these men rise from the dust of warmongering and cannibalism? No. You did this off the shore of Easter Island on a smaller island called Orongo.

Woodcarvings of a birdman were found on this island. It was thought that the birdman was a sacred man who was selected annually by a contest between the island people. During this time his strain had precedence over diet. Essentially, they learnt to spread the foods they had on the island evenly and fairly to secure their livelihood.

Two-thirds of the island's total inhabitants (about 1,500 people) have lost their livelihood. Following a flamboyant policy debate by Peruvians, slave soldiers were ordered by Rafa Nui to return to their island. As these few remaining inhabitants of the island came back, they distributed the illnesses they had bought from contemporary civilisation (mostly smallpox) to the remainder of their tribe and reduced the island's total number to 111.

Nowadays there are only a few vestiges of the indigenous native DaNa on Easter Island. The world has been heavily inhabited in the last millennium, and if history is some kind of guideline, our quest for our own planet's resource must stop before we end up in the same plight as the people of Easter Island.

As the Easter Island must have felt after the disappearance of the tree, our world is getting smaller and smaller. Unlike the Easter Island of today, however, I do not believe that once we have exhausted it, we will be able to preserve the world' s surface through tourist income alone.