Why was Easter Island Built
What was Easter Island built for?Everybody knows the mystical Easter Island sculptures; almost nine hundred of them are scattered across the land, their impermeable views provide valuable information about their birth. However, one of the great strangers, as they emerged, has less to do with the sculptures themselves than with the men around them.
The first time Europeans came to the island's coast in 1722, they found several hundred sculptures but only between 1,500 and 3,000 inhabitants alive, apparently in contradiction to the large number of monument. However, a new report in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution now seeks to unravel the mystery by determining the largest possible populations for the island's civilisation in its flower.
"It seems the island may have helped 17,500 individuals at its height, which is the top end of the bandwidth of earlier estimates," said Cedric Puleston, chief investigator of the trial, which is part of the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, in a declaration. "Despite almost total segregation, the residents of Easter Island built a complex societal fabric and these astonishing works of artwork before a drastic shift occurred," Puleston added.
Before Europeans came to get an idea of the number of inhabitants who could live on the island, the scientists investigated the island's agricultural resources. "We studied in detail the map, took ground specimens around the island, placed meteorological station, used populations model and assessed yam output.
About 19% of the island could have helped a harvest of yams, the primary staple of the local cuisine. Scientists then took into account information on fertility and mortality figures to identify the greatest number of humans that could benefit from a harvest of this magnitude. "Easter Island is intriguing because it is an example of a wild example of a kind of man's adjustment that began when one group of humans quickly migrated across the Pacific Islands," said Puleston.