At Easter 1722, Dutch sailors came across an island somewhere between the South American continent and New Zealand, which became known as the loneliest place on earth because it was the furthest away from any other human settlement.
The Dutch gave the small patch of land in the vast sea the name Easter Island, by which it has become known, even though the people living there called their home Rapa Nui. Easter Island has attracted worldwide attention because it is home to almost 900 meter-high statues made of volcanic stone and for a long time it was not possible to understand how people could make and erect such massive pillars depicting oversized heads without special tools or divine help. It was equally difficult to say where the islanders had come from and how long they had inhabited Rapa Nui. At some point, linguists thought they could show that the Easter Islanders had come from the west, i.e. from Polynesia, probably as early as the 12th century. Pollen analyses revealed that there were large palm trees on Rapa Nui, which were cut down in order to transport the statues and build canoes.
"The collapse of Easter Island is a myth?"
Soil erosion followed the overexploitation, the land birds disappeared with the trees, the ecological catastrophe caused tribal wars to flare up, and so it came to a "collapse", as the bestseller from 2005 is called, in which the American Jared Diamond described the failure of societies in general. The collapse on Rapa Nui was intended to serve as a cautionary tale for the present, which became popular because Hollywood had found a film subject that corresponded to the zeitgeist - an end to one's own way of life due to climate change. The book and Hollywood film were based on the assumption that when the Dutch arrived in the 18th century, only a few people on Rapa Nui had survived the exploitation of nature and were languishing miserably. Geneticists were able to carry out DNA analyses of 15 islanders whose remains were handed over to museums in Paris around 100 years ago. The result: the collapse of Rapa Nui society is pure fantasy. Despite all the interventions in the environment, many people were able to live on Easter Island, who felt like they were in a paradise on earth. Instead of seeing a prime example of collapse, we can learn from the inhabitants of Rapa Nui how it is possible to survive despite dwindling resources!
