My song For many decades people's minds have been occupied with the mystery of Easter Island a remote piece of volcanic soil far away in the Pacific Ocean but our planet hosts thousands of such Lonely Island's What is so particular about this one the mystery is concealed not on the island itself? But the giant stone statues covering it who created the world-famous huge stone heads Did they serve any specific purpose? Where did their creators arrive from and where did they disappear?
Well, it seems the answer is finally just around the corner watch this video and satisfy your curiosity Learning all the truths about Easter Island remember to give us thumbs up. We work to make your life brighter What do we know about the island itself? Rapanui which is the name given to Easter Island by its first?
Inhabitants is the territory of Chile and is situated in the southern pacific ocean? And it is so so far that you can easily consider it one of the most distant places on the world's map It lies 1,200 miles away from Pitcairn which is its closest neighbor? Chile itself is 2,300 miles away to the west the only transport that can take you there is a plane If you want to get to this destination point you will need to spend five hours on board flying from Santiago Chile to Easter Island The area of the island is just 63 square miles and such let's admit a tiny territory is home to 887 huge stone statues Here are some interesting facts you might not know about them The statues carry the name boy, they started to be carved at some point between the 13th and 15th centuries Rapanui statues are easily recognized.
Thanks to the peculiar faces They have long noses wide Chin's Rectangular ears heavy brows and deeply set eyes It is quite curious that the nostrils curl in the way fishhooks do Firstly people thought that the statues were made up only by their heads But surprisingly it turned out that there are full bodies that are attached to that It was discovered during excavations in May 2012 the bodies were just hidden underground In fact the statues are very tall the biggest one is 33 feet tall and weighs 90 us tonnes But that's not the record once that you unearthed on the island was incomplete but according to scientific calculations it had to reach 70 feet in height and weigh about 297 US tonnes Still the heads of the statues visible from the first site make up 3/8 of each statue size as For the arms they were carved against the bodies resting in different positions Most statues 834 out of 887 were carved from the material called tough, which is in fact compressed volcanic ash Curiously all the statues except one group face inland it means their backs are turned to the ocean Perhaps the reason for that was the belief that the statues were the protectors of the villagers That's why they overlooked the settlement The only statues not fitting into this pattern can be found at a looook Evy a sacred place for the people of Rapa Nui There is a unique statue on the island it is the only statue which was found in a kneeling position It's name is to Kotori Scientists believe that the statue depicts an ancient singer his position resembles the one people took at the festival of rui The head of the statue is lifted quite high and you can even notice a beard To Kotori looks much more human-like than the other statues It's smaller size and the unusual Material the statue is made of red Puna puah stone are the things that make it stand out among the rest All these facts are quite intriguing right keep watching there are several mysteries to unravel People keep wondering how the statues of such huge weight have been distributed all around the island What is more when Europeans first arrived at the island in 1722? They found a small local population just between one and a half and three thousand people How could it correlate with the hundreds of statues on the island? Surely there had been numerous theories about how the statues had been moved One of the most popular ones among the lovers of mysteries was the belief that the statues have been created and moved by aliens But even if you like this theory we are sorry to debunk it the stone the statues were built from originates from the island itself the birthplace of most of the material was an extinct volcano Situated in the northeast of Easter Island and not another planet The mystery surrounding the way Rapa Nui people could move the statues challenged the researchers not letting them back off in the 80s some of them decided to recreate a statue and check the possibility of moving it around They were to use only the tools that could be available for the Aborigines.
It seemed impossible to do But a bit later an American archaeologist succeeded in moving a ten US ton copy Several decades passed and another group of American Scientists proved that the Islanders could tie ropes and circling the huge statues and move them with a walking motion They backed up their theory with practice moving a full-sized replica for three hundred and thirty feet using this method Actually their idea can explain why Rapanui folklore states that the statues were walking with the help of magic it explains the way the statues were transported to their designated places But what about the remaining question? How could a handful of inhabitants create such magnificent and numerous monuments a? New study has been conducted recently to specify the maximum number of the inhabitants in the heyday of the islands Civilization the results arrived and they were quite unexpected it turned out that as many as seventeen and a half thousand people could comfortably live on the island at Least 19 percent of the land could be covered with the fields of sweet potatoes that used to be the main source of food for The population what is more the Islanders consumed quite a lot of seafood and fish?
So knowing these numbers you can see that there were enough people to create the stone masterpieces But what happened to them why did they disappear? At first it was believed that the reason for such a decrease of the population was an eco side the natives cut out large forests and palm trees making spare room for moving the statues around as well as Agriculture they thought the trees were going to grow back fast enough. It was a misleading concept the deterioration of the environment Resulted in hunger and this in turn led to Wars and cannibalism Nowadays however such a theory has been proven wrong first of all Rapa Nui inhabitants seem to be very talented agricultural engineers They deliberately fertilized the fields with the volcanic rock in Fact another research has shown that people had been living on the island for many centuries and the population only Started to decrease when Europeans began visiting So a much more realistic explanation is also very tragic South American raids in the pursuit of slaves frequented the island throughout the nineteenth century Half of the Aborigines were taken away What is more European traders brought to the island new diseases?
which the locals hadn't been protected from and introduced in forced Migration it.
