Daily Meh is an edited stream of consciousness, by Simen.

Rethinking the Fall of Easter Island

Fascinating. Terry Hunt:

Jared Diamond, a geographer and physiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, has used Rapa Nui [Easter Island] as a parable of the dangers of environmental destruction. “In just a few centuries,” he wrote in a 1995 article for Discover magazine, “the people of Easter Island wiped out their forest, drove their plants and animals to extinction, and saw their complex society spiral into chaos and cannibalism. Are we about to follow their lead?” In his 2005 book Collapse, Diamond described Rapa Nui as “the clearest example of a society that destroyed itself by overexploiting its own resources.”

When I first went to Rapa Nui to conduct archaeological research, I expected to help confirm this story. Instead, I found evidence that just didn’t fit the underlying timeline. As I looked more closely at data from earlier archaeological excavations and at some similar work on other Pacific islands, I realized that much of what was claimed about Rapa Nui’s prehistory was speculation. I am now convinced that self-induced environmental collapse simply does not explain the fall of the Rapanui.

There’s even a dig against the misconceptions propagated by Thor Heyerdahl, whom we Norwegians have been taught to view as a national hero. Good.