This study provides direct evidence of the translocation of South American crop plants during the earliest stages of the settlement of Rapa Nui, about 1,000 years ago.

Rapa Nui’s famous stone statues watched over a population that grew sweet potatoes on a modest scale and reached a peak of only around 3,900 individuals, too few to have triggered a previously ...

How Rapa Nui Lost a Tree, Only to Have It Sprout Up Elsewhere. ... Sent there by the Chilean Ministry of Agriculture in the early 1950s, Volosky Yadlin collected seeds, ...

Easter Island’s iconic statues remain at risk after devastating fire. Recent blazes chewed through the heritage site, causing “irreparable” damage to hundreds of Rapa Nui’s sacred moai.

Polynesians settled Rapa Nui around 1,000 years ago, according to a statement from Columbia University. The remote island is located in the southeastern Pacific Ocean, around 2,200 miles west of ...

Figure 1 | Rapa Nui genetic ancestry and population dynamics. a , Moreno-Mayar et al . 1 examined the genomes of 15 ancient individuals from Rapa Nui, a remote island in the Pacific Ocean.

The earliest settlers of Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island, appear to have had some sort of contact with people from South America as early as 1,000 years ago, a new plant study finds.

Instead, Rapa Nui must have once had a larger population that had been depleted, by about 10,000 people, due to economic collapse. ... What could vary is the amount of land crops, ...

For centuries, Western scholars have touted the fate of the native population on Easter Island (Rapa Nui) as a case study in the devastating cost of environmentally unsustainable living.

Conventional wisdom holds that the island of Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island, once had a large population that crashed after living beyond its means and stripping the island of resources.

A recent study analyzed the starch residues found on obsidian tools from the oldest strata at the Anakena site in Rapa Nui (Easter Island), dated between 1000 and 1300 AD. The results provide ...