A revolutionary genetic study has shown how ancient populations on the eastern fringe of Asia rapidly expanded throughout north and South America from 18,000 years ago before simmering to a halt just as Europe beckoned.
Debunking the Ecocide Theory
Easter Island/Rapa Nui is often used as the poster site for how humans achieve environmental disaster. According to the ‘ecocide’ theory, a population of over 15,000 Rapanui people caused drastic changes that led to a period of resource scarcity in which famine and even cannibalism became prevalent, making the society more susceptible than ever before to collapse.
But a new international genetic study by an international team of researchers tells a different story. The alternative approach confirmed the decline of a relatively small founding group, but instead revealed that this contraction resulted from intensifying social interactions rather than demographic meltdown (6). Rather than signals of population collapse, the data showed a maturing stable growth phase that began in the 13th century and continued to European contact in the 18th. That this professionally challenged population clearly thrived post-contact contrasts starkly with the notion that there was a significant pre-contact collapse of the human sociopolitical system on Easter Island, and rather two complementary trajectories towards success.
Revealing Polynesian America
One wider question of long standing concern been whether the Polynesian forebears of the Rapanui reached with any Indigenous Americans prior to European contact. Earlier studies examining trace amounts of archaic Polynesian DNA in South American individuals had already dismissed the possibility of transpacific voyages, instead postulating that any evidence for such contact was probably due to European colonial activity as recently as 1722.
The current study, however, flips this script Using these high-quality ancient genomes from 15 Rapanui individuals, the researchers identified ∼10% Rapanui gene pool traces its origin back to Indigenous American source. Most crucially, they then inferred that these two populations had encountered one another and mated before Europeans set foot on the island—and perhaps a few centuries earlier than in the Americas during the 13th to 15th centuries. This result contradicts previous thinking and hints that the ancestors of the Rapanui should have been able to make epic voyages to across the pacific even more frequently than we thought.
Conclusion
The results of this breakthrough genetic study have therefore not only contradicted the ‘ecocide’ theory but have also illuminated one other aspect of what makes the Rapanui so remarkable and resilient, both on land and at sea. This study can, therefore, reshape the orthodoxy that has bequeathed first contact population collapse narratives and challenge the colonialist perspective of Rapa Nui’s past by dismantling plantation conceptions of pre-colonial populations in Oceania.
