I'll just make a brief interjection that a new study suggests that Diamond got it wrong. Easter Island forest deprivation was more likely caused by rats brought by the colonists, who also arrived much later then previously thought. The human depopulation was caused by slave traders and diseases introduced by Europeans..
"It also appears that the islanders began building moai and ahu soon after reaching the island. The human population probably reached a maximum of about 3,000, perhaps a bit higher, around 1350 A.D. and remained fairly stable until the arrival of Europeans. The environmental limitations of Rapa Nui would have kept the population from growing much larger. By the time Roggeveen arrived in 1722, most of the island's trees were gone, but deforestation did not trigger societal collapse, as Diamond and others have argued. "There is no reliable evidence that the island's population ever grew as large as 15,000 or more, and the actual downfall of the Rapanui resulted not from internal strife but from contact with Europeans. When Roggeveen landed on Rapa Nui's shores in 1722, a few days after Easter (hence the island's name), he took more than 100 of his men with him, and all were armed with muskets, pistols and cutlasses. Before he had advanced very far, Roggeveen heard shots from the rear of the party. He turned to find 10 or 12 islanders dead and a number of others wounded. His sailors claimed that some of the Rapanui had made threatening gestures. Whatever the provocation, the result did not bode well for the island's inhabitants. "Newly introduced diseases, conflict with European invaders and enslavement followed over the next century and a half, and these were the chief causes of the collapse. In the early 1860s, more than a thousand Rapanui were taken from the island as slaves, and by the late 1870s the number of native islanders numbered only around 100. " http://www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDetail/assetid/53200?fulltext=true&print=yes or http://tinyurl.com/ldwbm Gary Denton Odds&Ends - http://elemming.blogspot.com Easter Lemming Liberal News -http://elemming2.blogspot.com http://www.apollocon.org June 22-24, 2007 I ncompetence M oney Laundering P ropaganda E lectronic surveillance A bu Ghraib C ronyism H ad enough? _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
