http://www.smh.com.au/world/stone-cold-truth-on-how-easter-island-statues-moved-is-out-they-walked-20121026-28b45.html
Stone cold truth on how Easter Island statues moved is out: they walked Date October 27, 2012 David Batty At watch ... two moai statues on Easter Island. Photo: Kevin Mills For hundreds of years they have gazed inscrutably upon the most remote island in the world, standing with their backs to the Pacific Ocean as if defying attempts to understand their enigma. But the mystery of how the giant stone statues of Easter Island came to their resting places without wheels or animals may finally have been unravelled - they walked. The seemingly unlikely proposal comes from a team of local and US anthropologists and archaeologists who have conducted experiments that suggest the statues, called moai by the islanders, could have been ''walked'' upright down a path by teams pulling them with ropes. The successful demonstration at Kualoa Ranch in Hawaii with a three-metre tall, four-tonne concrete replica moai, captured on video by Nature magazine, offers an alternative to the traditional hypothesis that the 887 statues were rolled across the island, now know as Rapa Nui, on wooden logs. A team of 18 people attached three ropes to the replica moai's head, with two groups pulling forwards on either side and one group at the rear steering the statue and preventing it toppling over. Chanting ''Heave-ho'', they managed to shuffle the statue 100 metres in under an hour. The study, led by Carl Lipo, from California State University, Terry Hunt, from the University of Hawaii, and the archaeologist Sergio Rapu Haoa, the former Easter Island governor, looks at the moai that were successfully placed on stone pedestals and those the original islanders apparently abandoned on road sides during their journey from the stone quarry where they were carved. Their research, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, suggests the abandoned moai fell over from upright positions, with one showing signs of attempts to return it to an upright position, which would contradict the popular theory they were rolled on logs. ''The figure is usually shaped from the top down leaving a narrow 'keel' connecting it to the bedrock,'' the three experts write. ''Statues were 'walked' out of the pit through excavated openings to moai roads.'' The experiment followed the publication last year of Hunt and Lipo's book, The Statues that Walked: Unravelling the Mystery of Easter Island, which led a US television programme to ask the pair to put their theory to the test. But Jo Anne Van Tilburg, director of the Easter Island Statue Project at the University of California, Los Angeles, decried the demonstration as a stunt. Guardian News & Media Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/world/stone-cold-truth-on-how-easter-island-statues-moved-is-out-they-walked-20121026-28b45.html#ixzz2AQayoBB6 [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
