Did Easter Island’s giant stone heads walk into place?

Did Easter Island's massive stone heads actually walk to their destination? One team of scientists believes that they did, but it looks like convincing other scientists is going to be harder than actually showing it can be done.

There's a story that's been built up around Easter Island and its mysterious stone idols — the Moai. The premise of the story is pretty short, according to Carl Lipo, an anthropologist at California State University, who told LiveScience that a "crazed maniacal group destroyed their environment."

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As the story goes, the people became obsessed with building these stone idols, and in their madness, they cut down wide swaths of the forest on their island in order to use logs to transport them from where they were carved, to their destination facing the sea. This deforestation caused an environmental disaster that ultimately led to their society's downfall.

However, the oral history of the island says that divine powers allowed the statues to walk, and although those stories could just be taken as that — stories — Lipo and his team believe that it may be true, but rather than divine power, it was with ropes and the power of teamwork.

This conclusion didn't just come from the stories, though. There's also plenty of evidence on the island.

The method of rolling the idols on logs would have apparently needed a large number of people, but archaeological finds showed the island's population wasn't very large. Also, the spongy trees that grow on the island would apparently be crushed under anything as big as these idols, even when combined together into a rolling 'platform'. Perhaps the biggest pieces of evidence were idols found lying on the side of the road that had curved bases. It made more sense to Lipo and his colleages that the idols would be carved upright, with flat bases, and then transported down, so that the people wouldn't have to go through the effort of pulling them upright once they reached the end of their journey, but many of these idols on the side of the road would simply topple over if you pulled them upright, so their bases have to be finished once they got there. These rounded bases would definitely make it easier to rock them back and forth as they 'walked' down the road, though.

So, thinking there had to be another way, they built their own Moai, and put together a little demonstration to show that it could be done:

"It goes from something you can't imagine moving at all, to kind of dancing down the road," Lipo told LiveScience in an interview.

This method, as the video shows, wouldn't need that many people, and you just need a set of ropes. So, it's pretty convincing. According to Lipo, based on the 40 minutes it took them to 'walk' the statue 100 metres, it would take about two weeks to get an idol to its destination.

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More will be needed to convince some, though. Researchers working with the Easter Island Statue Project showed back in 1998 that the log-rolling method would have worked fine, and it also would have worked much better on the uneven, rocky roads that are on the island.

Jo Anne Van Tilburg, an American archaeologist who is director of the Easter Island Statue Project, told LiveScience that the 'walking' hypothesis needed the base of the statue to be wider than the shoulders, but her study of the idols found that wasn't the case with all of them. "I don't think you have to invent a very awkward, difficult transport method," she said.

However, watching the video, the idol they used in the demonstration actually had a base that was a little more narrow than the shoulders, and although it certainly wasn't an easy job, it looked a lot less difficult than expected.

Lipo and his colleagues may not have convinced everyone, but they've made a pretty compelling case. From here, if this 'walking' hypothesis is right, apparently the whole story of the island will need to be rewritten, as the "crazed maniacal group destroyed their environment" angle doesn't work anymore. As the history of the island apparently includes periods of slave raids and colonialism, and with evidence that the quarries these idols where carved were very abruptly abandoned, the story might already be overdue for a rewrite.

(Photo courtesy: Getty Images)

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