Over a few hundred years from the year 1200 on, the people of Easter Island / Rapa Nui built an amazing pocket universe - a flourishing civilisation with their own system of writing and amazing carved stone Moai.

But then it collapsed.

Will tells Rod what happens, and why the story of what happens matters!

The Wholesome Show is Dr Will Grant and Dr Rod Lamberts, proudly brought to you by The Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science!

Sources:

Benny Peiser’s ‘From Genocide to Ecocide: The Rape of Rapa Nui’. https://web.archive.org/web/20100610062402/http://www.uri.edu/artsci/ecn/starkey/ECN398%20-Ecology,%20Economy,%20Society/RAPANUI.pdf

DiNapoli, Crema, Lipo, Rieth and Hunt’s ‘Approximate Bayesian Computation of radiocarbon and paleoenvironmental record shows population resilience on Rapa Nui (Easter Island)’ in Nature Communications https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8225912/

BingUNews: ‘Resilience, not collapse: What the Easter Island myth gets wrong’ https://www.binghamton.edu/news/story/3155/resilience-not-collapse-what-the-easter-island-myth-gets-wrong

Princeton: ‘Jacob Roggeveen, 1659–1729’ http://libweb5.princeton.edu/visual_materials/maps/websites/pacific/roggeveen/roggeveen.html

Easter Island Travel: ‘Ship logs of 1722 voyage of Jacob Roggeveen’ https://www.easterisland.travel/easter-island-facts-and-info/history/ship-logs-and-journals/jacob-roggeveen-1722/

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