Was there a cannibalism on Easter Island?

On Easter in 1772, explorer Luo Ze Wayne discovered an island in the South Pacific. He was extremely surprised to find that hundreds of stone carvings were "as high as houses" with their backs facing the sea. Luo Ze Wayne realized that no matter how these islanders erected these statues, they needed ropes made of heavy wood and tough bark. But he immediately discovered that the island named after Easter in the future was just a wasteland. There are no trees on the island, and shrubs and weeds are only 3 meters high.

The puzzles on Easter Island puzzled the early tourists. The nearest land is Pitcairn Island, 2000 kilometers away, and 397 huge stone statues stand in such a desolate and distant corner. People can only think that alien creatures made the stone statue fall from the sky.

Now that the puzzle is solved, the answer is chilling.

Around the 10 century, immigrants from Polynesia boarded a raft, loaded with sugar cane, bananas, sweet potatoes and chickens, as well as mice for food, and settled here. In five or six hundred years, the population of the island increased to 1 10,000. They have their own clan and class, and divide the island into 12 like a cake. 12 clans lived in peace at first, until one day, the chiefs decided to honor their lineage with awesome stone statues.

Based on our understanding of the pyramids in Egypt and Stonehenge in England, we know that it is not as difficult to carry Stonehenge as expected as long as there is huge wood as an aid. Scientists have proved through sporopollen tests that there are Chilean wine pines with a height of 20 meters and a diameter of 1 m on Easter Island. In fact, until the early days of human settlement on the island, Easter Island was a temperate forest covered with tall trees and dense shrubs.

The arrival of human beings has caused devastating damage to the forest. For hundreds of years, the chiefs on Easter Island competed with each other to see whose stone statue was bigger and more spectacular. Someone erected five colossus in a row, and then someone erected ten; Someone carved the tallest portrait, and then the opponent added a 12 ton stone crown to his portrait. However, it is not easy to complete such a huge project by manpower alone. Countless giant trees need to be cut down as a means of transportation, and forests need to be cut down, so that farmland can desperately support labor.

The stone statues on the island are getting older and older, and the speed of cutting down trees is faster than the growth speed of trees. In addition, the mice brought by immigrants fed on seeds and seedlings, and the forest began to be destroyed. Chilean wine pine died out in about 1440-there is no trace of tree pollen in the annual sediments of Crater Lake. Radiocarbon dating of samples from stoves and garbage dumps shows that firewood has been replaced by herbs around 1640, even in the chieftain's home.

The story on Easter Island is the most extreme example of deforestation in the Pacific Ocean: patches of forest disappeared and 22 native trees became extinct. Lack of fuel, disappearance of wild food resources and soil erosion are the most direct consequences, followed by famine and wars between tribes for bushes. Without ships made of giant trees, survivors after the war could not go fishing and hunting in the sea, and they began to turn to a food source that had never been used: human beings themselves. In the ruins of the waste heap in the late Easter Island, human bones can be seen everywhere, and some bones break to absorb bone marrow. The oral history of islanders is still full of stories of cannibalism. The most rude insult to the enemy is: "Your mother's meat stuffed my teeth."