New Genetic Study of Ancient Rapanui Reveals Contact With Indigenous Americans, and That the Easter Island Ecocide Theory Is Just a Myth

A recent genetic study of the remains of fifteen individuals purported to be from the island of Rapa Nui—also known as Easter Island—has revealed that the inhabitants of the island had pre-colonial contact with the Peoples of South America, and also has dispelled a long-standing idea that the Rapanui had caused the collapse of the island’s ecosystem through overly-ambitious projects aimed at building the island’s famed moai, further evidence that this story was just a myth concocted by European explorers.

Over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the Natural History Museum of Paris obtained the remains of 15 individuals assumed to be Rapanui; however, there remained doubt regarding the provenance of the remains. Skipping forward to today, University of Copenhagen geneticist Víctor Moreno-Mayar has been working with the Rapanui community to study the DNA of these individuals, with the goal of—provided they were indeed from Easter Island—repatriating them to their remote island home in the Pacific.

Moreno-Mayar and his team found that the remains were indeed of individuals that were from Rapa Nui and, with the permission of the modern-day islanders, conducted a study aimed at clarifying the long-standing story that the inhabitants of Rapa Nui were the architects of their own decline, through a self-inflicted ecological collapse—an important question that has a major impact on the cultural identity of the People.

“Everyone in the community was involved and [the researchers] were open to questions, so it was quite interactive,” according to MAPSE Rapa Nui Museum curator and archaeologist Gabriela Atallah Leiva.

This myth, originally concocted by European explorers during the eighteenth century, purports that at some time during their history, The Rapanui began to devote a disproportionate amount of resources to the construction of the colossal moai monuments that can still be seen on the island today, supposedly resulting in deforestation of the island, civil war, and ultimately cannibalism after traditional food sources were depleted. This theory has been disputed in recent years, due not only to a lack of evidence of such a tragic decline, but also more recent archeological evidence that suggests that the islander’s pre-colonial situation was actually the opposite: Rapa Nui never had a large population to begin with, and all the evidence suggests that the community saw steady growth since it was settled over 700 years ago, rather than a traumatic collapse.

Moreno-Mayar’s whole-genome study of the remains looked for genetic bottlenecks that indicated a population decline, but only found one such instance that dated to sometime before 1300 CE, roughly half a millennium before European contact, and corresponding with the original settling of the island by Polynesian settlers. From there, the population grew steadily until contact with European explorers, only after which the Rapanui population suffered a catastrophic decline due to disease and kidnappings by slave traders.

“After the arrival of the Europeans, the history of Rapa Nui is dark,” Moreno-Mayar remarked, with his findings underscoring that Rapanui history was not as self-destructively dystopic as history would have us believe.

Moreno-Mayar’s work also yielded an unexpected extra find: the genes of the individuals studied contained a surprising amount of Native American DNA, with their genome containing up to 12 percent of code that would ordinarily be found from individuals on the South American mainland. Although it is unclear as to whether it was the Rapanui visiting the Americas before returning to the island or vice-versa, this intermingling took place sometime between 600 and 800 years ago, a finding that backs earlier evidence that includes the sweet potato, native to the Andes, being a pre-colonial staple in Polynesian culture, and chicken bones found at South American archaeological sites that predate European contact.

In the meantime, the Rapanui are working to have the remains of the fifteen individuals in Paris returned to their rightful home, and are planning local museum exhibits and a documentary based on these recent findings.

“Recovering all ancestors is the priority,” Atallah Leiva stated. “For the Rapanui culture, the ancestors are here among us… they are not in the past, they are here in the present.”