no, it's the jared diamonds who are wrong
September 13, 2024 8:58 AM Subscribe
"An international team of geneticists has found evidence that this famous cautionary tale never actually happened. The true story of Rapa Nui (named Easter Island by colonial Europeans) is not one of self-inflicted population collapse, the new findings suggest, but of cultural resilience. In the 1600s, it seems that the ancient people of Rapa Nui were not utterly isolated on their island, and it is clear that they did not overexploit their resources to the point of 'ecocide'." Genetic Evidence Overrules Ecocide Theory of Easter Island Once And For All.
Direct link to study. Includes a couple of sections on community engagement. We're a long way from the old days when archaeologists just stole DNA and artifacts from people.
The most exciting part of this work to me is the clear evidence of some small amount of mixing between Polynesian and Native American populations. The evidence has been leaning that way for a long time, most notably the presence of sweet potatoes in the parts of Polynesia closest to South America). But this new analysis both provides more evidence and gives very specific kinds of evidence of exactly which populations mixed and roughly when.
posted by Nelson at 9:40 AM on September 13 [15 favorites]
The most exciting part of this work to me is the clear evidence of some small amount of mixing between Polynesian and Native American populations. The evidence has been leaning that way for a long time, most notably the presence of sweet potatoes in the parts of Polynesia closest to South America). But this new analysis both provides more evidence and gives very specific kinds of evidence of exactly which populations mixed and roughly when.
posted by Nelson at 9:40 AM on September 13 [15 favorites]
I'm off to read this, in honour of my experience of checking out Guns, Germs, and Steel from the library, starting on it, feeling the incredible urge to put post-its in the margins to check things out/fact check and got so exhausted I never finished the book. I think I only started on Chapter 1.
posted by cendawanita at 9:40 AM on September 13 [4 favorites]
posted by cendawanita at 9:40 AM on September 13 [4 favorites]
I need to hippity hop over to Easter Island at some point...before I leave this earthly vale
posted by Czjewel at 9:42 AM on September 13
posted by Czjewel at 9:42 AM on September 13
A "popular science" writer being proven wrong?! Well, then, I will withhold judgement until I read his carefully reasoned....just kidding! <Nelson_Muntz>HAW, HAW</Nelson_Muntz>
posted by wenestvedt at 9:44 AM on September 13 [5 favorites]
posted by wenestvedt at 9:44 AM on September 13 [5 favorites]
Okay, this is a delicate matter, because a simplistic Rapa Nui ecocide narrative implicitly ascribes an original sin to those people that doesn't apply to the rest of us.
And my answer to that is "hold my Mesopotamian beer", because my Jewish ancestors were there for the Bronze Age Collapse, which was a bigger and less excusable ecocide than anything the Rapa Nui might have done. That original sin applies to all of us, and for all his faults, Jared Diamond says as much in his book.
The Rapa Nui getting trapped on the island is only an exceptional story compared to the rest of Polynesia. But they reached Peru, which means they built timber rafts capable of reaching Peru. Using timber that you still can't find on the island today. Far from refuting an ecocide theory, the Native American DNA provides an explanation for it.
Unless, that is, something in the DNA of 15 individuals proves there was not a precipitous population decline on the island after they made contact with the Americas.
posted by ocschwar at 10:04 AM on September 13 [1 favorite]
And my answer to that is "hold my Mesopotamian beer", because my Jewish ancestors were there for the Bronze Age Collapse, which was a bigger and less excusable ecocide than anything the Rapa Nui might have done. That original sin applies to all of us, and for all his faults, Jared Diamond says as much in his book.
The Rapa Nui getting trapped on the island is only an exceptional story compared to the rest of Polynesia. But they reached Peru, which means they built timber rafts capable of reaching Peru. Using timber that you still can't find on the island today. Far from refuting an ecocide theory, the Native American DNA provides an explanation for it.
Unless, that is, something in the DNA of 15 individuals proves there was not a precipitous population decline on the island after they made contact with the Americas.
posted by ocschwar at 10:04 AM on September 13 [1 favorite]
Unless, that is, something in the DNA of 15 individuals proves there was not a precipitous population decline on the island after they made contact with the Americas.
This is exactly the claim made in the paper, that there is no evidence of a population bottleneck around the time of the supposed population collapse.
posted by ssg at 10:06 AM on September 13 [9 favorites]
This is exactly the claim made in the paper, that there is no evidence of a population bottleneck around the time of the supposed population collapse.
posted by ssg at 10:06 AM on September 13 [9 favorites]
There was a recent episode of NOVA about this.
posted by credulous at 10:09 AM on September 13 [1 favorite]
posted by credulous at 10:09 AM on September 13 [1 favorite]
A report from Science has more about how they involved the local community in the research.
posted by rory at 10:19 AM on September 13 [1 favorite]
posted by rory at 10:19 AM on September 13 [1 favorite]
They may not have overexploited their resources to the point of population collapse (I'm not qualified to judge these genetic results), but they definitely overexploited their resources to the point of not having trees anymore and thus being stuck on their island. Arguably not an ecocide, but certainly a catastrophe.
posted by echo target at 10:20 AM on September 13 [2 favorites]
posted by echo target at 10:20 AM on September 13 [2 favorites]
I'm curious what you think the Late Bronze Age Collapse ecocide narrative to be. I've never heard of one. There is a climate change component to the systemic collapse that occurred, but I've never heard any hint of it being caused by the late bronze age civilizations. It's just a fact of life that over the course of a thousand years, the climate will naturally fluctuate between highs and lows.
posted by I-Write-Essays at 10:28 AM on September 13 [2 favorites]
posted by I-Write-Essays at 10:28 AM on September 13 [2 favorites]
they built timber rafts capable of reaching Peru
Is there some scholarship that suggests it was rafts? Polynesian voyaging is traditionally in vaka, things more like canoes and outrigger boats. Remarkable achievement of a culture, navigating the entire Pacific deliberately and successfully. I highly recommend the book Vaka Moana for a 2007-era description of the technologies.
"Raft" implies to me something that drifts or is otherwise difficult to navigate intentionally, some of of Heyerdahl nonsense.
posted by Nelson at 10:37 AM on September 13 [4 favorites]
Is there some scholarship that suggests it was rafts? Polynesian voyaging is traditionally in vaka, things more like canoes and outrigger boats. Remarkable achievement of a culture, navigating the entire Pacific deliberately and successfully. I highly recommend the book Vaka Moana for a 2007-era description of the technologies.
"Raft" implies to me something that drifts or is otherwise difficult to navigate intentionally, some of of Heyerdahl nonsense.
posted by Nelson at 10:37 AM on September 13 [4 favorites]
Go to any of the copper mining sites that enabled the Bronze Age to begin with.
You'll find plenty of slag piles. (In fact one in Jordan is to this day called "the slaggy ruin." -Khirbet al Nakhas) What you won't find is the fuel they needed to smelt the copper. Because it's all gone. Thousands of years after the mining stopped, you still don't have adequate reforestation. And not for lack of effort.
Then ask yourself how the tin arrived in the same area. And what it takes to build ships that will deliver tin from Cornwall to Israel. Then you might wonder why Sicilian timber became a vital resource during the Peloponesian War. And why such timber remains scarce to this day.
Fucking up on that scale utterly dwarfs whatever errors the Rapa Niu might have made.
posted by ocschwar at 10:38 AM on September 13 [2 favorites]
You'll find plenty of slag piles. (In fact one in Jordan is to this day called "the slaggy ruin." -Khirbet al Nakhas) What you won't find is the fuel they needed to smelt the copper. Because it's all gone. Thousands of years after the mining stopped, you still don't have adequate reforestation. And not for lack of effort.
Then ask yourself how the tin arrived in the same area. And what it takes to build ships that will deliver tin from Cornwall to Israel. Then you might wonder why Sicilian timber became a vital resource during the Peloponesian War. And why such timber remains scarce to this day.
Fucking up on that scale utterly dwarfs whatever errors the Rapa Niu might have made.
posted by ocschwar at 10:38 AM on September 13 [2 favorites]
Is there some scholarship that suggests it was rafts?
Sorry. That's just how I would describe the ocean going canoes that would have two hulls and a platform connecting them, like in the cover of Vaka Moana. My fault there.
posted by ocschwar at 10:41 AM on September 13 [2 favorites]
> Fucking up on that scale utterly dwarfs whatever errors the Rapa Niu might have made.
Are you blaming the inhabitants of Mesopotamia for making the rain stop falling? The region used to be much wetter than it is today. Are you suggesting that the change in rainfall patterns was caused by cutting down the trees? I have no stake in Rapa Nui, and welcome revisions to their story as we get more data, but this claim about the Bronze Age is wild.
posted by I-Write-Essays at 10:53 AM on September 13 [2 favorites]
Are you blaming the inhabitants of Mesopotamia for making the rain stop falling? The region used to be much wetter than it is today. Are you suggesting that the change in rainfall patterns was caused by cutting down the trees? I have no stake in Rapa Nui, and welcome revisions to their story as we get more data, but this claim about the Bronze Age is wild.
posted by I-Write-Essays at 10:53 AM on September 13 [2 favorites]
Are you suggesting that the change in rainfall patterns was caused by cutting down the trees?
Are we saying that's happening now?
posted by LionIndex at 11:09 AM on September 13 [6 favorites]
Are we saying that's happening now?
posted by LionIndex at 11:09 AM on September 13 [6 favorites]
we know that Polynesians were really adept seafarers that managed to get to every Polynesian island in a matter of 1 to 2 thousand years," Moreno-Mayar, Malaspinas, and Mota explained
This is SO COOL
I had no idea that the timeline for Pacific exploration was that short. It is good to be reminded that ancient seafaring folks would not have thought about it this way, but ocean exploration feels to modern-day me like fucking ASTRONAUT shit. The ground literally changes under your feet! You can be in the middle of it and see no places to land in any direction! And our ancestors learned to navigate it just as well as the dry stuff. Amazing.
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 11:15 AM on September 13 [6 favorites]
This is SO COOL
I had no idea that the timeline for Pacific exploration was that short. It is good to be reminded that ancient seafaring folks would not have thought about it this way, but ocean exploration feels to modern-day me like fucking ASTRONAUT shit. The ground literally changes under your feet! You can be in the middle of it and see no places to land in any direction! And our ancestors learned to navigate it just as well as the dry stuff. Amazing.
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 11:15 AM on September 13 [6 favorites]
. It is good to be reminded that ancient seafaring folks would not have thought about it this way, but ocean exploration feels to modern-day me like fucking ASTRONAUT shit
Probably everyone but the Polynesians would have. There was a very small handful of cultures with any experience navigating the open ocean and they were basically the undisputed world champions until the magnetic compass and astrolabe were invented. Even then they probably were as good or better in places they were familiar with.
posted by BungaDunga at 11:26 AM on September 13 [4 favorites]
Probably everyone but the Polynesians would have. There was a very small handful of cultures with any experience navigating the open ocean and they were basically the undisputed world champions until the magnetic compass and astrolabe were invented. Even then they probably were as good or better in places they were familiar with.
posted by BungaDunga at 11:26 AM on September 13 [4 favorites]
There's a chapter about this in the excellent Fall of Civilizations by Paul Cooper. I assume also a corresponding podcast in his series of the same name, but I've only read the book.
posted by terretu at 11:52 AM on September 13 [1 favorite]
posted by terretu at 11:52 AM on September 13 [1 favorite]
It looks like Polynesians were travelling to South America at around the same time (plus or minus a century) as they discovered New Zealand. I assume that’s a coincidence but I thought it was pretty neat.
posted by plonkee at 12:00 PM on September 13
posted by plonkee at 12:00 PM on September 13
Are you suggesting that the change in rainfall patterns was caused by cutting down the trees?
In 19th Century America, people deluded themselves into thinking "rain follows the plow."
In the Fertile Crescent, meanwhile, people have long known that rain follows the sapling. And yet where there was copper, there is desolation.
Meanwhile in the Nature paper, the paragraph about a population decline is headlined "No evidence for 1600s Rapanui collapse" and says they used a method they call HapNe-LD to make that conclusion. I need to read a little on that to see if 15 DNA samples that they don't even definitively carbon date to establish that they have no post-1722 outside contributions, is enough to make that determination.
The archaeology links in the story show evidence that there was no decline because there was not a large population either. In which case there's still a population bottleneck as soon as the voyages stopped, albeit a sustained one. How would HapNe-LD show the difference?
Anyway, I'm a little triggered because a lot of the criticism of Jared Diamond isn't because of what he wrote so much as because of what racists and tech bro midwits read from what he wrote. He deserves criticism for not making enough of an effort to prevent that (an important consideration for any book based on anthropological observations of indigenous people), but meanwhile his ideas deserve a more careful reading from the rest of us.
posted by ocschwar at 12:13 PM on September 13 [2 favorites]
In 19th Century America, people deluded themselves into thinking "rain follows the plow."
In the Fertile Crescent, meanwhile, people have long known that rain follows the sapling. And yet where there was copper, there is desolation.
Meanwhile in the Nature paper, the paragraph about a population decline is headlined "No evidence for 1600s Rapanui collapse" and says they used a method they call HapNe-LD to make that conclusion. I need to read a little on that to see if 15 DNA samples that they don't even definitively carbon date to establish that they have no post-1722 outside contributions, is enough to make that determination.
The archaeology links in the story show evidence that there was no decline because there was not a large population either. In which case there's still a population bottleneck as soon as the voyages stopped, albeit a sustained one. How would HapNe-LD show the difference?
Anyway, I'm a little triggered because a lot of the criticism of Jared Diamond isn't because of what he wrote so much as because of what racists and tech bro midwits read from what he wrote. He deserves criticism for not making enough of an effort to prevent that (an important consideration for any book based on anthropological observations of indigenous people), but meanwhile his ideas deserve a more careful reading from the rest of us.
posted by ocschwar at 12:13 PM on September 13 [2 favorites]
Are you suggesting that coconuts migrate?
posted by Naberius at 12:20 PM on September 13 [1 favorite]
posted by Naberius at 12:20 PM on September 13 [1 favorite]
I'm suggesting Diamond's books didn't fall off a coconut tree, even if some of his readers sound like they had a coconut drop on their heads at an early age.
posted by ocschwar at 12:30 PM on September 13 [2 favorites]
posted by ocschwar at 12:30 PM on September 13 [2 favorites]
There was a very small handful of cultures with any experience navigating the open ocean and they were basically the undisputed world champions until the magnetic compass and astrolabe were invented. Even then they probably were as good or better in places they were familiar with.
Yep. The Bronze Age Greeks, for instance, generally stayed within about a day's distance from shore. Odysseus was not (at least not voluntarily) an ocean-goer.
posted by praemunire at 1:07 PM on September 13 [3 favorites]
Yep. The Bronze Age Greeks, for instance, generally stayed within about a day's distance from shore. Odysseus was not (at least not voluntarily) an ocean-goer.
posted by praemunire at 1:07 PM on September 13 [3 favorites]
From the article:
Genetic analysis indicates that Rapanui's civilization was actually growing until the 1860s, when Peruvian slave raids and subsequent epidemics brought by European colonial activity decimated the island's population to around 110 individuals.
I'm a bit of a nerd about Rapa Nui...this is part of the story, maybe not the whole story.
If you were on Rapa Nui in, say 1855, you'd be on one of the remaining little bits of land that had not officially been colonized by a European power. Society there had been through some rocky times, though. Visits from whaling ships looking for r&r had disrupted social life a bit for the previous 50 to 60 years or so. The island had also gone through a period of social unrest and intercommunal violence, one of the results being that all the moai on the island had been pulled down by warring villages.
But in the 1860s, Peruvian "blackbirders" showed up, took away almost the entire population of the island to Peru for mining operations, in what was slavery in all but the name. The situation was reported on in the international press of the day, and there was pressure from European powers to return Rapa Nui people to their home. Peruvian authorities gathered up the remaining Rapa Nui people to the port of Callao...right at the time an epidemic was breaking out, that the Rapa Nui had no resistance to. Many had already died in the mines, many more died in the epidemic. Sadly, many of the traditional religious leaders died at this time, including the only people who knew how to read the indigenous rongo-rongo script that was invented on Rapa Nui.
However, there was a French bishop doing missionary work on the island, who was aware of the threat, and managed to rescue about 800 Rapa Nui people and relocate them temporarily to Tahiti before the Peruvians could take them. Most of those people returned to Rapa Nui a couple of decades later.
In the 1880s, there were still only a bit more than 100 people actually on the island itself. A Chilean adminral showed up and claimed Rapa Nui officially for Chile. It remains a Chile-controlled territory today. Much of the island was rented out as a giant sheep farm; during those times the native Rapa Nui people were restricted to the town of Hanga Roa and not allowed to visit sacred sites elsewhere on the island.
Anyway, what happened to "Easter Island"? Not an ecosystem crisis. Like so many stories from that time, the answer is yet again colonialism. In this case, a lot of the worst stuff happened in rapid succession, boom, boom, boom, during a couple of years in the 1860s.
(I'm out of town, this is all off the top of my head from memory. A few minor details might deserve adjustment.)
posted by gimonca at 1:41 PM on September 13 [19 favorites]
Genetic analysis indicates that Rapanui's civilization was actually growing until the 1860s, when Peruvian slave raids and subsequent epidemics brought by European colonial activity decimated the island's population to around 110 individuals.
I'm a bit of a nerd about Rapa Nui...this is part of the story, maybe not the whole story.
If you were on Rapa Nui in, say 1855, you'd be on one of the remaining little bits of land that had not officially been colonized by a European power. Society there had been through some rocky times, though. Visits from whaling ships looking for r&r had disrupted social life a bit for the previous 50 to 60 years or so. The island had also gone through a period of social unrest and intercommunal violence, one of the results being that all the moai on the island had been pulled down by warring villages.
But in the 1860s, Peruvian "blackbirders" showed up, took away almost the entire population of the island to Peru for mining operations, in what was slavery in all but the name. The situation was reported on in the international press of the day, and there was pressure from European powers to return Rapa Nui people to their home. Peruvian authorities gathered up the remaining Rapa Nui people to the port of Callao...right at the time an epidemic was breaking out, that the Rapa Nui had no resistance to. Many had already died in the mines, many more died in the epidemic. Sadly, many of the traditional religious leaders died at this time, including the only people who knew how to read the indigenous rongo-rongo script that was invented on Rapa Nui.
However, there was a French bishop doing missionary work on the island, who was aware of the threat, and managed to rescue about 800 Rapa Nui people and relocate them temporarily to Tahiti before the Peruvians could take them. Most of those people returned to Rapa Nui a couple of decades later.
In the 1880s, there were still only a bit more than 100 people actually on the island itself. A Chilean adminral showed up and claimed Rapa Nui officially for Chile. It remains a Chile-controlled territory today. Much of the island was rented out as a giant sheep farm; during those times the native Rapa Nui people were restricted to the town of Hanga Roa and not allowed to visit sacred sites elsewhere on the island.
Anyway, what happened to "Easter Island"? Not an ecosystem crisis. Like so many stories from that time, the answer is yet again colonialism. In this case, a lot of the worst stuff happened in rapid succession, boom, boom, boom, during a couple of years in the 1860s.
(I'm out of town, this is all off the top of my head from memory. A few minor details might deserve adjustment.)
posted by gimonca at 1:41 PM on September 13 [19 favorites]
Thank you gimonca! I was girding myself to go home and dig up my dusty collection of old journal articles to confirm and explain exactly what you laid out.
posted by ursus_comiter at 1:58 PM on September 13
posted by ursus_comiter at 1:58 PM on September 13
But I will say that anthropologists have been rolling their eyes at Diamond and GG&S for decades.
I searched and was sad to see that How Jared Diamond Distorts History does not seem to have appeared on the blue before.
Diamond’s account makes all the factors of European domination a product of a distant and accidental history. “For Diamond, guns and steel were just technologies that happened to fall into the hands of one’s collective ancestors. And, just to make things fair, they only marginally benefited Westerners over their Indigenous foes in the New World because the real conquest was accomplished by other forces floating free in the cosmic lottery–submicroscopic pathogens” (Wilcox 2010:123).
What Diamond glosses over is that just because you have guns and steel does not mean you should use them for colonial and imperial purposes. Or promote the idea of handing out smallpox-infested blankets from sick wards. One of the supposed values of Western civilization is to care for the sick, not to deliberately spread disease. “Pizarro had the capacity and resources to behave with remarkable brutality in the New World. But the mere capacity to behave brutally does not absolve him from having done so” (Errington and Gewertz, Excusing the Haves and Blaming the Have-Nots in the Telling of History, 2010:340).
Diamond has almost nothing to say about the political decisions made in order to pursue European imperialism, to manufacture steel and guns, and to use disease as a weapon. As a result, accounts like Guns, Germs, and Steel supplant real historical accounts like Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People Without History. “Europeans and Americans would never have encountered these supposed bearers of a pristine past if they had not encountered one another, in bloody fact, as Europe reached out to seize the resources and populations of the other continents” (Wolf 1982:18).
posted by ursus_comiter at 2:03 PM on September 13 [7 favorites]
I searched and was sad to see that How Jared Diamond Distorts History does not seem to have appeared on the blue before.
Diamond’s account makes all the factors of European domination a product of a distant and accidental history. “For Diamond, guns and steel were just technologies that happened to fall into the hands of one’s collective ancestors. And, just to make things fair, they only marginally benefited Westerners over their Indigenous foes in the New World because the real conquest was accomplished by other forces floating free in the cosmic lottery–submicroscopic pathogens” (Wilcox 2010:123).
What Diamond glosses over is that just because you have guns and steel does not mean you should use them for colonial and imperial purposes. Or promote the idea of handing out smallpox-infested blankets from sick wards. One of the supposed values of Western civilization is to care for the sick, not to deliberately spread disease. “Pizarro had the capacity and resources to behave with remarkable brutality in the New World. But the mere capacity to behave brutally does not absolve him from having done so” (Errington and Gewertz, Excusing the Haves and Blaming the Have-Nots in the Telling of History, 2010:340).
Diamond has almost nothing to say about the political decisions made in order to pursue European imperialism, to manufacture steel and guns, and to use disease as a weapon. As a result, accounts like Guns, Germs, and Steel supplant real historical accounts like Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People Without History. “Europeans and Americans would never have encountered these supposed bearers of a pristine past if they had not encountered one another, in bloody fact, as Europe reached out to seize the resources and populations of the other continents” (Wolf 1982:18).
posted by ursus_comiter at 2:03 PM on September 13 [7 favorites]
What Diamond glosses over is that just because you have guns and steel does not mean you should use them for colonial and imperial purposes .
Diamond wrote a whole book to debunk the supremacist thinking that tries to justify those colonial and imperial enterprises. He made no attempt to absolve Pizarro. Only to point out that Pizarro had steel because of the accident of birth, not because he was some kind of ubermensch.
And that's my point. People are angry with Diamond because of what midwits take away from his book, not because of what he wrote. Could he have written it better to prevent this? Maybe.
The same thing applies with Collapse. In that book he devotes as much space to a different Pacific island: Tikopia, where people developed laws, social norms, and culture specifically to avert the risk of an ecocide. A preliterate society on an isolated island developed a consciously chosen consensus and culture to acknowledge that they depended on natural resources that did not respect national boundaries or property lines, that had to be treated with respect, and some reverence, even. And those norms are visible in the cultures of most of the South Pacific. THAT was Diamond's point: that Polynesians came to the right approach to things that threaten to our society today. NOT that the Rapa Nui got a comeuppance.
posted by ocschwar at 2:19 PM on September 13 [2 favorites]
Diamond wrote a whole book to debunk the supremacist thinking that tries to justify those colonial and imperial enterprises. He made no attempt to absolve Pizarro. Only to point out that Pizarro had steel because of the accident of birth, not because he was some kind of ubermensch.
And that's my point. People are angry with Diamond because of what midwits take away from his book, not because of what he wrote. Could he have written it better to prevent this? Maybe.
The same thing applies with Collapse. In that book he devotes as much space to a different Pacific island: Tikopia, where people developed laws, social norms, and culture specifically to avert the risk of an ecocide. A preliterate society on an isolated island developed a consciously chosen consensus and culture to acknowledge that they depended on natural resources that did not respect national boundaries or property lines, that had to be treated with respect, and some reverence, even. And those norms are visible in the cultures of most of the South Pacific. THAT was Diamond's point: that Polynesians came to the right approach to things that threaten to our society today. NOT that the Rapa Nui got a comeuppance.
posted by ocschwar at 2:19 PM on September 13 [2 favorites]
OK, here we go. I did dig it up.
From Genocide to Ecocide: The Rape of Rapa Nui
Abstract
The ‘decline and fall’ of Easter Island and its alleged self-destruction has become the poster child of a new environmentalist historiography, a school of thought that goes hand-in-hand with predictions of environmental disaster. Why did this exceptional civilisation crumble? What drove its population to extinction? These are some of the key questions Jared Diamond endeavours to answer in his new book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive. According to Diamond, the people of Easter Island destroyed their forest, degraded the island's topsoil, wiped out their plants and drove their animals to extinction. As a result of this self-inflicted environmental devastation, its complex society collapsed, descending into civil war, cannibalism and self-destruction. While his theory of ecocide has become almost paradigmatic in environmental circles, a dark and gory secret hangs over the premise of Easter Island's self-destruction: An actual genocide terminated Rapa Nui's indigenous populace and its culture. Diamond, however, ignores and fails to address the true reasons behind Rapa Nui's collapse. Why has he turned the victims of cultural and physical extermination into the perpetrators of their own demise? This paper is a first attempt to address this disquieting quandary. It describes the foundation of Diamond's environmental revisionism and explains why it does not hold up to scientific scrutiny.
--
I have the pdf if anyone wants to read up on exactly how Diamond picks and chooses facts to suit his just so stories.
posted by ursus_comiter at 2:33 PM on September 13 [7 favorites]
From Genocide to Ecocide: The Rape of Rapa Nui
Abstract
The ‘decline and fall’ of Easter Island and its alleged self-destruction has become the poster child of a new environmentalist historiography, a school of thought that goes hand-in-hand with predictions of environmental disaster. Why did this exceptional civilisation crumble? What drove its population to extinction? These are some of the key questions Jared Diamond endeavours to answer in his new book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive. According to Diamond, the people of Easter Island destroyed their forest, degraded the island's topsoil, wiped out their plants and drove their animals to extinction. As a result of this self-inflicted environmental devastation, its complex society collapsed, descending into civil war, cannibalism and self-destruction. While his theory of ecocide has become almost paradigmatic in environmental circles, a dark and gory secret hangs over the premise of Easter Island's self-destruction: An actual genocide terminated Rapa Nui's indigenous populace and its culture. Diamond, however, ignores and fails to address the true reasons behind Rapa Nui's collapse. Why has he turned the victims of cultural and physical extermination into the perpetrators of their own demise? This paper is a first attempt to address this disquieting quandary. It describes the foundation of Diamond's environmental revisionism and explains why it does not hold up to scientific scrutiny.
--
I have the pdf if anyone wants to read up on exactly how Diamond picks and chooses facts to suit his just so stories.
posted by ursus_comiter at 2:33 PM on September 13 [7 favorites]
The striking lack of research into actual European atrocities contrasts noticeably
with the fixation of most researchers on hypothesised ecological 'suicide' which is
squarely blamed on the self-destructive actions of the natives themselves. As a result,
our knowledge about the exact number, gravity and detrimental consequences of the
more than 50 European incursions on Easter Island during the 19th century remains
extremely incomplete. We don't even know whether the island's population - before it
crashed in the 1860s and 70s - stood at 3,000, 5,000 or as high as 20,000, a dubiously
high estimate provided by A.A. Salmon who was the first to take a population census
in 1886 (Thomson, 1891:460).
What is undisputed, however, is that as a result of the series of slave raids, the
subsequent small pox pandemics and numerous population transfers of the 1860s and
'70s, the population was chopped down to a mere 100-odd survivors in 1877.
Peiser, Benny. “FROM GENOCIDE TO ECOCIDE: THE RAPE OF ‘RAPA NUI.’” Energy & Environment 16, no. 3/4 (2005): page 532
posted by ursus_comiter at 2:37 PM on September 13 [2 favorites]
with the fixation of most researchers on hypothesised ecological 'suicide' which is
squarely blamed on the self-destructive actions of the natives themselves. As a result,
our knowledge about the exact number, gravity and detrimental consequences of the
more than 50 European incursions on Easter Island during the 19th century remains
extremely incomplete. We don't even know whether the island's population - before it
crashed in the 1860s and 70s - stood at 3,000, 5,000 or as high as 20,000, a dubiously
high estimate provided by A.A. Salmon who was the first to take a population census
in 1886 (Thomson, 1891:460).
What is undisputed, however, is that as a result of the series of slave raids, the
subsequent small pox pandemics and numerous population transfers of the 1860s and
'70s, the population was chopped down to a mere 100-odd survivors in 1877.
Peiser, Benny. “FROM GENOCIDE TO ECOCIDE: THE RAPE OF ‘RAPA NUI.’” Energy & Environment 16, no. 3/4 (2005): page 532
posted by ursus_comiter at 2:37 PM on September 13 [2 favorites]
The fabled AskHistorians subreddit has an entire section of their FAQ covering why and how Jared Diamond sucks. It's delightful reading.
posted by Rhedyn at 3:31 PM on September 13 [4 favorites]
posted by Rhedyn at 3:31 PM on September 13 [4 favorites]
ursus_comiter, I would be *very* interested to read that article!
This past year, I read 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus , which even as a child raised on A People’s History (and an anthropology graduate student by the time Jared Diamon came on the scene) totally knocked my socks off - so much about pre-colonial societies that I’d never read or heard before, even almost twenty years after the book was published.
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 3:33 PM on September 13 [4 favorites]
This past year, I read 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus , which even as a child raised on A People’s History (and an anthropology graduate student by the time Jared Diamon came on the scene) totally knocked my socks off - so much about pre-colonial societies that I’d never read or heard before, even almost twenty years after the book was published.
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 3:33 PM on September 13 [4 favorites]
Neither of these books match the readability of 1491 (which is amazing), but they show that the colonial conquest of the native N. American population was not a given.
The Rediscovery of America by Ned Blackhawk
Indigenous Continent by Pekka Hamalainen
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 4:04 PM on September 13 [3 favorites]
The Rediscovery of America by Ned Blackhawk
Indigenous Continent by Pekka Hamalainen
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 4:04 PM on September 13 [3 favorites]
Rushes for rare moment to be eponysterical.
I would also love to visit one day. I made it to southern Chile but Easter Island sounds like a whole different place.
posted by rongorongo at 4:25 PM on September 13 [3 favorites]
I would also love to visit one day. I made it to southern Chile but Easter Island sounds like a whole different place.
posted by rongorongo at 4:25 PM on September 13 [3 favorites]
Go to any of the copper mining sites that enabled the Bronze Age to begin with.
You'll find plenty of slag piles. (In fact one in Jordan is to this day called "the slaggy ruin." -Khirbet al Nakhas) What you won't find is the fuel they needed to smelt the copper. Because it's all gone. Thousands of years after the mining stopped, you still don't have adequate reforestation.
you need not travel all the way to Jordan! just visit your local library & check out A Forest Journey [g]
posted by HearHere at 6:01 PM on September 13 [2 favorites]
You'll find plenty of slag piles. (In fact one in Jordan is to this day called "the slaggy ruin." -Khirbet al Nakhas) What you won't find is the fuel they needed to smelt the copper. Because it's all gone. Thousands of years after the mining stopped, you still don't have adequate reforestation.
you need not travel all the way to Jordan! just visit your local library & check out A Forest Journey [g]
posted by HearHere at 6:01 PM on September 13 [2 favorites]
just to make things fair, they only marginally benefited Westerners over their Indigenous foes in the New World because the real conquest was accomplished by other forces floating free in the cosmic lottery–submicroscopic pathogens”
I think what opened my eyes on this was someone making the obvious point that Europe recovered from a pandemic plague intact, the main difference was that they weren't simultaneously being invaded by genocidal slavers at the time
posted by BungaDunga at 8:25 PM on September 13 [4 favorites]
I think what opened my eyes on this was someone making the obvious point that Europe recovered from a pandemic plague intact, the main difference was that they weren't simultaneously being invaded by genocidal slavers at the time
posted by BungaDunga at 8:25 PM on September 13 [4 favorites]
See also: Diamond's handling of Haiti's deforestation (I think also in collapse). Lots of pages on the forestry and topsoil statistics. Literally zero discussion of the debt they owed for their own freedom to the French (and later the Americans). The debt was forced on them to compensate their previous slave owners after the success of the glorious Haitian revolution. At times they paid the installments in wood, that's the reason for overexploitation of the land not the "feeble natives" who needed "paternal guidance".
posted by kmt at 12:00 AM on September 14 [1 favorite]
posted by kmt at 12:00 AM on September 14 [1 favorite]
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posted by zenon at 9:28 AM on September 13 [1 favorite]