11.20.09
Rats in Easter Island collapse
Were rats behind Easter Island mystery?
And how. In 2005, Pulitzer-prize winner Jared Diamond revived public awareness of the island with Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. “What were they thinking when they cut down the last palm tree?” he asked in the book. The question had puzzled many scholars looking at the depopulated, deforested island, finally concluding the inhabitants had denuded it of food-providing palms to build sledges for statues and roofs for homes, an ecological parable of self-destruction.
But only a year later, another explanation surfaced in a series of papers by Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo of the University of Hawaii. First, they set the date for colonization of the island to 1200 A.D. in a radiocarbon dating paper in the journal Science, more recent by at least a century than past estimates. Next, they proposed, based on DNA evidence and chewed palm remains in the Journal of Archaeological Science, that Polynesian rats brought with those immigrants had been the culprits behind deforestation, eating palm tree nuts.