Flutterby™! : Easter Island ecocide theory dead

Genetic Evidence Overrules Ecocide Theory of Easter Island Once And For All

"These results do not support a major population collapse on Rapa Nui after its initial peopling and before the 1800s," conclude the authors of the study, led by geneticists from the University of Copenhagen in Denmark and the University of Lausanne in Switzerland.

A large body of archaeological and anthropological data has already contradicted the ecocide theory of Rapa Nui. But this new research is the first to undermine the story using ancient genomic data.

Via Metafilter which includes this comment from nelson:

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.

Further down the thread there's a recommendation for K.R. Howe's Vaka Moana, Voyages of the Ancestors: The Discovery and Settlement of the Pacific, which looks fascinating, and (again to quote the thread) an antidote to "Heyerdahl nonsense".

One of the things I realized recently is that I know that various cultures in the Americas had woven cloth, but I have no idea about the technologies that those peoples were using for spinning yarn and weaving cloth, especially from plant fibers. And yet they were doing so...