The Legend Of Lemuria – Part Three

Science is serious business. Those who wish to pursue a career in any of the disciplines of science have to serve a rigorous apprenticeship. Not only do they have to get the necessary academic credentials, but they also have to uphold the traditional protocols of science.

And before they can gain the necessary recognition and credibility within their chosen field of science, graduates must first publish the results of their research in established scientific journals, in order to acquire funding or tenure at a recognized educational institution.

People do not enter the scientific profession from the world of entertainment or show business. Stars of shows like Saturday Night Live are not welcome. Stand up comedians need not apply. Nor are results of scientific research published in Vogue, Sports Illustrated or Rolling Stone Magazine.

So it is all the more surprising when scientists, apparently with a straight face, support ideas which appear to come directly from the script of a Monty Python Show, or a Disney fantasia. For this is what has happened in the case of Easter Island and its famous Moai, or carved stone statues.

It all began when geologists began to investigate what lay beneath the rolling grasslands that cover the major part of this tiny island. What they found proved to be a considerable surprise. It appeared that at one time in its past the island had been home to an abundant variety of plant and marine life.

Scientists who have studied the ecology of Easter Island have found fossilised evidence indicating that the island was once covered by subtropical moist broadleaf forests, including three species of palm trees which grew up to fifty feet in size.

They also found evidence that the island had earlier possessed a range of shrubs, ferns and grasses that have long since disappeared, along with at least six species of native land birds and twenty-five different species of sub-arctic and tropical seabirds.

The challenge that confronted these scientists was how to account for the loss of such an abundant variety of fauna and flora, and for the environmental degradation brought about by the extreme deforestation that is so evident on the island today.

In other words, if Easter Island once had such a rich heritage of plant and marine life, then what happened to it, and was this in any way linked with the stone statues that littered the island? One man who believed he knew the answer to these questions was an American scientist named Jared Diamond.

Now Diamond was not just some amateur hack or interloper into fields in which he had no expertise. He was a man of impeccable credentials. In fact he is often referred to today as “America’s best known geographer”.

Born in Boston in 1937, Diamond earned a BA degree at Harvard and followed this up with a PhD at Trinity College at the University of Cambridge, England, in 1961. He has since had a glittering academic career, and received numerous different Honours and Awards, including the Pulitzer Prize.

One of the subjects that has occupied Diamond’s attention in recent years has been the enigma of why certain societies succeed, and why others fail. His research into this field culminated in the publication in 2005 of his book: Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.

In this book Diamond examined a range of historical societies in an attempt to identify the reasons why some of them flourished and others failed. He listed eight environmental factors that he believed had led to the collapse of certain human societies in the past.

He claimed that the most important reason was deforestation and habitat destruction, followed by soil erosion, salinization and loss of soil fertility. Diamond quoted Easter Island as the prime example of a society that had collapsed due to the environmental damage that the islanders had brought upon themselves.

When he began his research into the history of Easter Island, Dr. Diamond naturally assumed that the ancestors of the present inhabitants of the island were the original sculptors of the giant Moai that lay scattered all over the island.

He suggested that the first settlement on Easter Island had taken place some twelve hundred years before at the Caleta Anakena landing point, as it provided the best shelter from prevailing swells, as well as a sandy beach that was ideal for canoe launchings and landings.

Whoever these early settlers happened to be, and wherever they happened to hail from, they apparently flourished. And in time, so the theory went, the population of Easter Island grew to a significant number, thought to be perhaps as many as ten to fifteen thousand people at the high point of their culture.

What happened next is still a matter of conjecture and debate, but at some point in those early years, the inhabitants apparently discovered that the volcanic rock that lay exposed on the flanks of Rano Raraku crater could be sculpted with the use of primitive rock tools.

And so began the era of the Moai, in which stone statues carved in stylized human shapes began to be cut out of the living rock. These statues were then transported to different sites all over the island, where they were placed upon stone platforms called Ahus.

While most scientists today are content to accept this hypothesis without question, we need to bear in mind that no other Polynesian society has ever had the desire to carve statues in stone, let alone those of such extraordinary shape and size.

But even if the local inhabitants had somehow managed to carve these enormous statues, some of which weighed up to fifty tons, they were then faced with the challenge of transporting them. And this is where the so-called “history” of Easter Island starts to become a trifle bizarre.

According to Diamond, the inhabitants then began to cut down the trees on the island for a variety of reasons. Some of them were burnt down to provide land for agriculture, some used as firewood, while others were used to transport these Moai to their chosen destinations.

While this scenario may seem plausible enough in theory, it hardly stands up to critical analysis. Given the size of most of these statues, it would surely have taken local sculptors many months to carve even a single statue out of the side of the volcanic crater.

So when each individual statue was completed, there would have been ample time for a separate transportation crew to move it to its assigned location, while the sculptors set to work carving the next Moai. And so on and so on.

After all, if the inhabitants were clever enough to carve these statues in the first place, they should have had the nous to realize that one or two sets of timber would be all that would be needed to transport each to its chosen destination, if that is in fact how these statues were moved.

There would be absolutely no need to cut down entire swathes of palm trees in order to build up a vast stockpile of logs. They could simply keep on using the same logs, and only when these finally wore out would it be necessary to replace them.

But as the story goes, different clans now began to compete among themselves to see who could build the largest Moai. This led to the need for more and more logs to transport all these Moai, causing the islanders to denude the island by cutting down all the trees.

And then there were the rats.

Apparently, the earliest settlers not only arrived in their canoes with cargoes of men, women and children. They also brought with them Polynesian rats. And according to the historians, these rats went forth and multiplied until they infested the entire island.

Over the years these rats apparently found themselves short of their natural diet, so they turned on the giant palm trees and gnawed at their roots, causing them to die. So between the islanders and the rats, the island became denuded of foliage, leading to the destruction of their entire ecosystem.

Finally, with starvation looming, different clans on the island began to fight among themselves. And instead of worshipping the Moai as they had done previously, they now began to destroy them, which accounted for the stone ruins that existed around the coastline of the island.

In the end, according to Diamond, those few people who were left on the island turned to cannibalism to survive, as evidenced by wooden carvings showing people with gaunt faces and pronounced ribcages. The destruction of their society, and with it the former glory of Easter Island, was now complete.

For all his credentials and awards, Jared Diamond must assume part of the responsibility for perpetuating the myth that Easter Island was an example of a failed society that had collapsed due to environmental deterioration which the islanders brought upon themselves.

Instead, it is an example of that old bromide: There are none so blind as those who will not see. The problem lies not with the disappearing palm trees of Easter Island. It rests squarely with those scientists and scholars who, in spite of their vast intellect and education, simply cannot tell the wood from the trees.

The truth is that Easter Island was a desolate and windy place long before the first Polynesians arrived. There were no lush forests to greet them, and what little bird and marine life there was provided a meagre existence for those few who could adapt to the spartan conditions.

There were, however, plenty of stone statues to be found all over the island. They had been there for ages, perhaps even for tens of thousands of years, staring sightlessly over the horizon, and bearing mute testimony to the civilization that had built them.

When the first western explorer, Admiral Jacob Roggeveen, arrived on Easter Island in April 1722, he found the islanders living in thatched huts, and surviving off a diet of bananas and fish, as well as South American plants like yucca and sweet potato.

Roggeveen described them as being heavily tattooed, with their earlobes hanging down to their shoulders. They seemed to be in robust health, and there was no evidence that they had recently undergone any sort of social crisis leading to a descent into cannibalism.

This was borne out by a study conducted by Douglas Owsley in 1994, indicating that the bone pathology and osteometric data taken from the islanders of that period showed no sign of pre-European collapse, and little evidence that any fatalities could be attributed directly to violence.

So what could have happened to all those lush forests that geologists insist had once covered the island, along with the abundant marine life and all the tropical seabirds, whose fossils now lay buried beneath the soil?

The short answer is that they were all victims of gigantic tsunamis that had swept across the island, as a result of a global cataclysm that had engulfed the entire Pacific Ocean at some time in the distant past.

All that would be needed to prove this point would be for some enterprising archaeologist to employ ground penetrating radar to examine the slopes of Rano Raraku crater looking for Moai that were completely buried beneath the surface of the soil. If so, these radar images would be convincing proof of the following:

1. That the Moai on Easter Island were not carved by the Polynesians
2. That the Moai are far older than modern historians believe
3. That the earth has been subject to vast cataclysms in the ancient past

In Part One of this series, we discussed James Churchward’s claim that an ancient civilization known as Lemuria had once existed on a continent in the Pacific Ocean. According to Churchward, this entire continent sank beneath the waves as a result of a series of catastrophes.

When Charles Darwin undertook his five-year voyage around the world (1831 – 1836), he kept a daily record of his findings. These notes were later published under the title Journal of Researches. In it he had this to say about the profusion of species that appeared to have suddenly become extinct.

“It is impossible to reflect on the changed state of the American continent without the deepest astonishment. Formerly, it must have swarmed with great monsters: now we find mere pigmies, compared with the antecedent, allied races.”

“Certainly, no fact in the long history of the world is so startling as the wide and repeated exterminations of its inhabitants.”

“What, then, has exterminated so many species and whole genera? The mind at first is irresistibly hurried into the belief of some great catastrophe; but thus to destroy animals, both large and small, in Southern Patagonia, in Brazil, on the Cordillera of Peru, in North America up to Behring’s Straits, we must shake the entire framework of the globe.”

For Darwin, even the thought of a catastrophe large enough to engulf the entire world was sufficient for him to dismiss the possibility outright. But had he visited Easter Island, he would have found yet more fossilised evidence to add to that found in Southern Patagonia, Brazil, Peru and North America up to the Bering Straits.

It would seem that the fossil evidence mentioned by Darwin supports Churchward’s claim that something catastrophic did happen in the distant past of our planet, and that this had the effect of wiping out entire species of animals, plants and birds that existed at that time.

It should also have been obvious to a geographer of the calibre of Jared Diamond, that the Polynesian settlers could not possibly have built the great stone statues found on Easter Island. And the reason is simple. Most of them are buried up to their necks in soil.

The real mystery surrounding the great stone statues of Easter Island is not so much who built them, but why whoever did so would go to the all the trouble of carving them out of the side of a mountain, only to bury them later under huge amounts of loam and clay.

A sufficient number of these Moai have now been excavated to show that their torsos have been covered in soil, in some cases up to a depth of 20 – 30 feet. And the heads of others that still lie buried on the flanks of Rano Raraku crater can barely be seen above the soil.

But the statues that can be seen in the interior of the island today no longer stand erect on their original stone platforms. Instead these Moai lie buried in helter-skelter fashion, with their heads and torsos staring out of the soil at a variety of odd angles. It is clear that they were never intended to be that way.

Instead, it seems obvious that they had been washed off their foundations along the coast at some point in the distant past, and then carried away by the waves until they came to rest along the flanks of Rano Raraku crater.

The key topographical feature of the island is that it is not only the statues that have been covered with so many feet of clay, but that most of the island has been buried under the soil as well, as can be seen from the accompanying illustrations.

It is evident that the statues had to have been carved at some time before the arrival of the soil. And so the critical question becomes, where did all the soil come from? And the answer is that it can only have come from the craters above, or from the sea below.

While volcanoes are certainly capable of spewing out vast quantities of lava and ash that can blanket the surrounding land, the soil on Easter Island does not consist of pumice or ash, and none of the craters on the island have erupted since the Polynesians arrived.

So the most likely scenario is that this soil was the residue left behind after a series of enormous tsunamis had swept across the island, destroying everything in their path, including the palm trees, shrubs, ferns and grasses, animals and birds.

And the enormous stone Moai, that formerly stood proudly upon their stone platforms, would have been caught up in this tide of debris as well. Those at the sea shore would have been smashed into pieces, while those inland would have been swept along and dumped on the sides of the highest hills.

As an example of the power of the ocean, a severe earthquake off the coast of Chile on May 22, 1960, generated a tsunami over 25 feet (8 metres) high that completely destroyed the remains of Ahu Tongariki, and swept fifteen statues weighing over forty tons about 500 yards (150 metres) inland.

This would also account for all the broken Moai that can still be seen on the coastline of Easter Island today, without having to concoct extravagant stories of wars between clans, leading to the wilful destruction of the stone statues, especially since they had never built them in the first place.

The scenario painted by Churchward also parallels the scene witnessed by Thor Heyerdahl when he first visited Rano Raraku crater, mentioned earlier. He said that it appeared as if the sculptors had suddenly stopped what they were doing, and fled leaving their tools behind them.

Quite apart from the mysteries surrounding the construction of these stone statues, there is also the enigma of the “Bird-man” petroglyphs, the extraordinary hieroglyphic writing known as Rongorongo, and the cyclopean stone wall located at Ahu Vinapu.

One wonders, if James Churchward were still alive, what he would make of those strange Rongorongo glyphs that have been found on the island, and whether they might have been similar to the Naga-Maya script on the clay tablets that were shown to him by that temple priest in India.

It would seem far more plausible to conclude that all of these were the product of a highly sophisticated civilization, rather than the supposed creations of a handful of Polynesian natives stuck on a desolate island thousands of miles from the nearest habitation.

Sadly, the current scientific paradigm continues to remain convinced that modern civilization began some five thousand years ago with the cultures of Sumeria and Egypt.

So the idea that the Pacific Ocean might once have been home to a mighty civilization that perished in a global catastrophe perhaps tens of thousands of years ago, is dismissed as an impossible myth.

Yet there is a haunting quality about Easter Island that continues to tantalise and attract mystery seekers from all around the world. They come to the island to gaze in wonder at those silent stone sentinels that stand brooding over the landscape. The mystery of their origin still beckons to us today.

If only the silent Moai could speak.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 1st, 2014 at 2:05 pm and is filed under The Legend of Lemuria. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comments and pings are closed.