Month: April 2016
Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, has attempted to provide an answer to the question of the fate of the Rapa Nui people by taking a holistic approach to new evidence discovered over the last decade. According to records, when Captain Cook first set foot on Easter Island in 1774, only 700 Rapa Nui remained. What caused the island’s population to sink so low is a mystery, but there are a number of popular hypotheses. The prevailing view of the island’s history is that it is a microcosmic example of human selfishness leading to a population’s extinction. This narrative claims that the island was first settled by people from east Polynesia sometime between 800 and 1200 CE. As the island’s population expanded, the people started to over-exploit its resources, triggering an ecological catastrophe which in turn led to a social one. Scientific evidence supports this hypothesis by revealing a period of dramatic deforestation between 1200 CE and 1400 CE. Thousands of obsidian points discovered on Easter Island’s south coast are considered by some archaeologists to be weapons, pointing to a massive war among the island’s population as they started to compete for the dwindling resources. Earlier this year however, that interpretation of the evidence was called into question by a study suggesting the points weren’t in fact weapons. Other explanations suggest that the deforestation was caused by a plague of rats who ate the island’s palm fruit, or that in fact the cultural extinction was a result of Europeans arriving on the island, wiping out the population through slave trading and the unintentional spread of diseases the islanders had no immunity to. The main argument made by the latest study is that the truth of the Rapa Nui’s’ fate can not be explained by a single factor. “These different interpretations may be complementary, rather than incompatible,” said Dr. Valenti Rull, a senior researcher of the Spanish National Research Council in Barcelona, Spain, and the lead author of the study. “In the last decade, there’s been a burst in new studies, including additional research sites and novel techniques, which demand that we reconsider the climatic, ecological and cultural developments that occurred.” Taking advantage of the latest analytical methods, Rull and his team are beginning to shed light on many of the uncertainties in the history of Easter Island. In particular, complete sedimentary samples for the last 3000 years have revealed how drought and wet seasons may have influenced the island’s population. Periods of adverse weather could have affected sea travel to and from the island, leading to periods of isolation. Times of drought could have triggered the deforestation shown in the pollen record. Other evidence, such as radio carbon dating and DNA analysis of artefacts and human remains, has provided insights into Easter Island’s inhabitants. It is now possible to see where the islanders lived, what they farmed and ate, and how other cultures influenced them. By combining all of this newly available evidence, the complexity of the Rapa Nui’s story is being revealed. “These findings challenge classical collapse theories and the new picture shows a long and gradual process due to both ecological and cultural changes. In particular, the evidence suggests that there was not an island-wide abrupt ecological and cultural collapse before the European arrival in 1722,” said Rull, in a press release. The causes of the extinction of the people of Easter Island remains a mystery, but the work of Rull and his colleagues shows that to truly trace the story of the Rapa Nui, a combined approach studying climate, ecology, and culture is necessary. For more information, the study is available here]]>
Cervus elaphus, the red deer as a species is widely distributed across Europe, with only regions such as northern Scandinavia and Iceland devoid of the ungulate. Capable of growing to be twice as heavy as the white-tailed deer prominent in North America, there are as many as 400,000 C. elaphus in Scotland alone, Stanton remarked in an interview with Science Magazine online. Red deer have been present in Scotland for thousands of years, according to remains found in archaeological digs on the Scottish mainland as well as the Outer Hebrides and Orkney, two major island chains off the coast. With Orkney at least 16 kilometers from the Scottish mainland – and the Outer Hebrides even further – it’s obvious that ancient red deer didn’t just swim to either of these locations, not with a maximum swimming range of just 7 kilometers or less, according to Stanton. Even during the last Ice Age, when sea levels plummeted, these islands would have still been too far off shore; in other words, the only way these deer would have arrived on these outlying island chains would have been through human intervention. Stanton and his team set out to see where these island deer populations might have originated from by analyzing several dozen sets of remains – some of which were as ancient as 7500 years old – and collecting genetic material from each. The researchers took this data, which had been sourced from remains discovered not just from mainland Scotland but from the Inner and Outer Hebrides and Orkney, and compared it to DNA samples from other regions of Europe, both ancient and modern. There are less than a handful of genetic lines when it comes to the red deer of today – the results of the deer that returned to Europe after the end of the last ice age around 12,000 years in the past. These three or four separate genetic lines are more or less geographical in nature, allowing scientists to generally pinpoint the southern exodus point, according to Stanton. Out of the 72 bone samples in the study, 46 yielded results. The research team identified 14 separate genetic variants known as haplotypes, with a full 10 being unique and never before discovered; these 10 also happened to be unique to islands found off the Scottish mainland. Additionally, deer remains from the Outer Hebrides share none of the same haplotypes with deer on the Scottish mainland – or samples taken from the Inner Hebrides, which are close enough to the mainland for red deer to swim to safely. In other words, there’s a strong suggestion that Outer Hebridean deer were not taken from local populations before being deposited on the further island chain. There’s no definitive locale these deer were taken from as yet, though Stanton says that their general genetic profile is closest in line to red deer from western continental Europe. Stanton and his team’s research, recently published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, is available online here]]>
Archaeometry Image courtesy of Nicolas Poussin]]>
Seven Pillars of Wisdom. In a Bristol University press release one of the project leads, Professor Nicholas Saunders, said, “The bullet we found came from a Colt automatic pistol, the type of gun known to be carried by Lawrence and almost certainly not used by any of the ambush’s other participants.” Over the years the integrity of Lawrence’s portrayal of the rebel skirmishes and his role in them has been questioned, with many believing he had taken some dramatic license in Seven Pillars of Wisdom. However, archaeologists have found nothing at any of the excavation sites to debunk his story. Another project participant, Dr. Neil Faulkner, is quoted in the Bristol press release as saying “Lawrence has something of a reputation as a teller of tall tales, but this bullet – and the other archaeological evidence we unearthed during ten years of fieldwork – indicates how reliable his account of the Arab Revolt in Seven Pillars of Wisdom is.” Only two months previously another item related to the Hallat Ammar ambush, a nameplate from a Hejaz Railway engine, reappeared after being lost for nearly 80 years. In 1933, Lawrence gave the nameplate to his friend Vyvyan Richards’ family for safekeeping, and it remained with them after his death in 1935. The nameplate is inscribed in Ottoman Turkish and translates as “iron road”, that is “Hejaz Railway”. The Richards’ family tradition claims that Lawrence “souvenired” the nameplate from a train he attacked. The ambush of the Hallat Ammar train was a rare opportunity for such a souvenir to be acquired given the Turkish train actually had two locomotives instead of just one, and there would have been ample time to pry off a nameplate. In fact, the ambush was so stunningly successful it likely held more meaning to Lawrence than other attacks, and would have merited taking a souvenir. “It is extraordinary,” Professor Saunders added in the Bristol press release, “that after 100 years new discoveries like this are still being made, casting new light on a guerrilla war which helped reshape the Middle East after 1918 – the consequences of which we are still living with today.”]]>
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