Supposedly around a millennium ago, Easter Island , located in the Pacific Ocean 3,000 km from the coast of Chile, suffered a sudden and total deforestation that ended its civilization. Until now it was thought that the overexploitation of resources by its inhabitants had been the main cause of this disaster, but a team of Spanish scientists has questioned this idea after reviewing the studies that have made it possible to reconstruct the last 3,000 years of history of the Island. In his opinion, climate change had a lot to do with it: the loss of vegetation cover was not sudden, but gradual, and occurred coinciding with major meteorological changes.
The researchers, belonging to the Jaume Almera Institute of Earth Sciences (ICTJA-CSIC), the University of Barcelona (UB) and CREAF, and led by Valentí Rull , have provided a new vision in their study, published in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution . His idea is that the changes that have occurred on Easter Island are only understood under a global approach that takes into account climatic, ecological and cultural aspects.
The hypotheses previously handled about the ecological and cultural collapse of the island were based on the analysis of pollen from incomplete records obtained in lakes, which indicated a sudden replacement of palm forests by grasslands a few centuries before the arrival of Europeans in 1722. This working method requires drilling the lake areas and analyzing the sediments accumulated over the years to know the pollen content or its chemical composition. From there, the conditions of the landscape at the time the sediments were deposited can be deduced.
However, the new study indicates that deforestation was not sudden, but gradual, and that it did not occur on the entire island at the same time. At the time of the supposed Easter collapse, there were also major climate changes, such as pronounced droughts that could have played an important role in deforestation and in the lives of the island’s inhabitants, calling into question the classic interpretation of ecological and cultural degradation. only for human causes. Rather, it seems that there was a long and gradual succession of related climatic, ecological and cultural changes that would have shaped Easter as it is today.
