06-27-2024, 06:21 PM
(06-21-2024, 08:02 PM)Maxmars Wrote: Apparently the idea that the people of Rapa Nui over stressed their environment, leading to population collapse and the demise of their culture... may have been wrong.
It seems that new evidence doesn't paint the same picture.
Apparently when the idea was launched as a theory, most were quick to accept that a population of some 4,000 couldn't possibly have been able to survive on the island...
Except satellite imagery analysis may show that they may have been better at adapting than we gave them credit for. After all, they had managed to live on the island for many generations while maintaining a balance with their environment.
I wonder at the reason why this narrative was "popularized" in the first place... What might have happened there? No speculation... just an honest question....
The narrative dates back to Thor Heyerdahl, who wrote about Easter Island and fired public imagination. Everybody loves a good mystery, and there was plenty there to fuel it.
Anthropologists and geologists and botanists and many others leaped to investigate (because academics love a good mystery.) Books were written (that sold).
With the rise of the Internet, psychics and travelers and alternative history theorists tackled it as well, and thanks to the quirky values of the Internet, many of their ideas gained traction.
Scientists are limited by tools and data (for example, Alchemists didn't have the tools to create an atom bomb in the 1700's). Theorists aren't so limited.
Religion is the only field where someone expects to make a "find" and that answer, once and for all, is correct. "It's in the Bible/Koran/Torah/Vedas" is enough.
Science, on the other hand, is a series of steps and missteps based on the available data. The public finds it frustrating because they want an answer... one answer. But tools limit what we can know (which is why advances require new discoveries and new tools) and that means science changes as we find better evidence and answers.
And local/native legends can guide but aren't exactly the truthful narratives that people sometimes think they are. Part of the "resource war" comes from some of the legends and beliefs of the locals.
This isn't entirely new-new data. There's been suggestions all along that the picture might be incomplete or even wrong (questions about results) -- but the public doesn't see this. They just see Big Announcements. So when science changes it looks like something abrupt and there's a sudden round of "can't trust scientists!" "Science is unreliable!" "Why do we listen to those fools?" in the public forum instead of "now we see the picture more clearly."
Among academics, it's "Aha! New stuff! Better data!"
And thus we're seen as out of touch and even as foolish.
