DNA extracted from 15 corpses stored in a Paris museum has just yielded a monumental surprise: the Rapanui, inhabitants of Easter Island, the most isolated place on Earth, reached America by sailing two centuries before the caravels captained by Christopher Columbus.
The study gives a mind-blowing twist to the history of this small territory lost in the immensity of the Pacific. To the east, Pascua is more than 3,500 kilometres from Chile, the country to which it belongs. In the opposite direction, the closest place is the Pitcairn Islands, 1,900 kilometres away.
The first inhabitants of Easter Island were originally from Polynesia, from where they are believed to have arrived by boat around the year 1200. From that moment on, and without anyone quite knowing how, the Rapanui carved, transported and erected more than 900 moai, imposing human torsos that reach 10 metres in height and weigh 80 tonnes. DNA analysis of current Rapanui shows that they are 90% Polynesian and 10% American. But in 2017, the study of mortal remains of Rapanui who lived centuries ago found no trace of American DNA, adding to the mystery.
Since 2014, Victor Moreno-Mayar, a 35-year-old Mexican evolutionary anthropologist, has been studying the origin and history of this people. It is a difficult task, since the island community does not allow the analysis of mortal remains of ancestors buried on the island. The team found a unique opportunity in some boxes containing bones of supposed Rapanui collected by French sailors in the 19th century, which were now stored in France’s National Museum of Natural History in Paris.
The results, which are published this Wednesday in Nature, The reference of the best science in the world, confirms that all of them were originally from Easter Island, and that they lived between 1670 and 1900. Their genetic profile shows 90% Polynesian DNA and 10% American, which supports previous work of a smaller scale by the same team.
Every time two people have children, their genome is divided into portions and recombined, like someone shuffling a deck of cards. “Since we know this biological process, we can look at the lengths of these blocks of American DNA and ask when they entered the Polynesian population of Rapa Nui,” Moreno-Mayar, who currently works at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, explains to this newspaper. In addition, these blocks can indicate the date when the Rapa Nui and the Native Americans met and had children. “The shorter they are, the older the crossbreeding event is,” and vice versa, explains the Mexican geneticist. His team’s calculations say that the crossbreeding between Polynesians and Native Americans occurred around 1300, approximately two centuries before the three caravels sent by the Catholic monarchs and captained by Christopher Columbus reached the Caribbean coasts of America in 1492, and four centuries before the Europeans discovered Easter Island in 1722.
DNA does not clarify whether it was the Rapanui who reached the Americas or vice versa, but the former is most plausible, Moreno-Mayar’s team reasons, given the Polynesian people’s known skill at navigation, often heading east and against the wind. In less than a century, the Polynesians managed to reach Easter Island and from there reach the shores of South America, an astonishing achievement that leaves many questions open.
The genetic material recovered in Paris is not enough to know how many Rapanui arrived in America, or whether there were one or more arrivals to this continent. Nor, of course, what their boats were like. The data only indicate that they crossed paths with inhabitants from the west of the Andes; it is impossible to be more specific.
A navigation experiment showed that a vessel similar to the one used by the inhabitants of Pascua to navigate towards America would have reached the coasts near Guayaquil, Ecuador, explains Moreno-Mayar. “We do not have DNA from this region, neither current nor much less ancient, because this molecule degrades over time, and the worst conditions for its preservation are heat and humidity,” he explains. Finding the “mirror population” of the Polynesian pioneers, descendants of these interbreeding events, with 90% American DNA and 10% Asian, is a very difficult task, due in part to the fact that in South America there is much less population genetic data than in Europe or the United States.
The next step in the investigation is to obtain permission from the French government to repatriate the remains of the 15 Rapa Nui analysed, which were collected by the explorer and ethnologist Alphonse Pinart around 1870. Until the study was carried out, these bones were stored and labelled, but without much further information about their origin, explains Moreno-Mayar. Throughout the work, the team has collaborated with the Rapa Nui community, which has launched a programme to recover its ancestors stored in Western museums. For now, the Parisian museum has not received any requests for these remains, according to a spokesperson for the institution, who points out that, according to French law, it should be the Chilean government that requests the recovery and the French government that decides whether it is granted.
The myth of collapse
The study published today also debunks the idea that Rapa Nui culture collapsed before the arrival of the Europeans due to overexploitation of the island, wars, epidemics, and even cannibalism. The first European navigators to arrive on Rapa Nui, first the Dutchman Jacob Roggeveen on Easter Day 1722, hence the Western name of the place, and then the Spanish captain Felipe Gonzalez from Haedo In 1770, the man who drew up his detailed map and located the moais, could not believe how a people who did not know the wheel or metals and with only a few thousand inhabitants could have created such colossal sculptures. Later, the idea that Rapa Nui had a prosperous past with a population of about 15,000 souls began to take hold, which was later decimated by deforestation and the abuse of resources around the year 1600. The story was established, despite the scarce archaeological evidence, defended by influential figures in anthropology such as Jared Diamond, who dedicated his book to it. Collapsewhere he spoke of “ecocide”, as if these societies were guilty of their own annihilation. The Rapanui became a perfect “metaphor” for the dangerous excesses of human beings in the face of climate change.
The 15 cadavers analysed by Moreno-Mayar’s team cover the period immediately after the alleged collapse. DNA allows the population size to be calculated. The results show that the population numbered a few thousand people and that it grew steadily within the parameters of a non-industrialised society, explains the Mexican geneticist. “It is exactly the opposite of what we expected to find,” he admits.
The growth of the population on the island was only cut short from 1870, when the arrival of slave ships from Peru is documented, which took a large part of the population to work as slaves in America. This contact also brought a smallpox epidemic. According to some studies, the population of the island fell to 110. Today there are about 8,000 inhabitants on the island, according to the projections of the Chilean Government.
This work “brings a significant advance in our understanding of the island’s inhabitants and their ancestors,” say Stephan Schiffels and Kathrin Nägele, archaeology and genetics specialists at the Max Planck Institute (Germany) in an independent opinion published alongside the study. The experts propose turning the erroneous metaphor of ecocide on its head. “Perhaps this study will be the final nail in the coffin of this story and it will become another one about the resilience of humans and their ability to use resources sustainably in the face of changes in the environment,” they emphasize.
Iñigo Olalde, a geneticist at the University of the Basque Country who was not involved in the study, highlights its value: “It is the first time that ancient genomes from Easter Island have been sequenced with high quality.” The researcher points out that the data “are quite convincing,” but that the wide range of dates of the remains implies that almost certainly, the 15 individuals lived after the first contacts with Europeans, which opens up the possibility that American DNA arrived by that route. “The only absolute and incontestable way to demonstrate these theses is to analyze the genome of a Rapanui from before European contact,” he ventures.
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