Original subtitles

[suspenseful music]

- Tonight, a remote island

that's mystified humanity for centuries.

Home to a thousand giants.

Among the great wonders of the ancient world.

- They are very strange, otherworldly,

and found nowhere else on earth.

- Like Stonehenge,

these statues are instantly recognizable,

but what's more interesting about Easter Island

are the secrets that we have yet to unravel.

- But it's not just the statues

that are shrouded in mystery,

it's also the people who live there known as the Rapa Nui.

- When Europeans get there,

they were just sort of blown away.

Could this have been achieved

by the people that are living there?

Doesn't seem possible.

- What continues to intrigue people is the question why?

Why in the world did they do this?

- Now, we'll explore the top theories

surrounding the mysteries of Easter Island.

- Some claim the Moai are the embodiment

of people that have passed on.

- The Rapa Nui people cut down too many trees,

and things began to spiral out of control from there.

- Some say that the Rapa Nui were fending off starvation

by eating the flesh of other survivors.

- How and why were those astounding Easter Island statues

first built?

How were they moved into place?

And what happened to the people who made them?

[mysterious music]

[tense music]

April 5th, 1722, Easter Sunday,

Dutch explorers are sailing across the South Pacific

in search of Australia, when they spot land on the horizon.

- The ship's captain, this Dutch explorer, Captain Roggeveen,

comes across this bit of land in the South Pacific

and he realizes very quickly that this is not Australia.

That this is much smaller.

It's only about 14 miles long.

Didn't even show up on the map.

- It's incredibly remote.

It's 2,200 miles off the coast of Chile.

The next closest island is Pitcairn Island,

which is 1,300 miles away.

It's like a speck in the middle of the vast Pacific.

- Upon first glance, he's thinking,

"Oh, it's just this barren spit of land,"

but the crew of Roggeveen's ship

starts to notice smoke rising from the island.

[waves roaring]

- [Laurence] Islanders sail out on canoes

to greet the explorers.

- The captain writes about these people in his logs.

He writes that they're built very strong.

They're very friendly.

They have astonishingly white teeth.

They've got these very unique hairstyles.

Now the captain, he starts to realize this island

is unlike anything that he's ever encountered before

- Europeans were just sort of blown away by what they saw.

They come there expecting to find native people

maybe scrapping out a living,

and you're struck instantly about how is this possible?

How could anyone have made any of these statues,

much less hundreds of them on such scale?

It doesn't seem possible.

- [Laurence] The islanders called them Moai.

They're found nowhere else in the Pacific

and nowhere else on earth.

- These 1,000 statues

that mostly are dotted along the landscape

on the coastal regions,

basically represent human figures.

- Most people often talk about Easter Island

as having the heads on the island.

That the islanders made these heads and moved them as such.

The reality is that all of the heads that we see

are parts of full statues that have torsos, and arms,

and bellies, but those parts are buried.

[mysterious music]

- There are a variety of Moai out there.

Some that are very tiny.

Others that are almost seven stories tall.

Their sizes, although they range

in how big and fat they are,

the more average size is about 14 to 15 feet tall

and somewhere around 10 to 20 tons in weight.

- So, we have this contrast

between a place where we'd expect to find nothing,

but to find some of the most spectacular archaeology

in the world.

- In his logs, Captain Roggeveen writes about these marvels

that are these statues.

He writes, quote, "These stone figures

caused us to be filled with wonder

for we could not understand how it was possible

that people had been able to erect them."

The Dutch explorers sail off after a few days,

but they're left with a lot of unanswered questions

about the island's inhabitants

and more specifically, why they built

these incredibly massive stone giants.

- I think that what intrigues people

and what continues to intrigue people is the question why?

Why in the world did they do this?

- [Laurence] The answer to that riddle

may lie deep within the island's past.

- Native people who live on the island today

don't call it Easter Island.

That's a name that was given to them.

Their own island, now, they call Rapa Nui.

It's also the name of the people

and the language that people speak.

So, they are Rapa Nui people speaking Rapa Nui on Rapa Nui.

- The more traditional name,

which goes back further in time, is Te Pito o Te Henua,

which could be interpreted as the center of the world

or the end of the world.

- [Laurence] Many experts believe the island

was first settled by ancient Polynesians,

master seafarers who discovered the place

well over a thousand years ago.

Yet considering just how remote it is,

how on earth did they ever reach Rapa Nui?

- Oral tradition tells us that the island's founder,

Hotu Matu'a lived on an island called Hiva.

- [Laurence] Hive was said to be located

in the Marquesas Islands,

about 2,300 miles northwest of Rapa Nui.

[thunder rumbling]

- Hiva was going through some type of natural disaster,

and Hotu Matu'a was very worried for his people.

So, he convened his counsel

and one of the individuals was Hau Maka

and Hau Maka goes and has a sleep.

And as he closes his eyes and falls asleep,

his soul leaves his body.

And his soul starts flying over the ocean

and all of a sudden he comes up to an island,

teeming with mammal species around it and tons of trees,

and Hau Maka says, "This is an island for our chief."

- While we have this incredible legend,

some people believe that they actually may have found

the island by accident.

And that this particular place

would've looked very different to the ancient Polynesians

than it looks to us today.

- Upon discovery, Polynesians

would begin to transform this natural environment

into a cultural or agricultural environment

that would then suit their needs.

- Rapa Nui people had a great benefit.

Before they got to the island,

they were already architects and engineers.

And as they get to the island

that has all this amazing stone type

and it all comes together.

- [Laurence] Still,

much of the island's ancient past is murky at best.

- Most of our knowledge about the past,

about the Rapa Nui usually come from oral traditions

that are passed down, songs, dance,

and that's the reason why it's difficult at times

using just that evidence to understand the past.

- Whenever we see these types of construction projects

that we know are intergenerational

and are massive on a social scale,

we have to ask the question, what is the meaning?

- Clearly the scope, the amount of work

that went into making these statues

shows that they're important

and they're worth our investigation.

Most would argue that Moai represent deified ancestors

and the way that you can honor your ancestors

is to build something outta stone that'll last forever,

that'll stand there, that will protect you.

[mysterious music]

- According to oral history,

the Moai are not just representations

of the dead ancestors,

but it is also said that those dead ancestors

might actually inhabit the Moai.

- [Laurence] When Dutch explorers

first land on the island, they note that the statues

seem to be wearing hats.

And they also observe that the islanders

seem to pray to them.

- There is evidence that many of these Moai

were originally either painted or dusted red.

Red is considered to be a sacred color

in the Polynesian culture.

- The eyes are very important pieces.

They're recessed in and the reason why

is 'cause they would inlay pieces of coral

with either red scoria or black obsidian,

and these would give the ancestors

the [speaking in foreign language] or the living face.

- The Rapa Nui believed that the moment

that the white coral and the black volcanic glass

is inserted into the eye socket of the Moai,

it is in that moment that the spirit of their ancestor

dwells in that stone.

- [Laurence] But of the hundreds of Moai

on the island, only seven look out to the sea.

- Some historians have noted that some of the Moai

are facing towards the Marquesas Islands,

which could be the homeland of the island's inhabitants,

which are about 2,000 miles away.

The rest of the statues, however, are facing inward.

- They're facing inward.

They're not facing toward the sea.

So one might think,

"Oh, maybe they're there to be sort of guardians

of the people to ward off dangers

that might approach from the sea."

And so, the conclusion

is more that they're there not to ward off enemies,

but maybe to protect or have a relationship

with the people on the island.

- [Laurence] The Rapa Nui also believed

the Moai possess a divine power called mana.

- According to the Rapa Nui, the larger the Moai,

the more mana it possesses

and the more spiritual power it has.

- While there is clearly something spiritual

associated with the Moai on Easter Island,

some scientists have speculated

that because of their placement on the island,

there could be something much more going on.

- [Laurence] It's been more than 300 years

since Dutch explorers first set foot on Easter Island,

but these towering Moai statues

continue to guard their deepest secrets.

- Clearly, the Moai have great significance

to the Rapa Nui people.

Why else would they have spent valuable time and resources

carving over 1,000 of these figures?

Certainly, they mean something,

but historians have yet to really unravel

what that true meaning is.

- One question that one can ask when you go to the island

is why did people put Moai in the places they did?

You don't find them all across the island.

They're not the places that would show off

what you've done in the most obvious fashion.

So, it's kind of a puzzle

like why would they have done it there and not other places?

- While we believe that Moai serve a very sacred function,

they may have had a more practical reason as well.

This includes demarking one of the most important resources

on Rapa Nui, which is water.

[tense music]

- Rapa Nui is a volcanic island

made from these three volcanoes that emerged.

It's very porous. It's fractured rock.

It's ash and other kinds of things.

In fact, even when it rains today, it'll rain for hours.

And minutes later, the surface will be dry.

Puddles will vanish really quickly.

There's very few sources of water

that are on the surface.

When rain falls onto the island,

it immediately goes into the subsurface.

- [Laurence] To access fresh water,

the Rapa Nui take advantage of the island's unique geology.

- Rapa Nui is not Fiji, for example,

or Hawaii, where it has its own rivers, streams,

waterfalls, and so on.

Rapa Nui has water that's rainwater basically,

stored in craters or stored sometimes in caves.

- Early European visitors thought

that the Rapa Nui drank seawater.

They weren't drinking seawater.

They were actually drinking fresh water at low tide.

- There's not a lot of water sources on the island,

but one of the key ones would be where water is seeping out.

After heavy rains, the caves move the water through

to the coastal areas.

And once the saltwater tide goes out,

the fresh water comes in.

And what the Rapa Nui did was build these things

called [speaking in foreign language] or wells.

And they would put huge slabs of stone

to block the salty water to let the fresh water fill it up,

and then they would use all their bottle gourds

to fill up their water that they would need.

- Easter Island has these two large volcanic craters,

and when it rains, these craters fill up

with all of this rain water.

The problem is that these lakes are pretty far away

from where the island inhabitants live,

so it's not possible for all of them to go

and access fresh water from these lakes.

- [Laurence] With fresh water in short supply,

maybe the Rapa Nui found a way to keep track

of this precious resource.

- Fresh water is very limited

and a key resource for the communities,

so you have to center your community

around those water places.

So when we compared the presence of Moai

relative to the places where fresh water is emerging,

overwhelmingly those locations were tied

to freshwater sources.

- So, perhaps there is a practical use for the Moai,

that not only were they spiritual,

but they somehow marked for the Rapa Nui people

where the water was located.

- [Laurence] 2022, wildfire ravages Easter Island,

but from the ashes, a new clue emerges.

- After the fire, officials from the island

were inspecting areas of the fire and what had happened.

In the dry lake bed, they discover a new Moai.

- The Moai was found lying

on its side in the mud.

Now, this Moai was only about five feet tall,

but this was a Moai

that was previously unknown.

Elders of the Rapa Nui, they had no clue.

They had no recollection about this five-foot-tall Moai.

- A statue where no one had ever thought there was a statue,

that no one ever accounted,

no history of it ever being mentioned by anyone's ancestor,

was suddenly found.

Sort of remarkable.

- For several hundred years,

the lake was thought to be 10 feet deep,

and yet this five-foot-tall Moai

just appears at the bottom of this lake.

So, was it intentionally placed under water?

How was it moved to this location?

Why would it be positioned in this particular spot?

That becomes one of the bigger questions

like what is the purpose of this particular Moai

being found at the bottom of this lake?

- While we've studied the island in much detail

over the past 150 years with lots of different crews

going there for lots of different reasons,

there's a lot that we simply don't know yet.

[mysterious music]

- [Laurence] For hundreds of years,

researchers have been trying to uncover

the secrets behind Easter Island's iconic statues

and the people who built them.

- Some say that in order to understand the legend

and the origin of the Moai, you have to go back even further

and try to understand the origin of the Rapa Nui

in the Marquesas Islands.

Legend has it that the king of the Rapa Nui

is compelled to move his people from the Marquesas Islands

to this new island in the South Pacific

based on a wise man's dream.

[surf crashing]

But perhaps it is possible

that there are other factors at play here.

Ones that go beyond the scope of human imagination.

- There's a natural tendency to wonder how the construction

and transport of these statues is possible

given the basic technology that consists of stone tools.

You look at these things, you think,

"Well, how could such a few small number of people

with such limited technology possibly have crafted

these gigantic things and moved them?"

- According to oral tradition, the Moai were carved

by a highly skilled group of artisans,

but some theorists suggest that there had to be

a more advanced culture involved in their creation.

[mysterious music]

- The idea that giant monuments

like the ones found on Easter Island were built by aliens

is called the Ancient Astronaut Theory.

It suggests that an advanced race of beings

came from another planet and is responsible

for building enormous monuments around the world,

Great Pyramids, the Sphinx, and other giant monuments.

- Ancient astronaut theorists hold that aliens

are able to access earth through interdimensional portals

that are connected to very specific places on earth,

that is connected to an electromagnetic activity

that's called a vile vortex.

- Easter Island supposedly sits on top

of one of these vile vortices,

which allowed this ancient race of aliens

to transport themselves to this location

and to make contact with the Rapa Nui,

construct these statues, and then move them into place.

- What's really interesting

is that all over the Marquesas Islands,

which is where those seven outward-facing Moai are looking,

there are several figures of their sky god Tiki,

who looks very alienesque.

And what's even more compelling

is that there is a very similar figure on Easter Island.

- People who ascribe to this Ancient Astronaut Theory

point to a central and important figure

in Rapa Nui religious culture, Make Make,

who is the supreme being.

He's the creative force.

There are rock carvings all around Rapa Nui

known as petroglyphs that depict Make Make

and his very distinctive extra-human features,

such as a very large beak-like nose.

- Some believers say that these non-human features

are really proof that the Rapa Nui had encountered

some alien civilization that had a very advanced form

of engineering.

When we see these megalithic structures all over the planet,

you have to wonder how did an ancient civilization

using only primitive tools even pull it off?

- Naysayers will argue

that this is actually a civilization

that are also very skilled engineers,

and they do indeed have the imagination, have the tools,

have the ability to create these gigantic works of art.

But others still maintain

that only a highly advanced civilization

could be responsible for creating

these very intricately designed, gigantic statues,

perhaps in their own image.

- [Laurence] Whatever the Moai's purpose,

there's another question that perplexes researchers

to this day.

How on earth were these colossal statues,

some weighing nearly 200 tons, moved into place?

- These massive Moai, many of them

multi-ton rock figures were moved

as far as 10, 12 miles

depending on the route they took.

This is absolutely phenomenal

that these massive colossal statues

were moved to every part of the island.

- [Laurence] Legend has it what made the Moai move

was the chief's spiritual energy or mana.

- Oral traditions do suggest that the Moai

could have been commanded to move by the chief

from their original place of creation within this quarry

all the way across the island

to their final resting place.

- Visitors in the past have asked the Islanders,

"How did your ancestors move these giant Moai?"

And the answer is very simple, "They walked."

The islanders even have a song

that recounts the story of a chief named Tuu Ku Ihu,

and in the song he knows how to make the Moai walk.

- In fact, there's a word for a walking statue

called [speaking in foreign language],

which is walking without bending your legs.

[mysterious music]

- The oral tradition says the Moai are walking.

They're not on their back or on their stomach.

They have to be up and moving.

So now, this is in the '80s.

This idea of how the statues moved

really starts to dominate the archaeological community.

Everyone wants to try to figure this out.

- Pavel Pavel, a Czech engineer,

was really intrigued by this idea

that they could have been moved in a standing position.

And built some replicas in Czechoslovakia

and showed that it was possible

for a statute to be moved in an upright fashion.

And he also replicated that experiment

on the island in the 1980s

where he took a an actual statue in an upright position

and by a series of ropes, rotated it back and forth,

sort of swivel fashion and he could make it move forward.

His approach was much like the way

in which many people move a refrigerator

from one side of a kitchen to another,

sort of tipping it back and forth and shuffling it along.

- And the statue was moved in this way

over flat ground and a slight incline,

and he was able to do it rather well for short distances.

- [Laurence] But the Rapa Nui

had a much more difficult path to tread,

upwards of 12 miles over challenging terrain.

- One thing that I find fascinating

was the creation of the [speaking in foreign language],

which translates to the Moai road.

It almost looks like a spider web leaving the quarry

with all of these individual roads,

where most likely the land was leveled

and rocks were put on the side of these roads.

- You can imagine going along,

pulling one of these massive structures

on a system of ropes,

and you could see almost in your mind's eye

a figure walking.

But Pavel's experiment was conducted on a flat surface,

which did not account for the very rough and rugged terrain

between the quarry and their ultimate destination

on the island.

- Many places of the Moai roads, it's undulating.

It goes up and down.

You can't walk a Moai going downhill.

You'd have to switch your strategy.

- From looking at construction methods that are used

by other ancient civilizations around the world,

there is certainly more than one way

to move a giant piece of stone.

- Easter Island's colossal Moai statues

have been an enigma since the day European explorers

first laid eyes on them more than 300 years ago.

Researchers have spent years

on this remote Polynesian island

trying to understand what the Moai meant

to the people who created them.

But an even more intriguing mystery

is how the Rapa Nui people moved these statues into position.

Some believe the answer can be found not on Easter Island,

but halfway across the world at Stonehenge.

[suspenseful music]

- Stonehenge is this incredible ancient structure

that was created around 5,000 years ago.

You've got a hundred stones,

some of which are 30 feet tall and weigh about 45 tons,

very similar to the Moai statues on Easter Island.

- So, how did the builders of Stonehenge

move these giant stones?

A group of researchers in 2016

believe that they may have cracked the code.

- What this study found is that it's relatively easy

to transport stones even that size

on this sledge system

that can be moved very rapidly.

You move about 10 feet in five seconds.

[mysterious music]

- On the Polynesian Island of Tonga,

there's this massive stone structure

that is similar to the trilithon at Stonehenge,

- Ha'amonga 'a Maui is made of coral slabs

that are tons and tons of weight.

And these Polynesian folks,

we know they're already moving large stone.

- Unlike the Rapa Nui of Easter Island,

the Tongans preserved a pretty detailed record

as to how they moved all these coral slabs into place.

And what we discover is this was done

through an ingenious mix of a sledge and rollers.

- [Laurence] Despite their islands

being thousands of miles away,

one historian believes this information

could unlock the mystery of how the Moai were moved.

- In 1998, Dr. Jo Anne Van Tilburg,

who's the head of the Easter Island Statue Project,

she decides that she's going to test out this Tongan method

of using a sledge and rollers

on a 10-ton concrete replica of a Moai.

- Van Tilburg is very clever.

She realized that the same techniques

that they were moving statues with

were the same techniques they were using

to move their large canoes.

- The canoe ladder concept came up,

and that is basically a ladder

that you can slide an object up and down

over great heights sometimes.

So we attached the statue to a canoe ladder

and we set it on the rollers

that were attached to the frame.

I was standing at the top of the platform

and they were moving the statue on this platform,

on this frame that we had made so fast up there

that I had to jump off 'cause I was afraid

I was gonna get run over.

It worked like a charm. It was fabulous.

It worked on inclines. It worked across flat surfaces.

It just worked.

Now, would it worked with a statue double that size?

I don't know.

We haven't tried it, but I bet it would.

- Van Tilburg's work ultimately shows us

that a small group, maybe 50 to a hundred Rapa Nui men,

could move a statue, we'll say, 10 miles

in less than a month.

That's not that hard. That's doable.

And there's probably other techniques

that even made it easier.

- [Laurence] But skeptics point

to a number of problems with this theory.

- It's possible that 15,000 trees were needed

to move a thousand Moai.

- When Easter Island was settled,

we know that there was a vast forest there

with trees perhaps as tall as 90 feet.

And the question then becomes as the civilization progresses

and they move into agriculture

and trees begin to be felled for the cultivation of fields,

would there have been enough lumber

for a system of movement like this?

- [Laurence] The amount of manpower needed

to build the tracks and move the Moai into position

is also in question.

- Some studies show to move a statue with your team,

you may need an extra 200,000 calories per group per day.

So, you can imagine then another job of that chief

is to make sure he has enough calories and resources

for his movers, and carvers, and specialists.

- Regardless of their transportation

to their final location, we know that this process

would've created a hardship for the Rapa Nui people,

and we have to ask ourselves the question,

what kind of sacrifices might have to be made

by the Rapa Nui people to make this project possible?

- [Laurence] When the Rapa Nui people

first settled Easter Island many centuries ago,

they built a thriving civilization.

But by the late 1800s, their tropical paradise

has become unrecognizable.

- We have surviving accounts from 19th century explorers

describing the devastation on Easter Island.

- The population is dying out.

The island and the Moai are essentially abandoned.

- The trees are all gone.

The quarries are full of half-finished statues.

It is clear that something catastrophic happened.

- [Laurence] Many fascinating questions

about this mysterious island remain.

Perhaps the most puzzling of all,

what happened to the people?

[mysterious music]

- At the peak of Rapa Nui success,

somewhere by the 1400s to the 1500s,

there were no fewer than 12,000 people

living on Easter Island.

Other estimates go to 17,000 and maybe 25,000.

- We see maybe 200 years later,

there's maybe 3,000, 2,000 people on the island.

In 1877, a Chilean anthropologist

does an inventory and counts 111 people living on Rapa Nui.

[mysterious music]

- Easter Island should be a paradise.

But by the late 19th century,

it is rocky and barren.

And the Moai have been toppled over

and the Rapa Nui themselves are living inside of lava tubes.

- The Rapa Nui created

some of the most significant cultural art of any age.

Could that creation have actually sown

the seeds of their own demise?

[tense dark music]

It's worth remembering that Easter Island is very isolated.

They are consuming the resources

that are available to them only on that island.

There are no supply ships coming in.

There are no extra resources being produced.

So once those resources are depleted,

there's going to be a definite impact on that civilization.

- [Laurence] Many experts suspect

that for the Rapa Nui cutting down so many trees

to transport the Moai proved catastrophic.

- By cutting down trees faster than they regrow

means eventually you're not gonna have any trees left on it.

And then as you cut down the trees,

you lose soil productivity,

leading to famine and the lack of food.

- And if you don't have trees, then the Rapa Nui

cannot create the sort of larger canoes to go out and fish.

And all of this would become stressors.

- There's no place for birds to nest.

There's no shade for plants that grow in the shade

and there's no wood for basic human needs like fires.

- 2005, Jared Diamond publishes the book "Collapse,"

which builds on a claim that as populations

continued to grow, eventually they reached a tipping point

where the island could no longer support their people.

[mysterious music]

- The fact that the Rapa Nui believed

that the Moai contained the spirits of their ancestors,

and then you see this abandonment of the Moai,

that they're toppled and basically left,

shows the shift in their priority of the civilization,

that they're looking more towards basic survival,

than they are the most important cultural artifact

they left the world with.

- [Laurence] And as historians discover,

things go from bad to worse.

- Some archaeologists point to a layer of subsoil,

which has spear points in it that indicate

a sign of warfare.

But if you take a look at the Rapa Nui oral history,

it points to an even darker story,

which is that the Rapa Nui were fending off starvation

by eating the flesh of other survivors.

- [Laurence] There is a documented history

of cannibalism in Polynesian culture.

- We see stories and taunts.

If you wanna really insult someone, you say,

"Ah, I'll have the meat of your mother between my teeth

and I'll clean it out."

Other stories will say,

"Ha, I'm gonna use your femur as a fish hook,

so I can catch fish using you."

So this idea of cannibalism,

it's imbued in Polynesian cultures.

- The oral history suggests

that the inhabitants of Easter Island

really did whatever they had to do to survive,

even as the island itself started to die.

- [Laurence] But not everyone agrees

with this Collapse Theory.

- The idea that the Rapa Nui civilization imploded on itself

is compelling, but it's also contested.

Considering that by the time Europeans arrived to the island

in 1722, we have records that show

that the Rapa Nui are still building the Moai at that time.

- Whatever happened to the Rapa Nui at this time,

it didn't look like it was fatal.

[tense music]

- [Laurence] The people of Easter Island

were once members of a thriving society, capable of creating

some of the most iconic statues on earth.

Then something horrible happened,

decimating the population until

there were little more than a hundred people left

and we still aren't sure why.

- One theory is that the Rapa Nui started cutting down

way too many trees on the island,

and that's what caused so many things

to start spiraling out of control.

But there's another idea that suggests

that it wasn't the cutting down of trees,

but something much smaller and more invasive

that brought the Rapa Nui to its knees.

[mysterious music]

- When the Rapa Nui came to Easter Island,

we don't know exactly when or how,

but the Polynesian rat came with them.

- In most settings, rats weren't stowaways.

They were actually brought on board

for a variety of reasons.

One, you can eat them.

But one of the key things about rats is using their meat

and their tails for fishing, very important.

That rotation of a rat tail in the water

brings the fish to attack.

- Rapa Nui would've been a haven for rats.

And besides humans,

the rats have no natural predators on the island.

- On an island with abundant food in the palm nuts,

rats can double their population every 47 days.

That means that within about three years,

you would have tens of millions of rats.

- There is evidence that the Rapa Nui

were actually trying to plant new trees and reforest,

but they're waging war against a growing rat population

making that very difficult.

- So, the combination of people chopping trees down

for crops combined with rats impacting the nuts,

likely meant the demise of the palm forest

over the period of pre-contact time.

- [Laurence] Now, new evidence suggests

a different timeline for the population's downfall.

- There is a study in 2020

where they sampled radiocarbon

from the 11 sites on Easter Island

and found that the Rapa Nui continued

to make Moai 150 years

after it was previously believed they had stopped.

[mysterious music]

- [Laurence] Early explorers were filled with awe

when they first set eyes on those stone sentinels,

but perhaps it was the European's arrival

that actually triggered the downfall of the Rapa Nui.

- The Viceroy of Peru sent two Spanish ships

to Easter Island in 1770,

the Santa Rosalia and the San Lorenzo,

and essentially claimed Easter Island for Spain.

- So after the Spanish came and went,

Rapa Nui was rather well known on the maps and the charts.

Some of the ships would stay for a day or two,

and the Rapa Nui people saw and encountered

quite a large number of ships from then on.

- The Rapa Nui didn't know it at the time,

but the increasing number of European men

arriving at the island brings with it something

that the Rapa Nui had never encountered before

and something that they have no defense against.

[dark tense music]

- With the arrival of the Europeans,

we see the introduction of multiple diseases,

smallpox especially, and that really decimates the culture.

- [Laurence] And that's not

the only terrible tragedy the Rapa Nui faced.

- After the Europeans in the 1700s,

we see the whalers come to Rapa Nui.

And one of the things that the whalers

were also looking to do is something called blackbirding.

It's basically taking slaves.

They would go to the beach.

They'd put a silk sheet down.

They'd put a variety of artifacts.

And when the Rapa Nui people went to gather them,

they'd hit 'em over the head, they'd enchain them,

and they would throw them inside the boats.

And they would bring them all throughout the Pacific

to work the sugar cane fields.

[mysterious music]

- By 1862, these slave traders

capture probably more than a thousand islanders

and take them away.

By 1877, there were only 111 Rapa Nui left

as survivors on the island.

- To have seen these people

create a civilization of such magnitude

and such spectacular accomplishment,

to see that deteriorate and disintegrate

over just 1,500 years,

the story of Easter Island and the Rapa Nui

is a real tragedy.

- [Laurence] Others find hope

in the Rapa Nui's resilience and creativity.

- They were able to organize themselves

and invest in interacting ways that made them sustainable,

despite the fact they dealt with limited resources

and incredible shortfalls, challenges,

that they had to go through.

It's a really remarkable case of survival

that I think we have a lot more to learn from.

- Easter Island's colossal Moai

stand as silent sentinels,

guarding mysteries as impenetrable

as the volcanic rock from which they were carved.

Nearly 300 years after Europeans first set foot here,

the world is still trying to solve the riddle

of these enigmatic giants and the people who built them.

But as rising sea levels, fire, and torrential rains

continue to threaten the island and its Moai,

many fear its secrets may never be known.

I'm Laurence Fishburne.

Thank you for watching "History's Greatest Mysteries."

[mysterious music]