Easter Island's Walking Stones

For centuries, explorers and anthropologists have speculated about the moai, the enormous stone statues scattered over Easter Island. Though science has gone far to explain what the moai are and where they came from, they still stand as a warning to those who would exploit our natural resources.

First brought to the attention of the western world by the Dutch navigator Jakob Roggeveen, Easter Island is the world’s most remote inhabited place. Called “the navel of the world” by islanders, it consists of 64 square miles of dry land in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and is located 1,250 miles from the nearest inhabited outpost of civilization—Pitcairn Island—and 2,000 miles from the South American mainland.

When Roggeveen’s three ships landed on the island on Easter Sunday, 1722, the native population numbered a mere 400. No trees over ten feet grew anywhere on the island, the indigenous inhabitants had but few food resources, and their technology was limited to stone, bone, and shell tools. Despite the dearth of resources, the islanders had somehow managed to erect almost 900 moai, which stood looking inland from the coasts with their sightless eyes.

How could the enigmatic moai—the smallest of which weighs several tons, and some of which are over 65 feet tall and weigh more than 80 tons—have been created by a stone-age culture, and for what purpose? The answer to the mystery is a blend of anthropology, environmental science, and engineering that, if anything, is even more fascinating than the tales.

According to local legend, in about 400 AD, the Polynesian king Hotu Matu’a sent seven young men eastward to look for a new homeland for his people. The place they found was Easter Island.

The people of Easter island thrived from the 11th to the late 17th centuries, with a top population of about 12,000. In those days, the island was thickly forested with palm trees, which were used to make canoes for fishing, nets, and ropes, and also to provide a home for nesting birds.

Though the trees had long since been cleared by the time the first Europeans visited the island, archaeologists have found remains of their pollen, as well as the bones of the porpoises and birds that provided an important part of the native diet. The trees were also a critical element in an economy, as it gave the islanders enough time and energy to carve, transport, and raise the moai.

By carbon-dating artifacts, such as fragments of wood found in association with the stones, scientists have determined that the majority of the enigmatic stone statues were built in the 14th and 15th centuries, cut from the tuff (a type of light volcanic stone) with pickaxes made of basalt, a harder volcanic stone.

Archaeologists supposed that the Easter Islanders used sleds and log rollers to move the heavy stone statues. In fact, the amount of lumber needed to move the moai into their existing positions around the island from where they were quarried is probably what caused the island’s deforestation.

However, the islanders insisted that the moai had been moved by their chiefs’ mana (a mysterious cosmic power that seemed to carry with it dominion over the material world) which caused the stones to “walk” to their current location. They also believed that the statues themselves were endowed with their own mana, which they emitted from their coral eyes to protect the island from harm.

Explorer Thor Heyerdahl thought there might be some truth to the legend so, in 1985, he put it to the test. Because of the moai’s pot-bellied construction, they have a low center of gravity, making them difficult to tip over. Heyerdahl’s team rigged a fallen moai up in a gurney and, by having alternate teams pull on ropes, they were able to “walk” the moai forward about seven yards. (We can do this when we walk a heavy piece of furniture into a corner of our house.)

The end of the moai-building period coincided with Easter Island’s great environmental disaster when the islanders ran out of palm trees around 1400. Without the trees, they could not build canoes for fishing, nor make ropes for moving moai, and they had no wood for fires. With no place to roost, the birds moved on and consequently, there were no birds or eggs to eat.

The crisis of belief this brought about was profound; angry that their idols were unable to protect them from this environmental disaster, the natives removed the coral eyes of the moai and buried many of the statues. The conflict was ended by a novel contest: a representative from each tribe was to swim a mile to the neighboring islet Moto Nui. The first to return with the egg of a sooty tern earned the right to distribute the island’s resources for the year. Europeans brought sheep and other goods to the island in the 18th century, which helped the islanders’ situation, but the newcomers were a plague as much as they were a boon, as the island’s population was once again decimated by slave-raiding in the 19th century.

Despite archaeologists’ insights into the construction of the moai, mysteries remain. The islanders’ writing, called rongo rongo, has never been translated. Only about 21 examples of this writing exist today. In the 1930s, Hungarian linguist Guillaume de Hevesy pointed out the writing system’s similarity to certain signs and symbols used by the ancient Harappan culture of the Indus Valley, in modern Pakistan, suggesting that the advanced Harappan civilization may have been the ancestors of the original Polynesian settlers.

Most significantly, Easter Island stands as a warning to us. The moai, examples of spiritual power embodied in material things, were raised by tribal leaders hungry to declare their power and status. As a result of this race to consume resources, the island was deforested and its civilization plunged into chaos. Before long, the islanders were not only unable to build moai, but also unable to obtain the necessities of life. As such, the mysteries of Easter Island stand as a warning to our present culture of conspicuous, mindless consumption.

The Universal Flood – And Noah’s Ark

Was the earth once covered completely for a time with water, caused by a great flood? The earliest known civilization, the Sumerians (3000 B.C.) believed that such a flood occurred. The mythology of Greece also shares this Judeo-Christian story. Almost every major culture has a story about a great flood that covered the planet and how one man and his family survived it.

A startling number of creation lores have fixed to them the "flood" myth. In the mythology of most rudimentary cultures there can be discovered a flood epic, with the deluge being of such mammoth magnitude that it is surmised to have blanketed Earth completely. Such was the destructive force of this flood that few land animals and plants endured it.

In Western civilization the most famous version is the story of Noah and the Ark as declared in Genesis. Although it may be the best known, the account of Noah's adventure is neither the only such legend nor the oldest such legend. Legends of a flood can be found in the folklore of such diverse locations as the Middle East, India, China, Australia, Southern Asia, the islands of the Pacific, Europe, Africa, and the Americas. But the flood legend on which the story of Noah is based had its origins among the peoples of ancient Mesopotamia; in the epic “Gilgamesh”. (It was during the Sumerian era that a great flood overwhelmed Mesopotamia. So great was this flood that stories about it worked their way into several ancient cultures. The Sumerian counterpart of Noah was Ziusudra, and from him was developed the Babylonian figure Utnapishtim, whose story of the flood was related in the “Epic of Gilgamesh”.)

The Greek flood legend has Zeus deciding to destroy the Earth, but he allows the good King Deucalion and his family to be saved by taking refuge in an ark well stocked with provisions. Texts from the 6th century BC in India tell the story of Manu, (meaning "man") who is warned by a fish about a coming flood. In the legend Manu builds a boat and saves himself.

In China the flood myth had a different twist than the legends told in the West. The flooding of the land year after year was seen as an obstacle to successful agriculture. The floods were made much less damaging through the efforts of a hero named Yu the Great, who dredged the land to provide outlets to the sea for the water.

At this interval in history, there was one terra firma mass combining present day Europe, Africa, America, and all other lands bordering them. There were lakes and rivers that dotted the vista but most of the water was well underneath the earth's surface. According to both legends and researchers, the deluge started with torrential downpours followed by the splitting of the earth. Stress on the earth's crust caused it to fissure northward and southward. The earth was polarized open at a rate of 3 miles per second encircling the globe in approximately 2 hours. This split created continental plates that divided east from west.

The succinct rock beneath the continental plates was forced upward creating the mid-Atlantic ridge currently located in the center of the Atlantic Ocean. As the ridge was pushed upward, the continental plates were pushed apart at rates up to 45 miles per hour. The two continental plates eventually collided with other plates causing the land to move upward or downward. The upward locomotion created the mountainous regions of the world. The downward activity resulted in deep trenches in the ocean floors. This explains why major mountain regions and ocean trenches are parallel to one another.

Waters that were initially released from the earth ruptured forth into the atmosphere at supersonic speeds. As the water went higher and higher into the atmosphere, much of it became solid ice. Rain, hail, and snow fell on the earth, according to most accounts, for forty days and forty nights. All life forms that found themselves on top of mountains were instantly frozen in time. This explains the fish and animal fossil remains in nearly every mountain region of the world, and how some are so well preserved. The so called "ICE AGE" was in fact just a matter of days.

Sediment from displaced earth rapidly settled trapping animal and plant life beneath it. The once thriving cities disappeared under tons of rock and then mud. The decomposed remains of plants, trees, and animals beneath this sediment currently provide the world's oil supply.

After one hundred and fifty days, the water receded and dry land appeared. Noah and his family came out of the ark 370 days after the torrent began. The Ark rested on Mount Ararat, in Northern Turkey - where some believe its remnants exist to this day.

Jewish historians as well as many ancient civilizations throughout the world spoke of the great flood. Scientists have proven conclusively that there was indeed a flood that covered the entire earth and this occurrence is carved in stone or clay in nearly every primordial civilization. Thousands of individuals have reportedly seen the Ark. In recent history, there were two major sightings of the ark. In 1883, the Turkish military found the ark while investigating damage caused from a massive earthquake. They not only found and entered the Ark, but also returned with pieces of wood from the structure. Because of the acceptance of Darwin's theory of Evolution, the find was ignored by most in the western world. However, in 1917, the Czar of Russia sent an expedition to find and document the location of the ark. It was found and photographed. Unfortunately, the Czar's government was toppled by the communists and documentation was either destroyed or hidden in Kremlin safes. The Czar's mother spoke of the expedition years later, and had a cross made from the wood of the ark. Since this time, numerous glimpses have been reported. Racial fighting and terrorist camps in the area have restricted contemporary attempts to ascertain the Ark. This territory is currently under the control of Kurdish terrorists.

The US military knows the location and has satellite photographs of the Ark to prove it. Because of security considerations, they will not release these photographs. American Air force navigators used the Ark as a landmark while on bombing raids during World War II.

Legend has it that God promised Noah He would never destroy the earth in a flood again. He made a covenant with man and placed the rainbow in the clouds as a sign. Each time the rainbow is observed, it is a reminder of this covenant God made with man.