Humans Adapt

For John, BLUF:  We have been fed a lot of bunk about past and future population busts.  This is a quick examination of what happened on East Island (the one with the big carved stone heads).  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Malthusian Myth Busting:  Easter Island Edition

From Watts Up With That, by Mr David Middleton, 15 July 2021.

Here is the lede plus several:

You know the story…

In just a few centuries, the people of Easter Island wiped out their forest, drove their plants and animals to extinction, and saw their complex society spiral into chaos and cannibalism. Are we about to follow their lead?

Jared Diamond, 2005

While it is true that the Easter Islanders deforested their island, forensic historians have now determined that by converting the forest to farmland and innovatively adapting to prolonged Little Ice Age droughts, they avoided collapse.

BingUNews Resilience, not collapse: What the Easter Island myth gets wrong

By Jennifer Micale
JULY 08, 2021

You probably know this story, or a version of it: On Easter Island, the people cut down every tree, perhaps to make fields for agriculture or to erect giant statues to honor their clans. This foolish decision led to a catastrophic collapse, with only a few thousand remaining to witness the first European boats landing on their remote shores in 1722.

But did the demographic collapse at the core of the Easter Island myth really happen? The answer, according to new research by Binghamton University anthropologists Robert DiNapoli and Carl Lipo, is no.

Their research, “Approximate Bayesian Computation of radiocarbon and paleoenvironmental record shows population resilience on Rapa Nui (Easter Island),” was recently published in the journal Nature Communications. Co-authors include Enrico Crema of the University of Cambridge, Timothy Rieth of the International Archaeological Research Institute and Terry Hunt of the University of Arizona.

Here is the money quote:

In short, the island never had more than a few thousand people prior to European contact, and their numbers were increasing rather than dwindling, their research shows.

One wonders how often decisions are made without having the full story?  I expect more than once.  Sometimes it is necessary, but not always.  Sometimes just a little more digging is what is required,

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff