White Europeans destroyed Easter Island

We were all taught to believe that the people of Easter Island (Rapa Nui) destroyed themselves by destroying their environment until the last tree was chopped down, bringing that civilization from decline to a perilous end. But that's not quite what happened. The only people in the South Pacific to develop their own language and writing system used incredible technology we do not understand and probably cannot mimic today to create moai (activated statues) with eyes made of iridescent shells watching over them, somehow buried so deep in the ground that only their massive heads stick out. It was the Europeans who arrived and possibly brought vermin and disease with them, to say nothing of their greed, malice, and eagerness to enslave and exploit the Natives that ruined this distant outpost of humanity.

AAPI Heritage Month w/ Ronny Chieng

• Ronny Chieng Celebrates Asian Trailblazers for AAPI Heritage Month | The Daily Show
• Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month
• Ronny Chieng, The Daily Show, 5/29/25; CC Liu, Crystal Q. (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly 

Whites of Japan: Ainu, Emishi, Jomon?

Why do the Ainu people seem to have Caucasian features? (vrogue.co)

The fascinatingly mysterious origins of the Ainu

(TREY the Explainer) This is TTE's first video on human diversity and evolution. It discusses ancient and prehistoric human migration and evolution into East Asia, specifically Japan. [Did the Ainu, Emishi, or Jōmon people come from mating with nearby Russians, Koreans, Tartarians?]

• 15 fascinating facts about the Ainu - Japan’s [bear worshiping] Indigenous people

We examine the strange and somewhat mysterious case of the Ainu tribe [with possible origins in Africa as "Black Asians," as happened with many groups like the early blue-eyed Blacks of Ireland and British Isles, or even the Australian aboriginals and ubiquitous Polynesians] and other members of Y-Haplogroup D. In doing so it breaks down what exactly happened in Asia during prehistory.

Background Music by Kevin Macleod: The Fascinatingly Mysterious Origins of the Ainu

• Untold History, Feb. 2, 2024; TREY the Explainer, 3/18/18; CC Liu, Amber Larson, Crystal Quintero (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

Easter Island has Native American DNA

Sexy Polynesians seduced Native American Indians on the mainland in ancient times?

Moai: the "ancestors" of the Rapa Nui people on Easter Island are honored in stone.

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Ancient DNA from Easter Island/Rapa Nui shows Polynesians and Native Americans interbred

We should welcome the sea people.

The headline says it all, but where, when, why? The why seems obvious enough. Where and when?Stephen Luntz reports for IFLScience.com:

The population of Rapa Nui, dubbed "Easter Island" by Europeans who stumbled onto it on Easter and proceeded to rape, kidnap, and enslave the people, interbred with Native Americans from the Americas before Europeans arrived, despite a distance of 2,300 miles (3,700 kilometers) between them, ancient DNA suggests.

Thrust together, they made the best of it.

The islanders, once the poster children for a people who brought about the environmental collapse of their world through overharvesting of resources [a recently debunked but still popular theory], also appear to be innocent of this charge, according to the same research.

• Easter Island never collapsed: study

The island of Rapa Nui is so incredibly remote that even finding it is considered one of humanity’s most remarkable achievements before the acquisition of technology like compasses and large vessels.

We welcome Rapanui, intermarry.

The remarkable civilization built there by the native [American and Polynesian] people was made famous by the enormous moai (carved monoliths) they constructed, but it has fascinated anthropologists for other reasons.

One of these is the possibility that the inhabitants sailed on and reached South America. On the one hand, it’s a lot harder to miss a continent than a small island, but on the other hand, this would have required a voyage almost twice as long as the one from the other Polynesian islands from which the Rapanui people came.

Europeans kidnapped, raped, and enslaved us.

Genetic testing of the modern population of Rapa Nui has shown a diversity of ancestry, but that is distorted by the Europeans who first visited in 1722 and subsequently kidnapped most of the population for slaves.

Now, however, DNA has been found from 15 people who lived on the island, in some cases as far back as 1670, and whose remains are stored in the Musée de l’Homme in Paris.

Aztlan/Atlantis is overseas in underground caverns.

The possibility of interchange between Polynesia and the Americas via Rapa Nui has been very controversial, but the presence of foods like sweet potato, which originated in South America, is hard to explain any other way.

It also seems the first South American chickens were Polynesian breeds. The new study shows that about 10 percent of the ancestry of the pre-European contact Rapanui was Indigenous American.

That means some of the population not only sailed all the way to South America but found their way back to their tiny dot in the vast Pacific, bringing people they’d visited with them.

Not surprisingly, the Native American genetic inheritance of the population most closely matches peoples from coastal Chile and Peru. More

• IFL Science: Historic spacewalk may have broken space law, a population of Neanderthals were isolated for 50,000 years, and much more this week
• Stephen Luntz, IFLScience.com via MSN.com, 9/14/24; Xochitl, Ashley Wells, Pfc. Sandoval (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

Easter Island pop never collapsed: study

The collapse of the population of Easter Island never happened, say scientists

How much proof of ET intervention is needed?

(WQ) Star People (space visitors) came down to help produce the culture we see on so-called "Easter Island" or Rapa Nui as it is actually named.

When Europeans arrived, they assumed the population had to bigger before and must have dwindled down to its size of a few thousand. A new study published in a peer-reviewed journal shows that that is a Western myth, a foolish assumption that never happened.

The Rapa Nui may have ruined their environment and chopped down all their trees. But that did not cause a collapse of its population. It's intensive gardening and farming techniques, which produce low yields in the best of seasons, were as they had always been.

So who built the Moai, the giant statues buried up to the chests? They obviously had help and no time or inclination to make such monoliths without prompting and help from somewhere out there off the isolated island.

• The population collapse of Easter Island never happened: scientists have uncovered the truth in a new study (Popular Mechanics)
• Ancient DNA from Easter Island (aka Rapa Nui) shows Polynesians and Native Americans interbred [so somebody must have boated across the Pacific to meet up]

Ecocide hypothesis

In his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Jared Diamond suggested that cannibalism took place on Easter Island after the construction of the moai (stone head statues that are actually whole bodies) contributed to environmental degradation when extreme deforestation (ecocide) destabilized an already precarious ecosystem [33].

The archeological record shows that at the time of the initial settlement the island was home to many species of trees, including at least three species which grew up to 49 feet (15 meters) or more: Paschalococos (possibly the largest palm trees in the world at the time), Alphitonia zizyphoides, and Elaeocarpus rarotongensis.

At least six species of land birds were known to live on the island. A major factor that contributed to the extinction of multiple plant species was the introduction of the Polynesian rat.

Studies by paleobotanists have shown rats can dramatically affect the reproduction of vegetation in an ecosystem. In the case of Rapa Nui, recovered plant seed shells showed markings of being gnawed on by rats [3]. This version of the history speculates a high former population to the island that had already declined before Europeans arrived.

Barbara A. West wrote, "Sometime before the arrival of Europeans on Easter Island, the Rapanui experienced a tremendous upheaval in their social system brought about by a change in their island's ecology... By the time of European arrival in 1722, the island's population had dropped to 2,000–3,000 from a high of approximately 15,000 just a century earlier" [34].

By that time, 21 species of trees and all species of land birds became extinct through some combination of over-harvesting, over-hunting, rat predation, and climate change. The island was largely deforested, and it did not have any trees taller than 9.8 ft. (3 m).

Loss of large trees meant that residents were no longer able to build seaworthy vessels, significantly diminishing their fishing abilities. According to this version of the history, the trees were used as rollers to move the moai statues to their place of erection from the quarry at Rano Raraku [35].

Deforestation also caused erosion which caused a sharp decline in agricultural production [3]. This was exacerbated by the loss of land birds and the collapse in seabird populations as a source of food.

By the 18th century, islanders were largely sustained by farming, with domestic chickens as the primary source of protein [36].

Birdmen replace warriors

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As the island became overpopulated and resources diminished, warriors known as matatoa gained more power and the Ancestor Cult ended, making way for the Bird Man Cult.

Beverly Haun wrote, "The concept of mana (power) invested in hereditary leaders was recast into the person of the birdman, apparently beginning circa 1540, and coinciding with the final vestiges of the moai period" [37].

This cult maintained that, although the ancestors still provided for their descendants, the medium through which the living could contact the dead was no longer statues, but human beings chosen through a competition.

The god responsible for creating humans, Makemake, played an important role in this process. Katherine Routledge, who systematically collected the island's traditions in her 1919 expedition [38], showed that the competitions for Bird Man (Rapa Nui tangata manu) started around 1760, after the arrival of the first Europeans, and ended in 1878, with the construction of the first church by Roman Catholic missionaries who formally arrived in 1864.

Petroglyphs representing Bird Men on Easter Island are the same as some in Hawaii, indicating that this concept was probably brought by the original settlers; only the competition itself was unique to Easter Island.

According to Diamond and Heyerdahl's version of the island's history, the huri mo'ai – "statue-toppling" – continued into the 1830s as a part of fierce internal wars.

By 1838, the only standing moai were on the slopes of Rano Raraku, in Hoa Hakananai'a in Orongo, and Ariki Paro in Ahu Te Pito Kura.

Criticism of the ecocide hypothesis

Diamond and West's version of the history is highly controversial. A study headed by Douglas Owsley published in 1994 asserted that there is little archeological evidence of pre-European societal collapse.

Bone pathology and osteometric data from islanders of that period clearly suggest few fatalities can be attributed directly to violence [39].

Research by Binghamton University anthropologists Robert DiNapoli and Carl Lipo in 2021 suggests that the island experienced steady population growth from its initial settlement until European contact in 1722.

The island never had more than a few thousand people prior to European contact, and their numbers were increasing rather than dwindling [40][41].

Several works that address or counter Diamond's claims in Collapse have been published.

In Ecological Catastrophe and Collapse -The Myth of "Ecocide" on Rapa Nui (Easter Island), Hunt and Lipo set out a claim-by-claim rebuttal to Diamond's claims.

This includes, among other things:

• that deforestation began immediately, but the population grew while the forest declined as the land was converted to more productive farmland;
• that the island's population grew continuously up to the arrival of Europeans, with the only clear decline starting in the period of 1750–1800;
• that studies from other islands show clearly that Polynesian settlement without Polynesian rats is only associated with minimal forest loss while the arrival of rats without human settlement is devastating to forest populations;
• only species favored by the rats for consumption were lost, not for example the native Sophora toromiro;
• that the island's drier, less predictable climate made it inherently more vulnerable to deforestation than other Polynesian islands; and that the population declines on Rapa Nui can be well attributed to the very mechanism described by Diamond in another of his books, Guns, Germs and Steel -- the devastating impact of introduced diseases, raids, slavery, and exploitation on indigenous populations [42].

In another work, Hunt and Lipo discuss more evidence against the ecocide hypothesis. In addition to focusing on the settlement chronology, they note that the island has an abnormally low amount of evidence of warfare compared to other Polynesian islands, only relatively small-scale intergroup conflict.

There are no fortifications, and the attributed obsidian mata'a "weapons" show rather evidence of having been used in agriculture, and indeed, match up with agricultural tools long recognized among artifacts of other Polynesian peoples [43]. More

• The population collapse of Easter Island never happened: scientists have uncovered the truth in a new study (Popular Mechanics)
• Eds., Wisdom Quarterly tex and Wiki edit

Star People of Hawaii: Mu's Mt. Sumeru?

The axis mundi Mt. Sumeru

In Buddhist cosmology, the central mountain around which everything else on the plane of the Earth revolves is Mount Sumeru (or "Good Meru"). It is thought mythological because it would be bigger than Mt. Everest or Mt. Kailash and it should be in the middle of the ocean. The lost continent of Mu (or Lemuria) would fit the bill, and the peak of this sunken continent still sticks up above sea level, and it is called Hawaii's Mauna Kea. It did not get shorter when the continent sank; the floor got lower, and most of it is underwater. So it is like a tall person standing in a hole next to a guy named Everest standing on a platform. The "tallest" mountain is still Mauna Kea.

• VIDEO: The enigmatic 'Ancient Alien Library' concealed beneath the Great Sphinx (Wm. Shatner)

Ancient Aliens: Hawaii and Mauna Lea's link to extraterrestrial life and "star people" (S14, E12) | full episode

Pele gets very angry. Appease her.

(HISTORY) Aug. 31, 2024: The Native Hawaiians (and dwarf Menehune) of Hawaii trace their ancestry to star people beings from the Pleiades star system called the Atua (also Akua). A kind of "Atlantis" once existed in the middle of the Pacific known as ancient Lemuria (or Mu). And it had the world's tallest mountain, an axis mundi, Mauna Kea, as measured from the base to the snowy peak. Mauna Loa volcano and four others are still erupting and growing the big island. What are tikis, who were the royals and Hawaiian demigod chieftains emanating mana, and the "little people" or Menehune who worked to build walls and were recorded in past censuses?

Native American giants? (AI creation?)

See more in Season 14, Episode 12, "Islands of Fire."

How many little islands and outcroppings? Over 1,000 = Hawaii

Watch all new episodes of Ancient Aliens, Fridays at 9/8c, and stay up to date on all of your favorite shows on The HISTORY Channel website at history.com/schedule. #AncientAliens

Hawaii: Last Week Tonight (HBO)

Hawaii: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

Buddhists surf? Yes, Japanese invented it.

(LastWeekTonight) Aug. 15, 2024: #3 on Trending. John Oliver discusses how Hawaii has long been run [by imperial forces] for the benefit of everyone but indigenous Hawaiians, how certain groups keep creating messes for locals, and what Mark "Facebook" Zuckerberg wishes for when he sees a star.

Connect with Last Week Tonight online...on its YouTube channel for more almost news as it almost happens, on Facebook like your mom would, on Twitter for news about jokes and jokes about news, or visit the official site for all that other stuff at once: hbo.com/lastweektonight.

• 'Doomsday' fish turned up before quake

What is Hawaii? A conservative small town near the beach with a lot of military bases and troops

Niihau (Sinclair), the Forbidden Hawaiian Island

After a directed-energy weapon was used in an arson attack with government complicity, Maui just hasn't been the same. But a law was passed before the attack that says the US government can confiscate land after an "accident" to remediate it, protect the public, or "help" people who lost out during a "natural" disaster. Now that a $4 billion settlement has been reached, what will happen to historical La Haina? Will the island ever be the same? Will the US military seize and wall off even more land? Will the queen be reinstalled? Will billionaire real estate investors turn the isles into an outdoor mall? Will anyone ever figure out that most of Hawaii is on another 1,000 island and atolls no one has even heard of because the US military keeps all of that for itself? Or what about that big Scottish island? That's something. Hawaii has all the requisites to be cool, but it is not. It is a tourist emporium, overpriced and churning with US and Japanese civilians enriching the hotels. There's little culture left, at least very little that can be seen (da kine) by tourists, a facade of Aloha Spirit to sell tourist packages. Visit and hop on over to the islands, getting to the top of the tallest mountain in the world, a volcano in the clouds on Hilo, the Big Island, rather than administrative center Oahu. Dakine? Just work it into conversation; it means whatever you need it to mean.

First tattooed man in America was Irish

Carnet de voyage - James F. O’Connell, découvreur de Nan Madol (tahiti-infos.com)

They danced, so I'll dance an Irish jig for them.

James F. O’Connell, the “Tattooed Man,” arrived in New York City in 1835, causing much consternation. If a lady so much as glanced at him, her future children would be born just as hideously inked as he was — covered in thick, patterned black bands that curved down and around their hands, arms, legs, and backs. Or so the churchmen told their flocks.

O’Connell, an Irish sailor, acquired his full-body tattoo during a stint as a castaway in the South Pacific’s Caroline Islands during the late 1820s and early 1830s.

After their ship sunk, Irishman O’Connell and his shipmate, George Keenan, were taken in by inhabitants of the island of Pohnpei — who were not cannibals, O’Connell emphatically states in his memoir.

Within a few days, the two were bustled off to an isolated hut, where five or six women, “savage printers” armed with ink and thorns, set about providing the newcomers with the markings that would smooth their way into the community.

The resulting tattoo, called pelipel, made O’Connell “fully human” in the world of the South Pacific, writes Juniper Ellis in her book Tattooing the World (Columbia University Press, 2008), for which the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) provided research support. More: neh.gov

The Dharma Bum

There's something about the Irish, going from a tiny island under the thumb of a neighboring island, pushed out into the world as a diaspora that saw the sidhe, Tuatha de Danan, the wee people, the spirits, and creatures of the Emerald Isle spread out into all corners of the world and the public imagination. The neighboring island forced itself on everyone, like the last militant vestige of the Roman Empire (the remaining force in Rome slipping on a sheep's disguise in an exhibition of soft power that conquered the planet or plane more deeply than British weapons and forces.

U Dhammaloka (right) with Burmese monks

How did the Irish win their way into the hearts of all, particularly with so many redheads? One of the most prominent and important of the Irish was named O'Connell (Laurence), who became the first Westerner to ordain as a Theravada Buddhist monk, Ven. U Dhammaloka (pronounced \ooh-dah-mah-low-kuh\), the "U" being an Burmese honorific.

He traveled by boat to California then by ship to Asia, where he made a name for himself as a freethinker and Buddhist, opposing Christian missionaries, ended up all the way in Mandalay, Burma, in a Buddhist monastery.

Another O'Connell (James F.), not JFO, also made a splash in the Pacific among the people of Pohnpei among the Caroline Islands. He was a sailor on a boat that wrecked, landing him in Micronesia and this adventure.

• P.T. Barnum's incredible freak show oddity, the First Tattooed Man in America, Irishman James F. O’Connell (irishcentral.com)

How an Irishman's tattoo changed history

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I was happy to be a Buddhist monk for freedom

(Rare Earth) James O'Connell, 18, survived a shipwreck along with seven others only to become the most famous Western man in Pohnpei. Ah, coming home after being enslaved since your late teens only to have your own society condemn you as Satanic for what they did to you and then be forced to headline a traveling circus freakshow until you died. No matter where you go, the tattoos always speak first. This is the (self-told, probably exaggerated for circus reasons) story of P.T. Barnum's original freak success story, "James O'Connell, America's first tattooed man."

Micronesia (with US Guam), Melanesia, Polynesia, Australasia (Oceania)

• The Life and Adventures of James F. O’Connell, the Tattooed Man (1845)

Support keeps Rare Earth going: rareearth and ko-fi.com/rareearth Follow Instagram: rareinsta. Follow twitter: evan_hadfield

• Evan Hadfield, Rare Earth, Nov. 25, 2023; Celtic Tattoos & Traditions; USA Kilts; Pulan Speaks (video); Pat Macpherson, Dhr. Seven (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

Another good tattoo idea?

Hawaii before US colonialism (video)

Hawaii used to be nice until the US decided to hit it with a Directed Energy Weapon: Maui fire

This is a private Scottish island in Hawaii

Happy Hawaii Day, the day the queen was overthrown and the islands were forced into subjugation and statehood, as rumor has it, by a giant fruit corporation that was intent on capitalizing on cheap production costs while enticing the US military with an offensive outpost to attack Japan and threaten Indochina (Vietnam), Laos, Cambodia, China, Korea, Russia, and the rest of the world. If the US could take the Philippines as a colony, they saw no reason why they couldn't or shouldn't abduct a thousand spare islands, atolls, and outcroppings (most of them now reserved for military purposes) we call the state of "Hawaii."

• NATIONAL HAWAII DAY | July 5 (National Day Calendar)

How was life in Hawaii before colonialism?

(Captivating History) Feb. 13, 2023: Just how did the ancient Hawaiians sail thousands of miles of open ocean without modern methods, without getting lost, and somehow discovering new islands? How did such a rich culture even come to exist on perhaps the most isolated archipelago in the world?

• ["Hawaii" is actually a set of over 1,000 islands though we only hear about five.]

Is the nickname of a “beach island paradise” an accurate description of the various kinds of beautiful, intriguing, and sometimes even dangerous topographies and natural phenomena that make up Hawaiʻi?

Join the Captivating History Book Club: bit.ly/3TMmpU2 Get a FREE mythology bundle eBook covering Greek, Norse, and Egyptian mythology here: captivatinghistory.com/ebook

Get the paperback version of Hawaiian History here: amazon.com/Hawaiian-Histo... and the eBook version of Hawaiian History here: amazon.com/Hawaiian-Histo... See all captivating history books here: amazon.com/author/captiva...

Follow on Facebook: captivatinghistory and Twitter: @CaptivHistory

• VIDEO: Why is Hawaii a Part of the United States?
• How to dress to prevent 100% of bug bites with two hacks

Robinsons of Scotland own part of Hawaii

Niʻihau (Hawaiian \ˈni'iˈhɐw\, anglicized as Niihau \NEE-(ee-)how\), is the westernmost main and seventh largest inhabited island in Hawaii, which is a state consisting of more than 1,000 islands few know about.

It is 17.5 miles (28.2 km) southwest of Kauaʻi across the Kaulakahi Channel. Its area is 69.5 square miles (180 km2)[3].

Several intermittent playa lakes provide wetland habitats for the Hawaiian coot, the Hawaiian stilt, and the Hawaiian duck.

The island is designated as critical habitat for Brighamia insignis, an endemic and endangered species of Hawaiian lobelioid.

The United States Census Bureau defines Niʻihau and the neighboring island and State Seabird Sanctuary of Lehua as Census Tract 410 of Kauai County, Hawaii.

Climbing the Buddha's Hand elevated monument

Its 2000 census population was 160, most of whom are native Hawaiians [4]; its 2010 census population was 170. At the 2020 census, the population had fallen to 84 [5].

Scottish Elizabeth Sinclair purchased Niʻihau in 1864 for US $10,000 (equivalent to about $190,000 in 2023, or $350,000 in 2024) from the pre-USA Kingdom of Hawaii.

The island's private ownership passed on to her descendants, the Robinsons.

• Robinson Crusoe

During World War II, the island was the site of the Niʻihau incident, in which, following the attack on Pearl Harbor, a Japanese Navy fighter pilot crashed on the island and received help from the island's residents of Japanese descent.

The island, known as "the Forbidden Isle," is off-limits to ALL outsiders except the Robinson family and their relatives, U.S. Navy personnel (military-industrial complex), government officials, and invited guests.

From 1987 onward, a limited number of supervised activity tours and hunting safaris have opened to tourists.

The island is currently managed by brothers Bruce and Keith Robinson. The people of Niʻihau are noted for their gemlike lei pūpū (shell lei) craftsmanship. They speak Hawaiian as a primary language. More: Niihau