Easter Island's massive stone statues once walked, claims a controversial new theory that explains how the megaliths were put into place.
Nearly 1,000 statues stand on the remote Polynesian island's 63 square miles, but much about their origin and the people who built them remains a mystery.
With the largest weighing 74 tons and standing nearly 33ft tall, few of the enigmas are more perplexing than how the megaliths - known as moai - were moved miles into place from the quarries where they were hewn.
Previous studies have suggested that the people who settled Easter Island some 800 years ago, known as the Rapa Nui, laid the statues prone and rolled them into place using logs.
Rhe island has since been highlighted as a warning of the dangers of overexploitation, with the theory being that the Rapa Nui eradicated the island's forests to serve their obsession with statue building.
But now a new study suggests that Easter Island's statue builders 'walked' the moai into place by rocking them from side to side rather like you would move a refrigerator into the corner of your kitchen.
Carl Lipo, an archaeologist at California State University, Long Beach, claims the archaeological record does not support the over exploitation hypothesis.
On the other hand, he says, incomplete statues littered across the island tend to support the idea they were rocked into position, Nature reported.
These incomplete statues lean forward in a posture that doesn't seem to lend itself to horizontal transport, says Professor Lipo, who added that they would have been modified once they reached their pedestals.
He contends that broken moai along roads, which were presumably dropped and abandoned, also point to their being transported across the island vertically.
Video of the theory in action:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvvES47OdmY
Link with more pictures & Map
What are your thoughts on this theory?
