Did Easter Island's statues 'walk' into place?

[Jazzy]

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?

 

[Feeblemind]

Funny you should bring this up. Here is an article and photo I found several weeks back. They do have bodies, buried underneath. This is from Mental Floss. Picture below.



Maybe this isn’t a newsflash to anyone but me, but, um, the Moai “heads” on Easter Island have bodies. Because some of the statues are set deep into the ground, and because the heads on the statues are disproportionately large, many people (myself included) tend to think of them as just big heads. But the bodies (generally not including legs, though there is at least one kneeling statue) are there — in many cases, underground. What’s even more interesting — there are petroglyphs (rock markings) that have been preserved below the soil level, where they have been protected from erosion. This research report has been making the rounds; it discusses recent progress by The Easter Island Statue Project to uncover, study, and catalogue two statues. It includes (among the dry details of the research) a day-by-day journal of the work, as well as remarkable photographs showing the petroglyphs and team members excavating. Above is an image from a previous excavation (source unknown) that shows you the scale of the statues, and how deep they were buried. (Note: visitors are prohibited from climbing on the Moai; the expedition pictured above appears to predate the EISP and the current practice of conservation.)

For more on the Easter Island statues, read more about the EISP, read their extensive research reports, and check out the Wikipedia page on Moai (which also discusses the fairly well-known fact that many of the statues used to have hats or possibly topknots, known as pukao). Also interesting is the back story of archaeology on Easter Island (also known as Rapa Nui); apparently the island has been the subject of archaeological research for 119 years.

 

[DrLeftover]

One ancient mystery at a time, please.

 

[Feeblemind]

Oh come on..those heads had BODIES for crying out loud....WHO KNEW??

 

[Evil Eye]

I thought this would be about the statues walking to their current positions under their own power like golems... I'm disappointed

WHO KNEW??

The people who made them

 

[DrLeftover]

The people who spend their spare time watching documentaries and doing that kind of research knew.



.... ... or if you looked at the photos of the statues still in the quarry and saw they were more than just heads.

 

[Feeblemind]

Wasn't it thought, at one time, that Aliens planted them? Or is that just Stonehenge and the crop circles?

 

[DrLeftover]

Wasn't it thought, at one time, that Aliens planted them? Or is that just Stonehenge and the crop circles?

And the 2000 election results in Florida.

 

[Feeblemind]

And the 2000 election results in Florida.

That is correct..the aliens from the planet Hanging Chad.

 

[wirelessguru1]

WOW! That is most definitely a really cool way of walking the statues...

 

[DrLeftover]

Oh, by the way.... guess where this is:

Yes. There are dry stone walls on the island that look an awful lot like some of the Inca stoneworks on the mainland.



http://www.ancientmysteries.eu/mysteries/chili-paaseiland/mystery-easter-island.html



(NOTE: the website says it will be closing at the end of this year, so- read fast.)

 

[DrLeftover]

The point to that being:



The world, even the world you see on the sensationalist TV shows, is even weirder, and less neatly classifiable than you will easily believe.



Trust me.



I'm a doctor or at least a professional.

 

[wirelessguru1]

The point to that being:



The world, even the world you see on the sensationalist TV shows, is even weirder, and less neatly classifiable than you will easily believe.



Trust me.



I'm a doctor or at least a professional.

Of course, because the most orthodox classifications are make believe since they are really not very scientific at all...

Essentially known History only extends to half precession macro cycle (or to 12,960 years ago) and everything else before that is pretty much pre-History and, therfore, make believe...since the orthodox desperately try to ignore, deny and dismiss the existence of lost civilizations in pre-History...

 

[DrLeftover]

Yes. Point conceded.



And?

 

[wirelessguru1]

And?

..and there is indeed evidence of lost civilizations which makes their Out of Africa evolution theories wrong including how humans got into the Americas...

 

[DrLeftover]

You mean something like this:

Both labs agreed that the coprolites were left 14,300 years ago--almost 1,500 years before the earliest agreed-upon evidence for human presence in the Americas. For the first time, we are actually radio-carbon dating human remains that are pre-Clovis, Jenkins says. There are older radiocarbon dates on sites in North America, but not directly on human remains.

http://www.archaeology.org/online/features/coprolites/