Of course they have bodies! How is this news to anyone? A good part of these statues are well above ground <i>including</i> their bodies, and we've known the sunken ones have bodies below the ground for several decades already.<p>They've been excavating these statues for quite a while already.<p>Here, go read the Wikipedia article on Moai, it's way more interesting than this article (which is just a copy of the first few paragraphs of <a href="http://www.eisp.org/3879/" rel="nofollow">http://www.eisp.org/3879/</a> with the commentary "wild stuff" added):<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moai" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moai</a><p>Now excuse me while I go submit an article about the Great Pyramids having five sides. Yes mind=blown, I know.
Whenever I see an easter island head, I can't help but draw parallels between our global civilization and theirs.<p>The eastern islanders consisted of around a dozen tribes, each competing for resources with others. It's thought that all of these statues were put up in a race by chieftains, competing with one another to put up the biggest, most refined and the best statue.<p>I wouldn't be surprised if they competed in their standards of life too. ("I eat X for breakfast, lunch and dinner!") I certainly wouldn't be surprised by the fact that they might have had political factions, special interests and a life rife with complicated political maneuvering. (it was certainly in the short term interests of statue makers to be against conservation and egg chieftains on)<p>After all we're the same species and they were just like us.<p>However what they failed to realize was the inescapable fact that they were living on a small piece of land in the middle of a vast ocean. Their seemingly inexhaustible resources were pitiful by any standards.<p>As time wore on and their population boomed, a point came when all of these factors came together. Their squandering of resources combined with their unsustainable way of life for a large population faced off with their limited resources, and the result was ugly. Their entire civilization collapsed.<p>Most of the population was lost to famine. Their civilization descended to cannibalism to survive. This degraded civilization became the perfect breeding ground for disease and even more people died. This cycle went on and on until their entire civilization was wiped out and the entire population nearly eradicated.<p>I shudder to think what it must have been like to live in this world. It must have been a nightmare.<p>Today like the eastern islanders with their statues, we keep on building taller and taller structures, better and more lethal weapons, and crazier systems. We compete with one another for status symbols at personal, regional and national levels.<p>Today we are just as isolated on this tiny blue ball, with a finite amount of resources, a booming population, combined with special interests and huge egos.<p>Like the eastern islanders we have nowhere to go...
This blew my mind. I don't know why, I find it incredibly eye-opening that the first thought that one might think of on seeing a head in the dirt (that there's the rest of it underneath) has just simply never occurred to generations of people because we were "told" by someone that they're just heads.<p>How powerful words can be in casting an illusion, in defeating creativity, and hiding the truth!
This is one of the most amazing discoveries I have seen recently. The sheer weight of that stone is absolutely insane. I'm still a little stunned this was just discovered.<p>I would love to know what the people who made this were thinking. To create a work of art that detailed and massive just to bury 75% of it seems very odd. I'm sure there was a good reason to do it (in their minds at least), I'd love to know what that was.
Like everybody, I've heard of the heads at Easter Island since childhood and yet I never had a clue of where on Earth Easter Island migh be.<p>So here's a Google Maps link for geography-impaired folks like me: <a href="http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Easter+Island,+Isla+de+Pascua,+Chile&hl=en&ll=-12.897489,-65.742187&spn=114.078688,227.988281&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=55.543096,113.994141&vpsrc=6&hnear=Easter+Island&t=m&z=3" rel="nofollow">http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Easter+Island,+Isla+de+Pascua,...</a><p>Answer: between Chile and Australia, closer to Chile.