An independent scholar who loves challenging the archaeological establishment has done it again, offering a new and provocative theory about who built the huge, enigmatic human-like monuments that cover the landscape on Easter Island, a lonely island outpost off the western coast of South America.
Graham Hancock is a British author and adventurer who has published several best-selling books presenting the evidence that sophisticated cultures existed on Earth long before mainstream academia acknowledges. His work is both popular and controversial, and he has stirred up another hornet’s nest with his assertion that the monuments of Easter Island were constructed 12,000 years ago by an advanced but now lost culture, and not 900 years ago by Polynesians as most archaeologists believe.
Did a Lost, Advanced Civilization Really Build the Easter Island Statues?
There are approximately 1,000 massive stone heads, known as Moai, distributed across Easter Island. They average between nine and 11 tons in weight and about 13 feet (four meters) in height, although some are taller and heavier (the tallest is 33 feet or 10 meters tall and the heaviest weighs an incredible 95 tons).
- Can Ancient Apocalypse Series 2 Convince Us of a Lost Ice Age Civilization?
- Did an Astronomical Body Cause the Global Floods of Ancient Myths with Its Gravitational Tidal Floods? - Part 1
Under the scenario constructed by Graham Hancock, these gigantic statues were made by people who lived on the island around 10,000 BC, long before the Polynesians arrived. As support for this thesis he points to a study showing that banana plants were present on Easter Island thousands of years ago, and he believes they would have been brought there by migrants who arrived near the end of the last Ice Age.
Row of Easter Island stone statues with stone hats added. (Docrgd/CC BY-SA 4.0)
“What I am suggesting is that the Polynesians encountered a pre-existing population on that island, evidenced by those banana [remains]... present there at least 3,000 years ago,” Hancock told the Daily Mail. “And that from that pre-existing population, they inherited the older traditions and songs that we see today.”
To further support his unorthodox claims, Hancock points to evidence that the statues of Easter Island are much older than the platforms upon which many sit. It seems the platforms were also constructed using different techniques, suggesting they were built by separate peoples. The statues are smooth and precisely made, while the platforms are more rudimentary, having been built from shards of stones stacked in piles.
This theory, like so many of his others, falls under the umbrella of Hancock’s 'Lost Ice Age Civilization' hypothesis, which asserts that a highly advanced ancient civilization once populated many areas of the Earth, until what they built was destroyed by a great flood that occurred at the end of the last Ice Age.
While he has been promoting this idea for a long time, he has been reaching a wider audience through his Netflix series “Ancient Apocalypse,” a professionally produced program that presents all of the evidence he has collected over the years that does not fit with the current archaeological paradigm.
Unfortunately for Hancock, as more people have become more aware of his work mainstream archaeologists and journalists have stepped up their attacks on him, doing their best to sully his reputation and dismiss him as a crank. These efforts have proven largely unsuccessful, however, as millions of people have shown themselves to be open to alternative ideas about human history.
The Critics Respond (and Hancock Responds to Them)
Some of the criticism of Hancock over the years has been highly personal in nature, which has undoubtedly caused many people to reject it. But there are scientists who’ve chosen to engage with his ideas in a more scientifically respectable way, offering critiques based on facts rather than attacks.
- Did an Astronomical Body Cause the Global Floods of Ancient Myths with Its Gravitational Tidal Floods? - Part 2
- How the Easter Island Statues Received Their Hats: Final Report
For example, Dr. Dale F. Simpson Jr., an archaeologist from the College of duPage in Illinois who has studied the Moai, believes that Hancock has overlooked some important facts that contradict his ideas. He notes that similar stone statues have been found on other islands, including Hiva Oa in the Marquesas Islands and some Raivavae Islands. Those statues are positioned similarly to the Easter Island monuments, and display some similar features (elongated heads and faces and hands joined at the belly).
“[Easter Island] is one of the most amazing places on planet Earth that I have been to. It is riddled with mystery,”Dr. Simpson acknowledged in an interview with the Daily Mail. “But sometimes, people take micro bits of data and turn them into macro-interpretations to support claims that are not entirely substantiated.”
Of course this does not represent a direct refutation of Hancock’s theory. If the original statues were built by an older civilization, this civilization might have left similar artifacts in many different places across the globe, where they could have inspired later efforts to copy their work.
“I'm not surprised that this legacy iconography turns up in other parts of Polynesia as well as Easter Island,” Hancock countered. “However, the Easter Island Moai are so different from the anthropomorphic figures in the Marquesas and Raivavae that I believe they are best understood as having evolved entirely independently from those figures."
The giant heads on Easter Island might be the only examples of the original, 12,000-year-old statues still in existence, protected from destruction by the isolation associated with their extremely remote location. Easter Island stands as a solitary sentinel on the endless Pacific Ocean horizon, 1,200 miles (2,000 kilometers) from the nearest landmass, the Pitcairn Islands, and more than 2,100 miles (3,500 kilometers) off the coast of Chile.
After calling it a “miracle” that anyone ever found Easter Island at all, Graham Hancock cites a cites a 2013 study on a soil core from the crater of the island's long-extinct volcano that reveals the presence of banana plants on the island in 2,000 BC. And he also mentions a second study, published in 2008, that shows the island was populated with shrubs and herbs that might have been brought by human settlers between 14,000 to 10,000 years ago.
Unsurprisingly, mainstream archaeologists have found reasons to object to these studies. Whether their criticism is genuine or motivated by a desire to protect orthodox theories from their most well-known heretic is open to debate.
Author and investigative journalist Graham Hancock. ([Cpt. Muji]/CC BY-SA 3.0).
It is certainly true, as skeptics of Hancock’s hypothesis point out, that no remains of pigs, dogs, cattle, or other large animals typically associated with human habitation has been found on Easter Island dating to several thousand years in the past. There have also been no archaeological discoveries in general that show humans were on the island before the first millennium AD, let alone in 10,000 BC.
The Ancient Apocalpyse Revealed?
In his presentation on this topic in the second season of his Netflix series, Hancock highlights oral traditions on Easter Island that describe people arriving from an island known as Hiva, which had to be abandoned after it was flooded when the glaciers melted and global sea levels rose by 400 feet at the end of the last Ice Age. He suggests these migrants would have settled on lower-lying areas of Easter Island that were later also rendered uninhabitable by flooding, leaving almost nothing behind (besides the giant heads) to suggest anyone had lived on the island thousands of years in the past.
Hancock also questions whether excavations on the island have even been looking for evidence of ancient settlers from an unknown advanced civilization, since most archaeologists have already dismissed the possibility out of hand.
Like most of the contentious debates Graham Hancock has been involved in, this one is likely to go on for quite some time with no clear resolution. In the meantime, Hancock plans to continue exploring controversial issues in history and archaeology on “Ancient Apocalypse,” with production on the upcoming third season of the show slated to begin in a few months.
Top image: Statue heads on Easter Island in various stages of completion before they were abandoned in a crater.
Source:Docrgd/CC BY-SA 4.0.
By Nathan Falde
