History of Easter Island - Possible South American Links

Possible South American Links

See also: Pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact#Possible Polynesian trans-oceanic contact

The Norwegian adventurer Thor Heyerdahl believed that cultural similarities exist between Easter Island and South American Indian cultures which he suggested might have resulted from some settlers arriving from the continent. According to local legends, a group of people called hanau epe (meaning either "long eared" or "stocky" people) came into conflict with another group called the hanau momoko (either "short eared" or "slim" people). After mutual suspicions erupted in a violent clash, the hanau epe were overthrown and exterminated, leaving only one survivor. Various interpretations of this story have been made - that it represents a struggle between natives and incoming migrants; that it recalls inter-clan warfare; or that represents a class conflict.

The fact that the sweet potato, a staple of the pre-contact Polynesian diet, is of South American origin, and that there is no evidence that its seed could spread by floating across the ocean, indicates that there must have been some contact between the two cultures. Either Polynesians traveled to South America and back, or Indian balsa rafts drifted to Polynesia, possibly unable to make a return trip because of their less developed navigational skills and more fragile boats, or both. Polynesian connections in South America have been claimed to exist among the Mapuche Indians in central and southern Chile. The Polynesian name for the small islet of Sala y Gómez (Manu Motu Motiro Hiva, "Bird's islet on the way to a far away land") east of Easter Island has also been seen as a hint that South America was known before European contacts. Further complicating the situation is that the word Hiva ("far away land") was also the name of the islanders' legendary home country. Inexplicable insistence on an eastern origin for the first inhabitants was unanimous among the islanders in all early accounts.

Jacob Roggeveen's expedition of 1722 gives us our first description of the islanders. They were "of all shades of colour, yellow, white and brown" and they distended their ear lobes so greatly with large disks that when they took them out they could "hitch the rim of the lobe over the top of the ear". Roggeveen also noted how some of the islanders were "generally large in stature". Islanders' tallness was also witnessed by the Spanish who visited the island in 1770, measuring heights of 196 and 199 cm. DNA sequence analysis of Easter Island's current inhabitants indicates that the 36 people living on Rapa Nui who survived the devastating internecine wars, slave raids and epidemics of the 19th century and had any offspring, were Polynesian. Furthermore, examination of skeletons offers evidence of only Polynesian origins for Rapa Nui living on the island after 1680.

Geneticist Erik Thorsby and colleagues have published two studies in the peer-reviewed journal Tissue Antigens that present evidence for an Amerindian genetic contribution to the Eastern Island population, which was probably introduced prior to the European discovery of the island. In general, theories about Easter Island which posited a non-Polynesian influence in its pre-European history have in the past been met with skepticism from mainstream archeology.