From Mayans To Olmecs — 10 Ancient Civilizations That Disappeared Under BIZARRE Circumstances

However, in 2024, Columbia archaeologist Dylan Davis released a study challenging the long-held narrative, showing that the Rapa Nui didn’t overpopulate the island but maintained a stable environment until the arrival of European settlers in the early 18th century. Davis and his team’s comprehensive study of the island’s farmland revealed that the residents only grew enough crops to feed four thousand individuals at any given time. He explained, “This shows that the population could never have been as big as some of the earlier estimates suggested.”

The Rapa Nui had a particular method of farming called “rock gardening,” where farmers would scatter broken rocks in fields to protect the budding plants from the elements. For many years, scientists simply mapped these “gardens” to calculate the yield of the ancient islanders’ crops. However, Davis and his team conducted different research using satellite imagery; their findings revealed that “There are natural rock outcrops all over the place that had been misidentified as rock gardens in the past.”

This study, in essence, disproves the theory that the Rapa Nui were frivolous people, as Davis’s study pointed out that the Rapa Nui’s “rock gardening” was an extremely efficient way to draw necessary minerals and nutrients out from Easter Island’s nutrient-deficient volcanic soil.

“The lesson is the opposite of the collapse theory,” says Davis. “People were able to be very resilient in the face of limited resources by modifying the environment in a way that helped.”