I know Chile owns Easter Island/ #RapaNui , but it still seems weird to see " #EasterIsland , #Chile." I suppose it's the same as "Hawaii, USA," but today's so developed and has such a strong white footprint that it doesn't strike me as hard, though I imagine it hits Hawaiians like a club.
A friend of mine who's #Boricua says she and many of her friends prefer independence to statehood for #PuertoRico because they've seen the effect on #Hawaii and aren't interested.
Over the past decade or so, researchers have found genetic evidence for contact between people in eastern Polynesia and those in coastal Peru and Colombia. Now archeologists studying the oldest settlement on Rapa Nui (Easter Island) have found physical evidence that islanders traveled to South America at least once and returned with food crops not known in Polynesia.
Wooden tablets containing a language of glyphs called Rongorongo may be evidence that the people of Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island, created their own writing system without the influence of European language
The indigenous people of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) have always said that their rongorongo writing was very old, but were generally not believed until quite recently. Researchers have now dated one rongorongo text to 200 years before the island had any contact with Europeans.
These new dates of a #RapaNui 🗿 #Rongorongo tablet (S. Ferrara et al., Sci Rep 14, 2794 (2024) 🔓) - before any known contact with literate societies - seems to suggest an independent invention of writing on #EasterIsland:
Abstract: “Placing the origin of an undeciphered script in time is crucial to understanding the invention of writing in human history. Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island, developed a script, now engraved on fewer than 30 wooden objects, which is still undeciphered. Its origins are also obscure. Central to this issue is...
#ClimateChange continues 24/7/365 and doesn't wait for politicians to reach an agreement on measures to stop it.
Remember #easterIsland#AngkorVat#Mu and many more civilisations who have disappeared in the past.
If we continue like this it will happen on a global scale.
I don't know why the myth of #EasterIsland being deforested to ecological collapse for the pointless ritual of putting up big heads is still being peddled about when #Nauru provides a much better and non-mythological example.
Here we have a tropical paradise that was strip mined to ecological oblivion by the greed of outsider capitalists and their willing compradores. It is a tale of capitalist greed laying waste to a complex ecosystem for the short term gain of the few. It even has the good old sub plot of promises that the spectacular wealth from the phosphate would fund the impossible project of ecological restoration. Sound familiar?
Oh, I do know why the Easter Island myth gets peddled, racism. It easy for white people to think that indigenous people are stupid but pure and reveal something about the human condition that is masked by modern, European sophistication. It is hard for us to think that our cultural sophistication isn't anything but naked greed and brutality.
From the slave ships, through the Pacific Phosphate Company, to Royal Dutch Shell, it is the Hobbsean ideology of the European bourgeoisie that remains. That is what we need to struggle against if the whole earth is not to go the way of Nauru.
The invention of writing on Rapa Nui (Easter Island). New radiocarbon dates on the Rongorongo script (doi.org)
Abstract: “Placing the origin of an undeciphered script in time is crucial to understanding the invention of writing in human history. Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island, developed a script, now engraved on fewer than 30 wooden objects, which is still undeciphered. Its origins are also obscure. Central to this issue is...
Rapanui (Easter Island) invites the world to help it grow Cacao beans (www.teaonews.co.nz)
Rapanui has seen a huge decline in its ecosystem and sees this investment as helping it fund solutions to its climate change issues.