DIAMOND'S IN THE ROUGH

Some folks really hate Jared Diamond. And those folks love hating Jared Diamond. As any good polymath (with backgrounds in physiology, ecology, evolutionary biology, geography, history, and anthropology, degrees from Harvard and Cambridge, and professorships at UCLA in both medicine and geography) Diamond has written several books. His first popular work came out in 1991 and was titled, The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal. He followed that in 1997 with two books, Why is Sex Fun? The Evolution of Human Sexuality and Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. And in 2005 Diamond came out with his latest work, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. You see, the man likes exploring big ideas.

By far, Diamond’s most popular work was Guns, Germs, and Steel (subtitled in the UK as: A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years.) The premise for the book came about when a friend, a politician from Papua New Guinea, asked Diamond “Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo [inventions and manufactured items] and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?” The title of the subsequent book gives away Diamond’s attempted collation and summary of the best of conventional academic wisdom at that time.

It was a big question and his answer inevitably simplified things. The book was also a public offering intended for a lay audience and attempting to provide a suitable answer based on scholarly consensus. That is to say, it was not meant to be a final definitive answer to all related questions or to please every specialist with granular understanding in every related field. It most certainly was not intended to address every niche hypothesis an academic somewhere may have on some aspect of the story. And yet, despite being the best and most accessible work of its kind on offer, his work was criticized for just that: not pleasing everyone while failing to perfectly encapsulate all conceivable aspects of biology and geography, history and culture, politics and economics. Still, in 1998 Diamond won the Pulitzer Prize in general non-fiction for his offering. A documentary based on the book was produced by the National Geographic Society and broadcast on PBS in 2005. Two decades later, Guns, Germs, and Steel is a book found in nearly every library and new and used bookstore, certainly in the English-speaking world.

So, as you can imagine, given the popular enthusiasm and academic dislike of Guns, Germs, and Steel, folks were primed for critique when his next book arrived. A book of its time, Collapse looked at historical examples of societal breakdown, with a focus on those instances involving significant environmental changes. Diamond noted some common features among many societies that have “collapsed” (which he defines right off the top as “A drastic decrease in human population size and/or political/economic/social complexity, over a considerable area, for an extended time.”) Those destructive commonalities were combinations of overpopulation, overhunting, deforestation, soil degradation, water management issues, as well as the introduction of invasive species. The book also attempted to understand why societies fail to perceive problems in advance or respond to those appropriately to prevent collapse. But, not just pointing out common problems, Diamond also offered some real solutions to collapse, such as long-term planning and making difficult decisions like a society reevaluating and adjusting its core values. (For a brief summary of the book from Diamond himself check out this video: Collapse | World History Project)

Two significant and vigorous refutations of Diamond’s book arrived quickly, before the next National Geographic film based on his work. A 2006 meeting of the American Anthropological Association set out to debunk both Collapse and Guns, Germs, and Steel. That same group then gathered a crack team of archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians to attempt a formal public takedown of Diamond. It seems they’d had enough of this outsider publishing multiple best selling works in their disciplines. That group’s efforts culminated in their own book titled Questioning Collapse.

THE BOOK

What underpins Questioning Collapse is the insistence that humans behave rationally. (Homo economicus?) Along with this curious borrowing from centuries old economic theory, the authors add another bold assertion: that, rather than collapsing, societies tend to be profoundly resilient and merely undergo a metamorphosis. To make this claim the authors reject Diamond’s definition of collapse (a drastic decrease in population or complexity for an extended time) and replace it with something that reads to me like the opposite: from sociologist Eisenstadt: “the complete end of those political systems and their accompanying civilizational framework.” The authors double down and insist that a more recent review of archaeological evidence for "civilizational collapse" (their preferred definition, not Diamond’s) from anthropologist Tainter confirms there is no such thing as “collapse.” As the authors explain, “When closely examined, the overriding human story is one of survival and regeneration. Certainly crises existed, political forms changed, and landscapes were altered, but rarely did societies collapse in an absolute and apocalyptic sense.” Could their strawman be any more explicit? Diamond: “collapse = temporary diminishment”; Anthros: “collapse = total erasure.” 

With this rejection and rewriting of Diamond’s whole thesis, the authors then demand his work is an overly simplistic and even backward, perhaps racist, figment of this man’s elderly imagination. They then give us nonsense such as:

Abandoned ruins — the words themselves evoke a romantic sense of failure and loss to which even archaeologists — most of whom are reared in the Western tradition — are not immune. But why is it that when we visit Stonehenge we don’t feel a twinge of cultural loss, but simply a sense that things were very different 5,000 years ago? Is it because Stonehenge is somehow part of our civilization? On the other hand, the Great Houses of Chaco Canyon, the soaring pyramids of ancestral Maya cities, and the fallen colossal heads of Rapa Nui tend to invoke a sense of mysterious loss and cultural failure, and a notion that something must have gone terribly wrong environmentally.

I hope you notice how plainly silly this claim is. Who doesn’t talk about the collapse (or complete disappearance or wholesale extermination) of the cultures who produced Stonehenge or the Lascaux paintings or any other notable works? We do talk in those terms and we do so in both scholarly and popular contexts. Or we might ask who in the UK considers themselves to be the direct descendants of the builders of Stonehenge or even related to the culture from which those folks came? Effectively no one does. The site itself and the builders have always been a mystery. So the authors' claim is fiction and outlandish fiction at that. Despite knowing this (because they’re the same academics who study these matters, whose work is cited, and who are asked to comment publicly), the authors still insist everyone but themselves are blinded by ignorance, bias, and bigotry. How nice of them.

Amazingly, what makes this story more interesting still is that it’s now believed people from the eastern Mediterranean, probably ancient Anatolians (from what is roughly modern Turkey), were the builders of Stonehenge and original inhabitants of Britain. That is to say: those who erected Stonehenge are not anyone the vast majority of Brits (or other evil Westerners) would consider as their ancestors. That might slightly throw off the anthropologist’s insistence that “we” (ignorant commonfolk) are blinded by our ego and sense of national or racial superiority. And then, too, we might ask what the best guesses are for why that society of erectors of stone so very suddenly “died out” and “disappeared” (aka “collapsed”). Turns out actual scholars think it was one or a combination of (now get this): disease, over-exploitation of the land, and/or that something went terribly wrong environmentally… Shit. Do you think we can expect the AAA will have a meeting to figure out how to debunk those scholars’ ideas? If not, why not? Aren't they destroying the world by perpetuating a set of dangerous myths?

CONTEXT

Though the above strawmanning and claims of bigotry are obviously foolish and mean-spirited, they also make sense when you know who’s offering these judgements and fictions. All of it comes from a class of folks, a cohort of anthros and academically adjacent allies, who want so much cake, all the cake, while also, yes, eating it all, too. These are people who, for example, refuse to define or agree upon even their own area of study: culture. Famously, in 1952 a pair of anthropologists, Kroeber and Kluckhohn, compiled a list of 164 distinct definitions of “culture” employed by scholars. Since then, over the better part of a century, little convergence has emerged and, in fact, the term magically avoids ever being tacked down but instead floats free, accepting effectively any terms or framing one wishes, or even none at all, while others call for killing off the word altogether.

That foundational ambiguity and confusion is not surprising. These same scholars use their ambivalence as a launching pad to deliver to the world a cultural relativism of maximal equality in which anything and everything, and everyone therein, is said to fall along what pretends to be the broadest and most judgement-free spectrum. From there the social acceptance and in some cases social norms or obligations to, for example, brutalize or kill little girls for the crime of wishing to go to school or exhume and desecrate corpses for a posthumous accusation or mere suspicion of homosexuality shall forever remain, in these scholars’ minds, neutral expressions saying nothing whatsoever about any person or people or culture or even any set of ideas or principles. How simple and egalitarian.

And yet, even while they forward such principles, the very same academic onlookers are thrilled to employ whimsical and damning definitions such as “prison”, “apartheid”, and “genocide”, for example, that are so unique and broad (laughable, really) as to be devoid of any historical or social context — the whole scholarly practice they claim to be engaged in. As such, their claims are necessarily irrelevant, except that these same scholars are thrilled to offer such laughable labels directly to a particular place and people; but, of course, not to all settings or groups that could easily fall under such ludicrously indulgent framing. You see, suddenly the strongest of judgements and the most critical of labels are easily, gladly even, applied and said to be defining of and making condemnation-worthy not the Israeli Prime Minister or government, not the military or the general public, not the concept of Zionism or any bad-acting Zionists but Jews, all of them and wherever they’re to be found. In fact, these scholars go so hard in the opposite direction to their claimed neutrality that they even reproduce and help excuse so many of the illustrative examples found in the long-standing and internationally accepted working definition of anti-Semitism — a term whose clear definition they reject outright and in so doing pretend to absolve themselves of entirely. Zoinks!

And why is the above important in this context? Well, I hope you can see how it’s only out of such a waggish, pseudo-scholarly belief system (culture? religion?), rejecting all common understandings of words and eagerly reframing people's own conceptualizations, that the rejection of Diamond’s simple and gentle definition of “collapse” could emerge. Too, this is how we end up with anthropologists enthusiastically applying their trending and deeply untenable label of “genocide” throughout Questioning Collapse. They gladly trade out the extraordinarily rare and narrow legal definition, of "special intent" (dolus specialis) to exterminate a people, with an effectively meaningless definition that's closer to something like "people died" only so that they can apply this most horrific label where it could not possibly be otherwise affixed.

UP TO THE TEST?

Still without even getting into the real substance and specifics of Questioning Collapse, you might test the authors’ own introductory hypothesis (that societies and cultures change rather than disappear.) You could do so by asking if the individuals who erected the pyramids of Egypt or Central America (or Stonehenge or the moai or who painted the caves at Lascaux or Altamira…) and those societies supporting them have merely changed careers paths or evolved or if they died and went extinct? And to answer that question you might simply ask if there are any living persons with the title Pyramid-Builder. Or you might enquire about any people belonging to a lineage of knowledge-keepers who can inform anyone how those things were constructed and for what purposes, you know, given that so many modern engineers and scientists are still debating and trying to understand so many of the particulars. Or, relatedly, you might just ask why the Rosetta Stone, say, was so significant. Was it because the society producing the hieroglyphic and Demotic scripts found inscribed there remain in some modified form? Or was it because the highly specific system of knowledge and communication (and the attitudes, customs, institutions, and arts that created them) have entirely ceased to be? The answers to all these questions seem kinda obvious, don’t they?

Further, I would contend that societies don’t become diminished or simply modify over time but are, eventually and forever, erased. Just like all species, all norms, laws, languages, spiritual beliefs and practices, craft and artistic forms, food gathering and agricultural techniques, and the peoples who employ them, yes, go extinct. The only difference between cultures in this regard is the longevity of the societies producing these distinct aspects and expressions. Some are sustained a very long time, of course, and others, far more often, come and go rather quickly. Yes, people may claim, or actually have, a connection to a specific diminished or truly extinct society or set of cultural tools or modalities, and they may attempt to revive a language or dance form or kinship relations after some time, but that’s not the same as social or cultural evolution. To be clear, not being able to use or share a language (or even to know whether something is a language or some other form of cultural expression, such as the rongorongo corpus) or to not know where aspects of culture come from or how or why or when they’re deployed, or by whom, or failing to maintain or revive whole aspects of culture is not an especially deft form of social or cultural expression and transmission.

But if you doubt my accounting, please point to the modern-day Dorset or Ethiopian Maya. Are you, a selection of elite PhDs in the field of history and anthropology, claiming these peoples culturally evolved or assimilated into today’s Inuit or Eritreans, respectively? Or are you suggesting both are merely taking a kind of cultural nap and may be revivified by artificial intelligence in the 22nd century — because “culture” is just whatever anyone wants it to be, practised by whomever (or whatever) wishes to do so and in whatever context they like? What are you saying? Like, even if the coming synthetic superintelligence rebirthed some aspect, or even every aspect, of a truly extinct culture wouldn’t that only support Diamond’s notion of collapse (“a drastic decrease … for an extended time”)? Its seems, if only to me, it would.

OKAY, BUT WHAT ABOUT THE SUBSTANCE?

Each section of the book, from this carefully selected pool of area experts, takes its own time to forward numerous flatly absurd tellings of the present and impossible revisions of the past. That’s what this book is. One section, for example, includes a truly laughable rewriting of the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire. The authors tell us the Inca Empire was “a model of good government” and “in effect, the conquistadors were adopted by their native Andean allies.” To these experts, apparently, the uncertainty of who should be king — resulting in the whole empire being plunged into a devastating civil war between renowned tyrants — is a clear sign of structural and managerial superiority to anything on offer in Europe at that time. Or maybe the good model was a tiny group of Inca elite maintaining their brutal grip on the top spot of a political and religious hierarchy (and control of the system of slavery holding it all together) only by continual violations of taboos against incest. Or perhaps the institutional excellence of the Inca is conceded by all the evidence that many diverse ethnic groups ruled over by the authoritarian Inca were all too happy to immediately abandon their overlord's benevolent leadership for the bedraggled backwardness of a small number of sickly, alien invaders from an unknown world. Or, on the other hand, evidence of Inca proficiency and supremacy could come from the fact that the empire lasted less time than the empires of the Coca-Cola or the New York Yankees. But, really, who can say? The authors certainly don’t make any good arguments.

In another section “scholars” assert overpopulation had no part in the Rwandan Genocide. They offer this despite the testimony of survivors and documentation of government officials alike and the universal acceptance that the country was the most densely populated place in Africa at the time (while being among the very poorest), which everyone also acknowledges resulted in severe food and land scarcity there. As such, surely overpopulation — and the stated and unstated promise of appropriating Tutsi property had some part, however small you demand that is — is what led normal people to use hatred and fear of their neighbours as fuel for mass extermination. That’s not what the anthros say. In fact, apparently, in 1986 Rwandan authorities didn’t declare the country was “too overpopulated” and that there was “no more room” to permit the return of the more than half a million Rwandan refugees. Apparently, this didn’t spark renewed activity in the Rwandan refugee community. Apparently, at a meeting in 1988, Rwandan refugees didn’t affirm their right to return home, by force if necessary, while threatening to overthrow the sitting government. All of that and more, apparently, is exactly and entirely irrelevant. For some unclear reason, the authors reject the findings presented by the UNHCR to the UN Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in 1994, that explained: “The recent strife in Rwanda is a striking example of ethnic conflict ignited by population pressure and diminishing land resources.” The authors also deny King and Elliott who argue the same, that the cause of the genocide was multifactorial but that a population explosion was the most important cause by far, and that “It is the concurrence of all these and other factors that made population pressure critical. It was inevitable that the pressure would express itself by reopening the tribal fault line.” They reject Prunier, too, who argued “The decision to kill was of course made, for political reasons. But at least part of the reason why it was carried out so thoroughly by the ordinary rank-and-file farmers … was [their] feeling that there were too many people on too little land, and that with a reduction in numbers, there would be more for the survivors.” Our collection of historians and anthropologists and the editors endorsing them insist all of that is flatly wrong. Instead, the genocide, they say, occurred due Rwandan's curious beliefs about sacred kings. Yes. I imagine that being able to squint your eyes that tightly while standing on your head and tilting it just so, is an ability attained only after earning a PhD.

THE REAL TARGET

The book is rammed full of this fanciful alternate history. But, among the many attacks on Diamond’s work (little more than a summary of conventional scholarly thinking presented to a lay audience), there is a favourite point of attack: Diamond’s suggestion that the culture of Rapa Nui (aka Easter Island), those creators of so many gargantuan stone heads (moai) on one tiny and remote Pacific island, saw their population reduced (aka “collapse”) largely by an ecocide of their own making. Indicating the importance of this particular discussion, even the chosen image for the cover of Questioning Collapse was a photograph of a moai. And after an introduction establishing that the problem with the world is Diamond and the dissemination of his terrible ideas, section one of the book begins by insisting Diamond is so very wrong on the question of the demise of the population of Rapa Nui. The authors, Hunt and Lipo, assert that:

When we take a closer look at the paleo-environmental and archaeological evidence we find a complex history of ecological change for the island, not a single cause but a variety of impacts that occurred in combination with one another. This history is quite different from the notion of ecocide in which reckless Polynesians overexploited their environment. It is essential to disentangle environmental changes in Rapa Nui from a population collapse that resulted from European contact. Such contact brought Old World disease and slave trading. Contrary to today’s popular narratives, ancient deforestation was not the cause of population collapse. If we are to apply a modern term to the tragedy of Rapa Nui, it is not ecocide, but genocide. [Zing!] 

The authors demand deforestation was not the fault of the human inhabitants but that of the island’s rats. More than that, the locals, we are told, adapted just fine to life without forests or trees, just fine. (It’s difficult even to write that without laughing.) Curiously, Hunt and Lipo acknowledge prior research demonstrating the high probability that the forests of Rapa Nui disappeared over a 400 year period between 1250, or roughly when the first humans appeared on the island, and 1650, generations prior to any European visitors. Notice that in any other context this exact activity would be and is labelled ecocide without hesitation.

So, just to give you a sense of the severity of the deforestation, it’s interesting to note the accounts of the first non-Polynesians to arrive at Easter Island. With its complete lack of trees and green, these visitors assumed the vast yellow swathe of dry grassland covering the entirety of the island was sand. Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen, April 6th, 1722: “[W]hen at a farther distance off, we had regarded the said Easter Island as being of a sandy nature is that we mistook the parched-up grass, and hay or other scorched and charred brushwood for a soil of that arid nature, because from its outward appearance it suggested no other idea than that of an extraordinarily sparse and meagre vegetation…” What Roggeveen didn’t know was that the island previously had an endemic population of the largest ever palm species (the Rapa Nui palm, Paschalococos disperta) who was in dramatic decline by 1450 and disappeared from the pollen record, going extinct entirely some 70 years prior to his visit, around 1650. Too, speaking to the lack of wood, Roggeveen wrote about the locals cooking without firewood and instead using “dried litter from the fields” laid over pebbles in holes dug by hand. Elsewhere the sailor writes of these Polynesians (easily the world’s most excellent seafarers) being found without any seaworthy boats and only small, poorly functioning canoes. In his log he describes that their canoe’s “width is such that, with their legs packed close together, they can just sit in them so as to paddle ahead” and were made of only a few slim boards “skillfully lace together with very fine laid twine made from the above-mentioned vegetable product.” But he points out that these craft are flimsy and leaky, requiring constant bailing. For comparison and to understand how significant this lack of seacraft is, it’s useful to note that Polynesian inter-island sailing vessels of this period (and very likely the ones the original settlers of Rapa Nui arrived to the island on) were up to 36 metres long; which is larger than the HMS Endeavour, the ship James Cook used to explore the Pacific.

For me, this absence of boats brings up a critical point: why would you ever define societal collapse by the disappearance of a proportion of a society’s members or even some notion of diminished social complexity? Why not something like the significant diminishment of the culture? Isn’t that what we actually care about? Aren't we interested in knowledge transmission and the preservation of culture and not about demographics? Do we care if there were 2,000 priests or weavers or boat-builders or if there were just a dozen? Or do we care about the perseverance of the knowledge and craftform? And then doesn’t the cause of such a “collapse” of those holding, enacting, and transmitting culture feel nearly irrelevant? Like, was it volcanic activity or tsunamis? Or was it apathy among the youth or intra-societal violence? Or was it overharvesting of essential flora, a massive rat infestation, or the introduction of devastating insect or fungal parasites? To my mind, the impact of there being no trees looks the same however it came about. And is there any doubt the resulting knowledge loss on a culture like that found on Rapa Nui would have been profound?

So then, on that thought, were there not at least two cultural extinctions prior to the debated societal collapse (each lasting about as long as the empire of the Inca)? Just looking at the above sailor’s accounts, we can consider the disappearance of the sea-faring culture who first colonized and also of the culture that evolved from them, living within and off of the abundant forest and associated flora and fauna of the island. Both those peoples and cultures were likely very different from one another and from the culture that arose, whose members never knew the sea or a world that included trees. If that’s true, then the first Europeans encountered maybe the third distinct culture to have existed on Rapa Nui.

At the very least, it seems clear the society and culture alighting for the first time on the island did not survive four centuries. We can be sure, the original colonists had a wealth of ocean-going and boat-making knowledge and skills all vital to those former peoples. It’s also very likely they had a whole suite of associated sacred beliefs and practices, as exist on their neighbouring islands. I mean, how do you even entertain a proposal to cross thousands of kilometres of open ocean on a pile of wood unless you have all the appropriate talismans and are in touch with and in the good graces of all the gods of sea, storm, and sky? And then were boats, ocean wayfinding, and a culture of exploration essential aspects of the spiritual lives and very identity of those who came to Rapa Nui? Or were those just the privileged knowings of an exclusive guild of shaman-like navigators? Or, alternatively, were such skills and understandings deemed trivial and gladly disposed of as soon as this hospitable new land was alighted upon? We know boats and sea voyaging orient and ground whole societies of the kin of the original inhabitants of Rapa Nui. We know other Polynesians don’t merely relish telling of their own and their ancestors’ voyaging exploits but also have rich traditions of establishing sense of place and belonging as well as defining social groups by association with famous voyages and the named ships who carried them. That is certainly so, as far as I’m aware, of the Tahitians and Maori. So it’s difficult to imagine how, after a generation (or ten) of these boat-builders not building boats, that some number of songs, mental maps, ocean navigating techniques, and general sea survival skills so essential to those prior people (without which there would be no Rapa Nui) would not have at least been diminished if not lost entirely. Were critical tools, information, and abilities preserved and transmitted to successive generations or were they lost for a significant period of time or even made extinct? After landing, how decimated was the knowledge-base and how quickly, if at all? To me, these seem like the real set of questions needing to be answered and not those about tree-cover density or human population numbers...

Regardless, it’s impossible to understand how removing literally all the trees from this pristine, sensitive, and unique ecosystem was not a deeply ruinous and self-destructive act (whether carried out exclusively by rats, who were either stowaways or deliberately brought to Rapa Nui) but far closer to a benign thing, as Hunt and Lipo insist. And yet that is the offering. Our intrepid authors tell us the introduction of both humans and rats, resulting in the erasure of all the dominant plant species along with the permanent wholesale transformation of forest into grassland, could not have led to ecological disruption or devastation resulting in significant hardships for the human population. And then, while pretending they’re not motivated by the myth of the noble savage (ghak!), the authors demand the population collapsed (or, actually, didn’t?) due instead to visits from Europeans, who introduced disease and took slaves (and thereby committed “genocide”), as they’re so wont to do. (Eurocentric much?)

THE RAT HYPOTHESIS

So, what is their evidence for the above conjecture about rats? The authors tell us that all of the palm nuts discovered at one excavation site, their own, were found to have been gnawed by rats and that, as a result, surely, rats were the cause of deforestation, not humans. Again, without getting into any of the details, we know their claim is absurd if only because the island’s rats were not endemic nor did they, we can be reasonably sure, swim to the island. Rapa Nui is easily one of the most remote islands on planet earth with its nearest neighbouring island being Pitcairn, just as remote and around 2,000km away (farther than Vancouver to Winnipeg), and the nearest continent, as the crow flies, being South America, whose closest beach lay in Chile, around 3,500km (Vancouver to Ottawa) from Rapa Nui. Yes, it’s true that rats are great swimmers, for a wee little mammal, and are able to dive and swim underwater for up to 30 seconds (which is how they wind up in the toilet of your Brooklyn apartment) and can cover distances of open water to nearly one kilometre. That means the greatest of all Olympic-qualifying rats (little Ratty Phelps in his little pink Speedo) would still come up 1,999km shy of Rapa Nui (if the little guy left from Pitcairn and even if he had the winds and currents of the South Pacific in his favour.) But, of course, for the island to become populated by this method said rat would not only have needed to’ve covered 2,000 times the distance but done so while pregnant (little Rattina Phelps), in under 20 days (rat gestation), and with no nourishment of any kind… Or maybe the authors are proposing Pacific traversal of rats by bareback riding ocean-spanning albatross. Who can say? Certainly not the authors. But without such a proposal, of this three-tiered miracle or their hitchhiking upon seabirds, we’re left with Occam’s Razor and the overwhelmingly more feasible (and also universally accepted) guess that the first inhabitants brought rats with them, intentionally or otherwise. And yet, if that’s the case, it’s hard to see how, as Hunt and Lipo appear to demand, humans bringing invasive species to the island is a rejection of Diamond’s summary hypothesis and not enthusiastic support for it. Right? I think so.

And yet, the authors’ rat hypothesis is stranger still. Even if you want to entertain their radical departure from logic, you still have to, somehow, get past the fact that this idea of theirs is resoundingly debunked on so many other fronts by an entire literature composed by so many of their living colleagues as well as effectively all of their predecessors. Without explaining why or even acknowledging such, Hunt and Lipo reject early 20th century work from folks like Brown (1924), who explained rats were rare on the island and were valued as a currency and food source (as is common throughout Polynesia) and, critically, were not a significant environmental threat. Hunt and Lipo also don’t seem to notice or care about research current with their own and engaged in similar investigations that showed very different results. That rejection includes one paper from 2009, by Mieth and Bork, showing several sites with very few rat-gnawed palm nuts:

Among more than 200 completely preserved and charred nutshells that we discovered in the burned layers, namely on Poike peninsula, less than 10% had the teeth marks of rats. This finding is supported by Vogt (2009, p. 16) who recovered numerous palm nuts that were un-charred and had been conserved exceptionally well under clayey sediments. Only a few had traces of gnawing.

Hunt and Lipo are either unaware or just omit Mieth and Bork’s rather definitive conclusion — supported by eleven diverse points of consilience (including the remnants of cut palm stumps, vast soil layers containing palm charcoal and ash along with widespread evidence of centuries of intensive slash and burn activity, a lack of evidence for destructive consumption by rats, and the coexistence of rats and this species of palms elsewhere, and more) — “that humans, and not rats or climate variations, destroyed Rapa Nui’s palm woodland.”

The pair’s rat-based postulation also fails to contend with Mann et al (2008), who quashed this idea with an additional layer of evidence to that of Mieth and Bork: investigations of pollen data and sediment archives from a crater lake on the island, resulting in the conclusion that there was “no evidence for a ‘rat outbreak impact’ on Rapa Nui's vegetation preceding anthropogenic forest clearance.” Without disproving any of their colleagues’ claims, Hunt and Lipo also reject the longstanding consensus that the native population wiped out the forests prior to European arrival — maybe 16 million trees covering 70% of the island and found in the fossil record going back 37,000 years (see: Flenley & King, 1984; Van Tilburg, 1994; Stevenson & Haoa, 1999; Flenley & Bahn, 2003; Mann et al., 2003; Rolett & Diamond, 2004; Fischer, 2006; Prebble & Dowe, 2008; and so many more.)

With all of the evidence and agreement that it wasn’t the rats, please notice how much more absurd their argument is when you discover the common understanding that, along with the conversion of palm-dominated forest and scrubland to grassland by slash and burn, came the extinction of not just the largest palms species but at least 21 other species of trees as well as the island’s land bird species, sea mammals, and insects. Was all that also entirely the rats’ doing? Let's pretend it is, despite a total lack of evidence. If that's was the case, again, how would that count as a falsification of Diamond’s stated hypothesis (that accepts multiple causes including overexploitation, ecological collapse, and the introduction of invasive species)? Correct. It wouldn’t! (Do you see why I'm writing this? Can you appreciate how, frankly, insane this whole project is? Don't worry, it gets far worse.)

THEN WHAT OF THE REST OF THEIR ARGUMENT?

Of course, rats are not the entirety of Hunt and Lipo’s claim. They also say the decimation (“not collapse”) of the descendants of the original settler population was due to European illnesses and slave raiding. But is that what the islanders’ own oral history and all the research to date tells us or is that another rejection of everything known and believed about the matter? 

The information we have suggests that three centuries prior to Roggeveen’s ship cresting the horizon, competing groups had formed on Rapa Nui, dividing the island in two between the Tu’u and the ‘Otu ‘Itu confederations. We also know that these groups fought one another for control of the island, an ongoing struggle that continued for more than a century. The toppling of the moai took place during this period, which was said to have been about competing groups attempting to destroy each other’s spiritual and social power. Hunt and Lipo would have us believe the toppling of sacred idols was a benign act with no repercussions for the humans doing the toppling or for those having their idols smashed and that this only happened because of social disturbance initiated by Europeans. (Ask yourself who is being strangely Eurocentric and un-anthropological here, Diamond or Hunt and Lipo?)

Yes, some like to deny that the inhabitants of Rapa Nui were violent. Interestingly, it’s mostly Lipo forwarding this idea. They (mostly Lipo) like to insist weapons and weapon parts discovered on Rapa Nui were not for fighting but for farming and more generalized usage. He likes to imagine that because the mata’a, glass-like obsidian axe heads, aren’t typically found knapped into what you think of as a spearpoint or arrowhead but more often into rounded edges that means they weren’t or perhaps couldn't have been used for violent purposes, or something. But as Dr Torrence, archaeological researcher specializing in ancient stone tools, assures us, despite what Lipo et al insist, “these stone implements would be very dangerous if used as axes or clubs in close-combat fighting” even if the mata’a are not shaped into stereotypical spearpoints. Yeah. Obviously. (Just go look at them or watch something similar being made.)

Unfortunately for Lipo and friends, it’s not merely that a chunk of lava glass shaped into an axe head and attached to a handle can easily be utilized for dismemberment or murder, not merely removing bunches of bananas or skinning a fish, but it’s also true that the ancestral Rapa Nui language abounds with proto-Polynesian terms for weapons, war-making, and warriors. (If I can find this in six seconds with a Google search, what do these anthropologists and historians get up to with all their time?) And along with that, all the early ethnographers (Thomson, 1891; Routledge, 1919; Métraux, 1940; Englert, 1948) cite informants telling of a tradition of warfare, including specific accounts of two significant wars on the island (paired with accounts of moai toppling and cannibalism.) If that isn’t enough, Lipo and Hunt also seem to dislike the first-hand accounts from folks like James Cook who also wrote upon visiting Easter Island, in March of 1774, that the islanders carried weapons, specifically “...clubs very much like those of New Zealand and spears about 6 or 8 feet long which are pointed at one end with pieces of black flint." (Such denials of so much good evidence is especially curious given that, when it suits them, elsewhere these same authors argue for the accuracy of the accounts of the first European visitors, such as estimates of population size on Rapa Nui…) Even more, everyone accepts when Polynesians tell us civil war pre-dated European arrival on other islands, such as on Tahiti, and that inter-island conflict was not uncommon, such as the invasion of Raiatea by warriors from neighbouring Bora Bora in the 1750s. So why are the people of Rapa Nui deemed so unreliable? Only an anthropologist would demand that oral history is extraordinarily imprecise and that people telling their own history must have confused, of all things, modern events they themselves lived through with ancient myth shared by their elders, and that those people fabricated all this only to impress Christian missionaries.

So, just take all the above in. Those who promote the pacifist line and its complementary external-only hypothesis for societal collapse on Rapa Nui need to disregard or explain away all of this: the language, local oral history, the earliest recorded accounts from natives and visitors, and other culturally relevant anecdotes. And they do make such rejections, though mostly covertly and by omission. That’s quite the scholarly practice. Just imagine hearing an account from a forty- or sixty-year-old about the events of September 11th, 2001 and the subsequent wars in the Middle East. And then imagine you, an ethnographer or historian, say, insisting your informant was wrong and speculating that those events did not transpire as stated but actually took place centuries prior and describe the US Civil War, with deployments not in Iraq and Afghanistan but from Iowa and Arkansas… Okay, bro. Okay. 

SO WHAT ABOUT SLAVERY AS A CAUSE FOR DEPOPULATION? 

Hunt and Lipo don’t give us evidence, just their own insistence, so you have to go looking for yourself. Luckily this work has been done. In his publication From Genocide [Zonk!] to Ecocide: The Rape of Rapa Nui, Peiser (also a Diamond hater) tells us that 1805 saw the first slave-raid on Easter Island, where, after a bloody battle, the crew abducted 22 islanders. A journal from Russian admiral Otto von Kotzebüe’s journey to Easter Island provides a third-hand account of this earliest 1805 slave raid. The admiral writes of this account as a likely explanation for why he and his crew, in 1816, experienced such hostility from the locals and were unable to land and remain on the island for any time. Von Kotzebüe gives an account of a story told to him by an Englishman, Alexander Adams, while in the Sandwich Islands (modern-day Hawaii). The story is said to have originated from the captain of an American ship, the Nancy. The story goes that, upon failing to catch some seals whose skins were highly valued in Chinese markets, the captain:

...resolved to sail to Easter Island, and to steal some men and women, to bring them to Massafuero, there to establish a colony, which should regularly carry on the seal fishery. In pursuance of this wicked design, he landed at Cook's Bay, where he endeavoured to seize upon a number of the inhabitants.

The combat is said to have been bloody, as the brave islanders defended themselves with intrepidity; but they were obliged to yield to the terrible arms of the Europeans; and twelve men, and ten women, fell into the merciless hands of the Americans. Upon this, the poor creatures were carried on board, fettered for the first three days, and not released until they were out of sight of land. The first use they made of their recovered liberty, was, that the men jumped over board; and the women, who attempted to follow them, were prevented only by force. The captain made the ship lie to, in hopes that they would return on board for refuge, when they were threatened by the waves. He, however, soon perceived how much he had been mistaken, for the savages, used to the water from their infancy, thought it not impossible, notwithstanding the distance of three days' voyage, to reach their native country, and at all events they preferred perishing in the waves, to leading a miserable life in captivity. After they had disputed for some time, as to the direction they should take, they separated; some took the direct way to Easter Island, and the others to the north. The captain, extremely enraged at this unexpected heroism, sent a boat after them, which returned after many fruitless efforts, as they always dived at the approach of the boat, and the sea compassionately received them in its bosom.

At last the captain left the men to their fate, and brought the women to Massafuero; and is said to have afterwards made many attempts to steal some of the people from Easter Island. 

Von Kotzebüe concludes:

Adams had heard this story from the Captain himself, which was probably the reason he did not wish to mention his name: he assured me that he had been to Easter Island, in 1806, but was not able to land, on account of the hostile behaviour of the inhabitants: he said, that the ship Albatross, under the command of Captain Winship, had met with the same fate in 1809.

That doesn’t sound like Europeans taking slaves (and you’ll notice that the Russian, and perhaps the Englishman, seem to detest, "this wicked design", the notion of slave-taking, at least on paper in 1816.) And it doesn’t sound like successful attempts by Americans at taking slaves, either; nor does it seem the American’s depopulated Easter Island. What am I missing here?

Also described in From Genocide to Ecocide, Peiser tells us that “Between 1815 and 1825, three further traumatic encounters with intruders and slave-raiders resulted in battles and warfare-like conflicts between Europeans and Natives. According to some ship logs and accounts of sailors, Rapa Nuians drove back European visitors on a number of occasions by attacking and repelling them.” Right. So not taking slaves? Yeah. Nearly a century after the first visitors from Europe (1722) those on Rapa Nui were still easily repelling would-be visitors such as the Russian captain and his crew in 1816, despite those visitor’s variety of ocean-going craft and much more powerful guns and steel.

Still, Peiser then speculates (rather wildly) that, “[g]iven these recurring and war-like skirmishes (which also included the premeditated kidnapping and rape of women), it is probable that some of the oral tradition of tribal conflict and warfare may reflect also these traumatic clashes many of which led to heavy casualties among the native defenders.” You see, Peiser is engaged in a similar rewriting as Hunt and Lipo. Apparently the modern erasure, or “correction”, of local accounts is a concerted pastime for these academics, constituting a significant multi-disciplinary effort to liberate the historical record and a people of their own flawed history. The only question is if doing so is motivated by ignorance, stupidity, or evil?

From what I can find, the most significant and “successful” period of “recruitment” were those attempts carried out by the Peruvians in the 1860s. By the time of these raids, Peru had been independent of Spain for a couple of generations. So, not part of Europe or a colony. More than that, the ships doing the raiding got approval from Peruvian authorities not from Europe. If that's not enough it seems to me that the captains, officers, and crew of those ships were not all or mostly European. More commonly there were no Europeans aboard, as far as I can tell. Most of the ships' captains seem to have been born in independent Peru, and the crews were likely a combination of Peruvians, other Indigenous Latin Americans, and Pacific Islanders as was the norm at this time. So, again, not Europeans.

But, yes, raids from Peru took place. At that time, responding to dramatic labour shortages and seeking folks for agricultural labour in Peru, some thirty boats headed into the Pacific looking to get whomever they could by whatever means necessary — meaning that combinations of persuasion, trickery, and straightforward kidnapping were employed. But we know, as suggested above, the people of Rapa Nui were always capable of repelling any unwanted visitors. In his work Slavers in Paradise: The Peruvian Labour Trade in Polynesia, 1862-1864, Maude writes about how at this time the isolated island of Niue had a population of 5,000 and of this number being sufficient for the locals to be unintimidated by any armed crews from South America with muskets and cannons on kidnapping expeditions. And as Hunt and Lipo offer in other work, the maximum population of Rapa Nui has historically been put at anything from as little as 3,000 to as many as 57,500, with modern researchers proposing a maximum of somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000. Maude, in his section on Rapa Nui, says the island’s population at the time of Peruvian raiding, in 1862, was “over 4000.” So it’s hard to see, for me at least, how 5,000 is plenty of manpower to repel any unwanted ships on another island but 4,000+ is woefully insufficient on this one island.

More than that, we know Peruvian raids on Easter Island and other smaller unappropriated islands took place beyond the centres of European activity, like those on Samoa and Tahiti, precisely because the British and French had made slavery illegal at home and in their colonies: the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was founded in Britain in 1792; the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act, outlawing British Atlantic slave trade, followed in 1807; slavery was criminalized throughout the British Empire by the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833; and then the world’s oldest international human rights organization, Anti-Slavery International, originally the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, started in 1839 with a mandate to outlaw slavery worldwide by designating slave traders as pirates and enforcing that with the global reach of the British navy. As such, most European settlements or settlers, church missions or missionaries needed to be avoided by these Peruvian “labour” ships. In fact, for evidence of this, in Slavers in Paradise Maude writes about the first such ship arriving at Easter Island, on October 23, 1862, having two islanders aboard and noting that “they were later freed at Papeete by the French authorities and repatriated.” Maude also notes a ship carrying 115 islanders (106 men, 7 women, and 2 boys) arriving at Callao in January of the following year and how the British Consul there boarded the ship to find the islanders “in good health” and to have “come of their own free will…” Elsewhere, Munro tells us the kidnapping and/or recruitment of Pacific islanders was not sanctioned and that “In the face of embarrassing international and domestic criticism the Peruvian government suppressed the trade in Polynesian immigrants on 23 April 1863, less than twelve months after it began.” As such, it seems worth asking from where you suspect international condemnation came? The Ottoman Empire? China, Korea, and Imperial Japan, perhaps? No.

Still, the total number of “recruits” (folks who were snatched in the night at gunpoint, who were duped, or were willing and happy labour migrants) from Easter Island during the 1860s is said to have been, by some accounts, as high as 1,400. This number, Maude suggests, was 34% of the island’s estimated population at that time. The same estimates propose around 3,300 were taken from all Pacific islands during the 1860s. That said, researchers have spelled out how, for many reasons, these figures are questionable at best and that any estimate is very rough indeed and must have a wide margin of error. To my mind, all the above does not confirm but poses serious challenges for the “evil Europeans” hypothesis. Really, how does this not quash any argument that says significant depopulation could only have taken place after European contact and because Europeans took islanders as slaves (and having nothing whatsoever to do with internal conflict or plant and animal overexploitation leading to ecological collapse)?

SO WHAT OF DISEASE?

The period in question, the mid 1800s, predates the wholehearted acceptance of the germ theory of disease by generations. (Though, given the last few years, I would accept arguments that say we still aren’t there yet.) But, of course, Polynesians and others calling the Pacific islands home had enough experience with introduced illness of all sorts and were savvy enough, certainly by the late-middle 19th century, to endeavour to avoid or at least limit transmission. It had been more than a century at that point that locals and visitors had been picking up and swapping serious illnesses. In fact, when reading anything about the Pacific, it’s nearly impossible to miss accounts from a century prior to this, like Cook’s first voyage, that record sailors sharing sexually transmitted illnesses everywhere they went or having a half their crew killed off by malaria or dysentery, or both, at a single landing… On disease transmission, Maude notes there being quarantine restrictions in place on Pacific islands during the 1860s. He doesn’t mention any at Easter Island specifically, however. What he does describe, though, is how it wasn’t until Peruvian slave raiders abducted some of the population of Easter Island (an unknown number) and those islanders being later repatriated that the population of Easter Island was decimated by an outbreak of smallpox.

According to some later accounts, 100 or so labourers were freed from Peru and shipped back to Easter Island. But it seems almost all of them died from smallpox on the trip between the mainland and Rapa Nui, as happened all too often in the period. We’re told:

Only fifteen regained the island, to the greatest misfortune of the population that had been left behind; shortly after their return, smallpox, the germs of which they had brought with them, broke out and transformed the island into a vast charnelhouse. Since there were too many corpses to bury in the family mausoleums, they were thrown down clefts in the rock or dragged into underground tunnels. […]

Civil war added their toll to the havoc wrought by this murderous epidemic. The social order had been undermined, the fields were left without owners, and people fought for possession of them. Then there was famine. The population fell to about six hundred. The majority of members of the priestly class disappeared, taking with them the secrets of the past. The following year, when the first missionaries settled on the island, they found a culture in its death throes: the religious and social system had been destroyed and a leaden apathy weighed down the survivors from these disasters. (Métraux, 1957, 47)

So there may be agreement that Europeans helped kill much of the population of Easter Island by way of communicable disease, but it looks like that happened not by Europeans and only due to their release from indentured servitude or slavery in Peru. Devastating, yes, but extraordinarily different from the revisionist offerings of Hunt, Lipo, and others. And, most certainly, none of the above looks anything like any accepted definition of the term “genocide.” On the other hand, so much of this contemporary scholarly work, and so much like it from so many academics and researchers, does appear to resemble professional malpractice when you actually go look at the details.

Of course, it could turn out that Diamond is wrong about Rapa Nui and what happened to the population there; but what we can be confident about is the flagrant falsity of the versions of events offered by those trying to disprove Diamond’s summary and hypothesis. To my mind, the worst crime Diamond commits is noticing our common humanity and suggesting a strong parallel between societies of centuries ago that appear quite distinct from our own — inspiring empathy and calling for self-reflection. Evil.