Humankind

by Rutger Bregman

  I’m often reminded of what a Chinese politician said in the 1970s when asked about the effects of the French Revolution of 1789. ‘It’s a little too soon to say,’ he allegedly responded.63

  Maybe the same applies to civilisation. Is it a good idea?

  Too soon to say.

  6

  The Mystery of Easter Island

  By now, my whole understanding of human history had shifted. Modern science has made short work of the veneer theory of civilisation. We’ve amassed plenty of counter-evidence over the past couple decades, and it continues to pile up.

  Admittedly, our knowledge about prehistory will never be watertight. We’ll never solve all the riddles surrounding our ancestors’ lives. Piecing together their archaeological puzzle involves a fair share of guesswork, and we should always be wary of projecting modern anthropological findings onto the past.

  That’s why I want to take one final look at what people do when left to their own devices. Suppose Mano and the other boys from the real-life Lord of the Flies weren’t marooned alone. Suppose there’d been girls on the boat, too, they went on to have children and grandchildren, and ‘Ata wasn’t found until hundreds of years later.

  What would have happened? What does society look like when it develops in isolation?

  We can, of course, take what we’ve learned so far about prehistoric life and try to picture it. But there’s no need to speculate when you can zoom in on a true, documented case study. On a remote island long obscured by myth and mystery, the insights of the previous chapters come together.

  1

  As a young man, Jacob Roggeveen made his father a promise: one day, he would find the Southern Land. Such a discovery would secure his place among history’s exalted explorers and mean everlasting fame for his family.

  It was thought to be situated somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. As a cartographer, Jacob’s father Arent Roggeveen was convinced the continent had to exist to balance the land masses of the northern hemisphere. And then there were the stories brought back by travellers. The Portuguese navigator Pedro Fernandes de Queirós described the Southern Land as a paradise on earth, peopled by peaceable natives yearning for Christianity. It boasted fresh water, fertile soil and–minor detail–mountains of silver, gold and pearls.

  It was 1 August 1721, forty years after his father’s death, that Jacob finally set sail. Destination: the Southern Land. From his flagship the Arend, he commanded a fleet of three vessels, seventy cannon and a crew of 244. The sixty-two-year-old admiral had high hopes of making history. And he would, but little did he suspect how.

  Jacob Roggeveen wouldn’t establish a new civilisation. He’d discover an old one.1

  What happened eight months later never ceases to amaze me. On Easter Sunday 1722, one of Roggeveen’s vessels raised the flag. The Arend came alongside to find out what the crew had seen. The answer? Land. They’d spotted a small island off the starboard side.

  The island had been formed hundreds of thousands of years earlier where three volcanoes converged. Paasch Eyland, as the Dutch crew christened it (‘Easter Island’), spanned just over a hundred square miles–a speck of land in the vast Pacific. The odds that Roggeveen would stumble upon it were more or less nil.

  But the surprising existence of the island paled in comparison to their next discovery: there were people on this island.

  As the Dutch approached, they saw a crowd gathered on the beach to meet them. Roggeveen was confounded. How had they got here? There wasn’t a seaworthy boat in sight. Even more perplexing were the towering stone figures dotting the island–moai, the islanders called them–consisting of gigantic heads atop even bigger torsos, some thirty feet tall. ‘We could not understand,’ Roggeveen confided in his logbook, ‘how it was possible that people who are destitute of heavy or thick timber, and also of stout cordage, out of which to construct gear, had been able to erect them.’2

  When Roggeveen and his crew weighed anchor a week later, they had more questions than answers. Even today, this tiny island in the Pacific remains one of the most enigmatic places on earth, fuelling several centuries’ worth of wild speculation. That the islanders were descended from the Inca, for example. That the statues had been put up by a race of twelve-foot-tall giants.3 Or even that they were air-dropped by aliens (a Swiss hotel manager managed to sell seven million books on that theory).4

  The truth is less fantastic–but not by much.

  Thanks to DNA testing, we now know that explorers arrived long before Roggeveen came along. The Polynesians, those Vikings of the Pacific, found the island first.5 With a courage verging on lunacy, they are thought to have set out from the Gambier Islands some sixteen hundred miles away, in open canoes, against the prevailing winds. How many such expeditions perished, we’ll never know, but for this story only one needed to succeed.

  And those colossal figures of the moai? When a young anthropologist named Katherine Routledge came to do fieldwork on the island in 1914, not a single statue remained standing. Instead they lay toppled, some broken and in pieces, overgrown with weeds.

  How had this small society managed to make and move these monoliths? They lived on an island devoid of trees and didn’t have the wheel at their disposal, much less cranes. Had the place been more populous once? Routledge put her questions to the island’s oldest inhabitants. They told her stories of what had transpired here hundreds of years before. Chilling stories.6

  Once upon a time, they said, two tribes lived on the island: the Long Ears and the Short Ears. They lived together in harmony until something happened that drove them apart, destroying the peace that had reigned for centuries and unleashing a bloody civil war. The Long Ears fled to the eastern part of the island and dug themselves in. The next morning, the Short Ears attacked the hideout from both sides and set it ablaze, incinerating the Long Ears in a trap of their own making. The remains of that trench are still visible today.

  And that was only the beginning. In the years that followed, the situation degenerated into an all-out Hobbesian war, in which the Easter Islanders even resorted to eating each other. What had triggered all of this misery? Routledge could only guess. But clearly something must have happened to make a society destroy itself.

  Years later, in 1955, a Norwegian adventurer by the name of Thor Heyerdahl mounted an expedition to Easter Island. Heyerdahl was something of a celebrity. A few years earlier he and five friends had cobbled together a raft and sailed it forty-three hundred miles from Peru to Polynesia, finally winding up wrecked on the island of Raroia. This long-distance rafting trip was proof for Heyerdahl that Polynesia had been populated by raft-rowing Incas. Though it failed to convince the experts, his theory did sell fifty million books.7

  With the fortune he made on his bestseller, Heyerdahl was able to bankroll an expedition to Easter Island. He invited several eminent scientists to join him, among them William Mulloy, an American who would devote the rest of his life to studying Easter Island. ‘I don’t believe a damn thing you’ve published,’ he assured Heyerdahl before they set out.8

  Turns out scientist and daredevil got along surprisingly well, and not long after arriving on Easter Island the pair made a spectacular find. In the depths of a swamp, Heyerdahl’s team discovered pollen from an unknown tree. They sent it to Stockholm for microscopic analysis by a leading palaeobotanist, who soon informed them of his conclusion. The island had once been home to a vast forest.

  Slowly but surely the pieces began to come together. In 1974, a few years before his death, William Mulloy published the true story of Easter Island and the fate of its people.9 Spoiler alert: it doesn’t end well.

  2

  It all started with the mysterious moai.

  For some reason, said Mulloy, the Easter Islanders couldn’t get enough of these megaliths. One giant after another was chiselled from the rock and hauled into place. Jealous chieftains demanded larger and larger moai, more and more food was needed to feed the workforce and to transport the statues more an
d more of the island’s trees were chopped down.

  But a finite island cannot sustain infinite growth. There came a day when all the trees were gone. The soil eroded, causing crop yields to decline. Without wood for canoes, it was impossible to fish. Production of the statues stagnated and tensions grew. A war broke out between two tribes (the Long Ears and Short Ears that Katherine Routledge had been told about), culminating in a great battle around 1680 in which the Long Ears were almost entirely wiped out.

  The surviving inhabitants then went on a destructive spree, Mulloy wrote, knocking down all the moai. Worse, they began to slake their hunger on one another. The islanders still tell the tale of their ancestors the cannibals, and a favourite insult is ‘the flesh of your mother sticks between my teeth’.10 Archaeologists have unearthed innumerable obsidian arrowheads, or mata’a–evidence of large-scale slaughter.

  So when Jacob Roggeveen landed on Easter Island in 1722, he encountered a wretched population of just a few thousand individuals. Even today, the quarry at Rano Raraku where the moai were carved from the rock gives the impression of a workshop abandoned in sudden haste. Chisels lie where they were flung to the ground, with hundreds of moai left behind, unfinished.

  William Mulloy’s article represented a breakthrough in unravelling the mystery of Easter Island. Soon, a succession of other researchers were adding evidence to back up his case. Such as the two British geologists who in 1984 announced their discovery of fossil pollen grains in all three of the island’s volcanic craters, confirming the hypothesis that the island had once been covered by a forest.11

  Ultimately, it was world-famous geographer Jared Diamond who immortalised the tragic history of Easter Island.12 In his 2005 bestseller Collapse, Diamond summed up the salient facts:

  • Easter Island was populated by Polynesians early on, around the year 900.

  • Analysis of the number of excavated dwellings indicates that the population once reached 15,000.

  • The moai steadily increased in size, thus also increasing demand for manpower, food, and timber.

  • The statues were transported horizontally on tree trunks, calling for a large workforce, lots of trees and a powerful leader to oversee operations.

  • Eventually there were no more trees left, causing the soil to erode, agriculture to stagnate and famine among the inhabitants.

  • Around 1680 a civil war broke out.

  • When Jacob Roggeveen arrived in 1722, only a few thousand inhabitants remained. Innumerable moai had been knocked down and the islanders were eating one another.

  The moral of this story?

  The moral is about us. Set Easter Island and Planet Earth side by side and there are some disturbing parallels. Just consider: Easter Island is a speck in the vast ocean, the earth a speck in the vast cosmos. The islanders had no boats to flee; we have no rocket ships to take us away. Easter Island grew deforested and overpopulated; our planet is becoming polluted and overheated.

  This leads us to a conclusion diametrically opposed to what I argued in the foregoing chapters. ‘Humankind’s covetousness is boundless,’ archaeologists Paul Bahn and John Flenley write in their book Easter Island, Earth Island. ‘Its selfishness appears to be genetically inborn.’13

  Just when you thought you had cast off Hobbes’s veneer theory, it doubles back like a boomerang.

  The story of Easter Island seems to validate a cynical view of humankind. As our planet keeps warming and we keep on consuming and polluting, Easter Island looms as the perfect metaphor for our future. Forget Homo puppy and the noble savage. Our species seems more like a virus, or a cloud of locusts. A plague that spreads until everything is barren and broken–until it’s too late.

  So this is the lesson of Easter Island. Its calamitous history has been told and retold in documentaries and novels, in encyclopaedias and reports, in academic articles and popular science books. I’ve written about it myself. For a long time I believed the mystery of Easter Island had been solved by William Mulloy, Jared Diamond and their many cohorts. Because if so many leading experts draw identical, dismal conclusions, what’s left to dispute?

  Then I came across the work of Jan Boersema.

  3

  When I arrive at his office at Leiden University I can hear a Bach cantata playing in the background. At my knock, a man wearing a sharp flower-print shirt emerges from among the books.

  Boersema may be an environmental biologist, but his shelves are also crammed with books on history and philosophy and his work draws on both the arts and the sciences. In 2002, this approach led him to make a simple yet profound discovery that contradicted all we thought we knew about Easter Island. He noticed something countless other researchers and writers had failed to see–or maybe just didn’t want to see.

  Boersema was preparing his inaugural lecture as a professor at the time and needed some background on Easter Island’s decline. Wondering whether Roggeveen’s logbook still existed, he went to check the library catalogue. Half an hour later, he had the Journal of the Voyage of Discovery of Mr. Jacob Roggeveen open on his desk.

  ‘At first, I couldn’t believe my eyes.’ Boersema was expecting grisly scenes of carnage and cannibalism, but here in front of him was an upbeat travel log. ‘There was nothing at all about a society in decline.’

  Jacob Roggeveen characterised the Easter Islanders as friendly and healthy in appearance, with muscular physiques and gleaming white teeth. They didn’t beg for food, they offered it to the Dutch crew. Roggeveen notes the island’s ‘exceptionally fertile’ soil, but nowhere does he mention toppled statues, let alone weapons or cannibalism. Instead, he describes the island as an ‘earthly paradise’.

  ‘So then I wondered,’ Boersema grins, ‘what’s going on here?’

  Jan Boersema was one of the first scientists to express serious doubts about the widely accepted narrative of Easter Island’s destruction. When I read his 2002 lecture, it dawned on me that the history of Easter Island is like a good mystery story: a scientific whodunit. So, like Boersema, let’s try to unpack this mystery one step at a time. We’ll verify the eyewitness accounts, check out the islanders’ alibis, pin down the timeline as precisely as possible and zoom in on the murder weapons. We’ll have to call on a whole gamut of disciplines during our investigation, from history to geology, and from anthropology to archaeology.14

  Let’s start by going back to the scene of the crime: the trench where the Long Ears hid and died in 1680. What’s our source for this savage tale?

  The first record we have are the memories Easter Islanders shared with Katherine Routledge in 1914. Now every investigator knows that human memory is fallible, and we’re dealing here with memories passed down orally for generations. Imagine we had to explain what our ancestors were up to two or three hundred years ago. Then imagine we had no history books and could only rely on memories of stories of memories.

  Conclusion? Maybe Routledge’s notes are not the best source.

  But hearsay wasn’t the only evidence for the slaughter. One of the members of Thor Heyerdahl’s expedition, archaeologist Carlyle Smith, began excavating around the trench reputed to be the site of the Long Ear massacre. He took two samples of charcoal and sent them off to be dated. One sample was narrowed down to the year 1676. For Smith, this clinched it. Since the date corresponded to when oral tradition situated the slaughter and burning of the Long Ears, he decided the story checked out.15

  Although Smith later added some caveats to this interpretation, and although subsequent analyses re-dated the charcoal sample to anywhere between 1460 and 1817, and although no human remains were ever found at the site, and although geologists established that the trench had not been dug but was a natural feature of the landscape, the myth of the slaughter of 1680 persisted.16 And it continued to be propagated by Heyerdahl, Mulloy and Diamond.

  The case for an intertribal war gets weaker still when considered in light of the forensic evidence. The theory was that the islanders turned to cannibalism be
cause they were starving. But more recent archaeological analysis of the skeletons of hundreds of inhabitants has determined that, in fact, Roggeveen’s observations were right: the people living on Easter Island at the beginning of the eighteenth century were healthy and fit.17 There’s nothing to indicate they were going hungry.

  What, then, about the clues pointing to mass violence?

  A team of anthropologists at the Smithsonian Institution recently examined 469 skulls from Easter Island and found no evidence whatsoever to indicate large-scale warfare among the natives. Indeed, only two of the skulls bore traces of injury that, at least hypothetically, could have been inflicted using one of those infamous mata’a (the obsidian arrowheads).18

  But scientists no longer believe the mata’a were weapons. More than likely, they served as common paring knives–like the piece of obsidian that one of Roggeveen’s captains observed a native using to peel a banana. After examining four hundred mata’a in 2016, an American research team concluded they would have been useless as weapons: they were too dull.19

  This is not to say the Easter Islanders didn’t know how to make deadly weapons. But, as the team’s leader drily remarked, ‘they chose not to’.’20

  So the plot thickens. Because if they didn’t murder each other, what happened to the thousands who once lived on the island? Where did they all go? Roggeveen tells us there were only a couple of thousand people living on the island when he visited, whereas at one time, according to Jared Diamond, there were as many as 15,000. What’s their alibi?

  Let’s start by looking at the method Diamond used to arrive at this figure. First he gauged how many houses had once been on the island, based on archaeological remains. Next he guesstimated how many people lived in one house. Then to complete his calculations, he rounded up. Doesn’t exactly sound like a foolproof formula.