Hidden Secrets of Easter Island

were a thousand miles from land a tiny island emerges from the sea hundreds of years ago Polynesian explorers discovered this place and settled here Easter Island also known as Rapa Nui what happened on this island after they arrived has intrigued archeologists for centuries we know the Islanders carved close to a thousand massive stone figures instilled with the spirits of their ancestors we know they moved them possibly as far as 12 miles and placed them on sacred platforms called Abu but we don't know how they did it according to Island lore the statues called moai had simply walked into place but how could a people who had no metal tools carved such imposing figures how could prehistoric farmers who didn't have the wheel move enormous statues up to 30 feet tall and weighing close to 82 tons transportation of Lemoine and Easter Island is perhaps one of the most important archaeological problem we have is the biggest mystery sérgio wat phu was born and raised on Rapa Nui and served as governor for six years also an archaeologist he's long championed the idea that the statues were moved in an upright position it is to us to bill hypothesis and go after looking for the attributes on the status that allow an explanation that they were moved vertically archeologist Terry hunt and Carla Poe are heavily influenced by Sergio repoussé theory the key to proving it they hope is inside this box here is great this is gonna be scary to come out of there Wow I don't know if we're gonna feel better or worse when I see it is the box of Nick and we're going to move it with a small number of people really cow oh my god perfect you know what this making me feel sick to my stomach at this precise replica of a moai is the centerpiece of a simple but radical experiment being conducted in Hawaii by Lippo and Hunt over the next two days working with a small group of volunteers they will attempt to move this statute by walking it upward when people ask how did your ancestors when the touches the answer was always they walked and for the Rapa Nui that was the answer and for the foreigners asking the question they thought oh that's silly you know how crazy what we're trying to do is is evaluate our ideas or our ability to explain how they will move why the archaeological record looks like it does that's what we're gonna do is tricky and it could easily not work and we've never done this before dropping to eight people had centuries to figure this out and lots of people involved to conduct this experiment Lippo and hunt will have just two days and 26 volunteers the statue tradition was bought by voyagers from Polynesia to Rapa Nui throughout Polynesia carved wooden and stone figures are common but no other island can compare with the size or number of statues found here according to oral tradition the moai were carved to represent the spirit of the Islanders ancestors Estados are the living face of our ancestors in order to look living you have to put the in laid eyes on the status some statues are topped with a red stone ad or a topknot called a poo cow the moai were cut from volcanic tuff a porous stone made from compressed ash almost all of them were carved here at rano raraku a massive quarry inside one of the islands three extinct volcanoes littered around the site four statues in various stages of completion some still emerging from the rock the most common way of carving the moai here is to carve around the face and the body like awakening these tattoos from the rocks to do this Carver's used very dense stone tools made of basalt like this one used by modern day carver who makai in hawaii what we're trying to do is just cut the design that we want to follow into the tuff ummah kai is using a replica of the same ancient tool called a Toki to carve a small version of a moai I socket into volcanic tuff if I was to do this with a modern tool and probably take maybe 45 minutes to an hour is this will take maybe a whole day to three days it probably taped the team of 12 people a year to produce a wire design once the moai's could lose the car the back will be still attached to the mother rock with a keel eventually that kill will be perforated and some loose rock will be added under the back of the boy so it remained floating cos they cut off and release it from the mother Rock after they finish carving they slide it down bracelets at the foot of the hill then they finish carving the back at this stage the more I was ready to be moved to a secret platform called an ahoo known to be a place of religious ritual they've been lots of speculation about how the statues were moved from crazy theories if they were shot out of the volcano to aliens move them but in modern research there's been a whole family of ideas about using contraptions I'm using palm logs for tripods or sleds or rollers according to several of these theories the Islanders used logs to move the moai in University of California archaeologist joanne van Tilburg tried using a wooden sled to move Amoy along wooden rails it's similar to a traditional method Polynesians used to move canoes out of the water ultimately the experiment worked and it gained wide acceptance but not everyone believes the log theory the problem with these series is that they have not drawn on the evidence that we see on the moai the statues themselves on the roads as they investigated the statues and the roads they began to accumulate clues that they think will tell a different story [Music] building on another researchers data and using satellite imagery hunt and Lippo have surveyed almost 20 miles of ancient roads there are summer roads that begin at the Statue Corian Naraku and go along the south coast some go north and go across the center of the island these roads were used to to move oh I - every corner of the island they think the network of roads may have been even larger but the degraded road beds can be hard to find with the naked eye so they're testing a drone equipped with a camera that will give them more precise observations one Wow we have satellite images coverage for the entire island and we can see certain kinds of features this gives us a way of integrating that at a level where we get incredible detail the drone may help identify new roads which can then be ground truths with modern surveying equipment Hunton lippo believe a crucial clue to how the statues were moved may lie in the slope of the roads which they have measured confirming the results of an earlier team we found that the roads generally have a maximum of a three degree rise as they go uphill and then a maximum about six degrees they go downhill the island is fairly hilly and the inhabitants understood that to move the statues the roads would have to be leveled so that they had a consistent and fairly gentle grade but how did they move them to find out hunt and Lippo studied more than 50 statues that fell apparently while being moved we noticed that the statues that were headed uphill away from the quarry had fallen on their back most frequently we also found that when statues were heading downhill they'd fallen on their face statues on flat ground were kind of 50/50 and we could see that there was a pattern here we tested it statistically and realized that we had very clear indications that the statues robed in a standing position it was really no other way to explain that this idea has the virtue of being consistent with oral tradition in fact the Rapanui language even has a word neck a neck a which translates as walking with no legs for centuries we have known that the moai did walk as our ancestors said but how exactly they did the walking is what we the arcologies are looking into it in fact others have tried to move them vertically including Thor Heyerdahl and a Czech engineer named Pavel Pavel this is the statue that public Hubble tried to move in 1986 with his experiments moving this the statues in an upright position by shuffling it across the surface there was a lot of friction on the base and as he did it in fact there was damage done to the base that removed material right down from the bottom here we saw it this can't really be quite right because the the shuffling and the grinding cut isn't consistent with the what we saw in the statue so on the one hand we're like yes they're moving standing up but not exactly that way to figure out a less destructive way to move them they built on observations first made by Sergio Ramu identifying differences between statues that made it to the platform and those that fell on the way on the more than 50 fallen statues they analyzed what researchers called Road moai the eyes hadn't been carved yet they were left as sharp angled slots according to hunt and limos measurements Road moai were chunkier their bases were bigger their centers of gravity were lower kind of like a bowling pin most of the road Mo I had a d-shaped base and the base was angled so the statue leaned forward these were key features to lipoma hunt the statues will rolled across the front edge and that front edge has a characteristic shape especially as the statues get larger that allowed that to happen the statues that made it to the ahoo platform showed the difference the eyes had been carved their sides had been trimmed and their center of gravity shifted back and up they'd been cut so that their bases were no longer angled but flat they leaned forward but not as far as road more they stood more upright and they'd lost a little weight based on all these differences the difficulties faced by the Czech engineer Pavel are understandable pavel was using a statue that had already been reshaped for a platform the eyes had already been carved it didn't lean as far forward and its sides had been trimmed ultimately the evidence for how the statues were moved can be found on the statues themselves they were engineered to move and the details of the statues are telling us about transport but the only way to show that the statues could walk is to test the theory to do that they need to make a replica moai the most precise replica ever made they collect data embedded in thousands of photos of two fallen moai one that fell on its back and the other on its front and enter it into a 3d modeling software industrial designer max beech then translates the measurements into data which is used to make a mold for the statue their photos depict an 18 foot tall in 1910 moai because of safety concerns and cost they scale the replica down their statue will be 10 feet tall and weigh 5 tons about the average of nearly a thousand moai on the island hunt and lippo nicknamed the statue ho - et has a tribute to Easter islands legendary first ruler max Beach is also creating an animation showing how ho - e team might move I started with a small scale model to move it around on a table to get an idea of how would this thing walk back and forth we felt that there was some challenges with scaling this up so we built a 5 foot model would that would allow us to see what some of the dynamics involved are as this model scaled up while this contraption doesn't look like a moai the same principles of design and physics are still in play like an accurate center of gravity and the rounded forward edge it has enough of the features that gives us a sense when we pull it that it's gonna behave something like what we expect with the large statue you need to get it up high enough so that it starts to fall you're currently on that side but you're also pulling it so that it wants to rotate bringing that center of gravity back oh yeah ok that's the point that the coordination is key in addition to understanding the physics of how the statue should move figuring out where to tie the ropes is going to be critical in making the experiment with a larger replica moai a success the trick is to pull it in the right direction with the right force at the right time that it rocks forward on the forward edge which has that rounded that D shape but we'll hunt and lip pose ten-foot-tall replica moai behave the same way well let it fall off or we are going to stay true to the original center gravity engineer James D dish is designing the mold for hoto ET paying special attention to the center of gravity and how the statue is balanced when I apply density to this model it calculates the exact center of gravity and is saved in this coordinate system right here in the center this is important because if the center of gravity was off it could alter the the way that these were moved so if the experiment is to determine that these could be moved by walking them then the center of gravity has to be at the same height and it was originally the mold itself is comprised of four layers and made in two halves split down the nose ho2 will come out of the machine with about of plus or minus 30 thousandths of an inch accuracy overall this is incredible in comparison to any other recreations that have been made that have been mostly glossed over and symmetrical this is nearly exact of what you can find on Easter Island after nine hours of machining time each half of the mold is fitted with an internal rebar structure to support the massive weight of the statue when we are ready to pour the statue we're gonna fill this thing with nearly six tons of concrete what we'll see in this truck is the new high-tech mix so we've developed specifically for the moai statues it's lighter in weight iron flow ability it's more sustainable if you look really closely the little beads the spheres the beads are expanded polystyrene a type of synthetic foam putting it in the mix adds volume lead without adding weight that makes the statue closer and weight to a real moai of this size made from volcanic tuff we're burying him to equalize the hydraulic pressure from the outside so it can't move it took ten days from the time the concrete is poured into hoe to hiki's mold to the time the five-ton and foot-tall replica was carefully extracted from the ground trying to get this right and have him perform like the original Polynesians intended that's what our mission is there's a lot at stake in figuring out how the statues moved because it may cast light on the islands troubled past there are vastly different ideas about what happened here the story told by the Islanders speaks of different clans and prolonged warfare fractured skulls from skeletons found on the island seemed to confirm that what would have brought on this violence a widely accepted theory is the different clans around the island competed to build more and ever larger moai kneading logs to move them they cut down the islands lush forests to keep up with rivals [Music] as the forest disappeared and resources grew scarce the rivalry turned violent and the society descended into chaos some have described this as a case of ecocide a culture bent on over exploiting its resources spirals into cultural collapse and disaster but is this a true picture of what happened here Easter Island once looked very different Pollan evidence shows the 25 various species of trees and shrubs once group here and reveals the dramatic change as the island was deforested something pollen expert John Flynn Lee attributes to human activity our pollen results were strongly indicating to us that the people had destroyed the forest in fact it was the clearest example in the world as I had ever come across of deforestation by people throughout the island excavations have revealed the impressions of countless palm earth moles like these this island once had a palm forest in one way we know that is because of the preservation of these palm roots that document that there once was appalled for is a very extensive paul forests across the island these lines here these black lines trace the past that the roots of the palm trees once made but some scientists believed that the trees were cut down not in a frenzy of statue building and moving but for the simple reason that these were farmers these people were agriculturalists they needed to clear land so in a sense the forests were largely superfluous to them its garden land that was essential to them not palm for us that they couldn't eat the whole notion that it was the cutting down of these trees that led to a collapse if you will a stir on it is a bit too off the mark in my view archaeologists had Kerch studies human impact on Island ecology he's done a comprehensive study of the manga river islands about 1,600 miles away after the Pitt Karen's they are the nearest islands to Rapa Nui and striking in their similarity both Mangareva and Easter Island were nearly divorced and both once had large colonies of sea birds whose guano fertilized the soil but on both islands people caught an eight nearly all the birds do you eliminate those birds you disrupt that nutrient flow and we think that on both Easter Island and manga revel the elimination of large seabird populations was a key factor that the inability of the forest to regenerate the people also slashed and burned down trees to make way for farmland and combined with the loss of seed bird fertilizer put their forests in jeopardy and there may be another factor during excavations here at Hana canna Beach the site of the first settlement on Easter Island huntin lippo unearth evidence identifying what they believe dealt a significant blow to the forest rats possibly brought as accidental hitchhikers by the original voyagers from Polynesia hunt and lippo believe these rats play the decisive role in the deforestation of the island we didn't really see the full significance of that until we started to realize that rats as an invasive species in fragile environments like this would play up a pretty significant role in stopping the regeneration of new trees they would eat the seeds of the native trees in this case the palm trees and the palms would not regenerate as they had done naturally this is the same species that was on Easter Island this rat is originally from Southeast Asia and has spread through most the central and western Pacific will pit is a wildlife biologist at the USDA Wildlife Research Center in Hilo Hawaii this is a female Polynesian rat in the wild a lot of these rats only have about a year life expectancy but a female like this could produce four litters a year when introduced to areas with abundant resources and no natural predators the first generation of rats could in theory have exploded to millions in just a few years even a fraction of that number would consume a huge amount of food and it turns out that the food that the rats ate was palm nuts inside of which are the seeds that would spawn a new forest throughout the island remnants of palm nuts shown all marks from rat teeth supporting that argument the role that these little Polynesian rats may have played in deforestation is a very interesting one and a bit little controversial it's a disruptive force ecologically but I'm skeptical that it was the sole or major force and the reason I say that is rats were transported to every island across the Pacific but not every island got DeForest it so it had to be a combination of some other factors along with rats that led to deforestation the forest was likely wiped out by a perfect storm of human impact slash and burn farming decimation of the Seberg population and the introduction of an exploding rat population on the island but did the demand for longs to help move the statues also play a role or will hunt and limo's experiment deliver on an alternative explanation at the experiment site in Hawaii the volunteers are about to get their first lesson in moving the moai so what we want to do first is have you do a tug-of-war we want to divide you into two groups roughly even amount of strength the teams are learning how to work together by working against each other because cooperation is so important we actually want you to be in a situation where it's really tough to win balancing the teams will be vital to balancing the more than an actual experiment so no one team can overpower the other the volunteers then graduate from tug of war to balancing a 10 foot tall wooden pole ready so north stop this is the maximum height we would tie the rope on the Statue give you an idea what seems easy with a 4x4 post may not come so quickly with a 10 foot tall 5 tons statue that's good coordination through a traditional Hawaiian blessing everyone on site is reminded of the cultural importance of what they're about to do a Rapa Nui ritual is also included and everyone shares in the eating of a white chicken cooked in an earthen oven the aroma released upon open in the oven is said to feed the gods I do worry about the purses isn't sharp enough but the fact it's got the roundedness to maneuver the five tons statue a crane operator it attaches rigging to hoe to be teased Nick oh my God look at those cables crunchy it's back up there the rigging will also act as a safety measure to prevent the statue from tipping over sorry real tough I know we're sort of wondering what if he doesn't stand is he resting on the ground he'll fall over oh my god got a stand yeah yeah yeah yeah we need to see that worse case another got a stand it's got a stand that's the whole key he leans forward because that's the way it was made oh my god the statue will not stand on its own hunt and lippo struggled to figure out why well at the moment you can see the way the straps are the weights hanging the center-of-mass line here goes straight down and is in front of the base itself what we need to do is get it back so that this strap is hanging from over here to get it behind this point there right now at the way it's hanging it's it's just gonna fall over it's in a leading position what looked wicked our plan is to turn the truck around he's got rubber bumpers on the very back okay okay yeah it's alright like that so that we can get this bats out yeah yeah okay good good good my impression is that if he doesn't stand by himself we probably have something wrong the ancient Rapa Nui didn't have a crane their statues had to stand on their own the rigging straps are adjusted but Oh to ET still does not stand at this point I have no idea what we could do to make this work if huntin lippo can't get her to et to stand it will be hard to prove that they're walking theory as legs the only thing you can do is either take away material in the front or add material and on the bottom finally there's a solution okay go okay okay I need it that much it turns out that it needs just a tiny bit of help in fact it's a 2x4 that's now resting right at the front of the base and that tiny bit of addition there has balanced Amoy he's standing on his own there's no pressure on the cables but it may be that that in fact it was always made to be unstable and they're moving they were carved in such a way to always be falling and what you would do is you would add something like we did with the 2x4 maybe a stone things that we do find in the archaeological record underneath the front to stabilize it along the Moy roads on Easter Island or water Warren stones like these that may have been used this way Sergio Rob who actually mentioned this a number of times about consistently finding these sort of flat or called poro stones and they're not just any old stone they're very dense and they tend to be really flat you find them on the roads over and over again we're nervously learning a lot right now in trying to do this and that science it's great to be wrong and we realize that there are a few other things that need a little more emphasis in our understanding before it's time to make the first attempt at moving the replica the volunteers sit down to watch the training video to see how the statue should move and as we talked about the D shaped is one of the keys it's being leaned over to the side and then it falls forward and walks on that front edge and I think we can do it I think we have the force we have the manpower so now question is getting the details before they try to move ho to ET the volunteers need to make sure that can hold the statue upright I want to say figure out like with everybody and it tie to the highest point can we hold it back okay how many people do we want 10 to 5 on each side ok team leaders in the front if it seems like you can't hold it as he releases the pressure from the crane yell out so we can stop and you can add more pressure ok yeah let's move wood oh wow okay so now he's gonna release the tension and it's gonna be up to you guys to keep it from falling forward to the wanna fall for it yell out if it's too much coming down can you feel it is it a lot now the question is gonna be getting at the fall on its front edge which I think we can do with just two teams this is always our idea is that the teams that are pulling are actually slightly behind the statute keeping it from falling forward while rotating at the same time with the safety rigging attached to the Statue hunt and Lippo finally had the chance to test their walking theory starting out with Tina hey I want you to pull just the harder you keep it concert if you get excited rock it a little bit okay hold it okay I want you guys to spread out a little more so that you're holding it but more in an angle just get harder or eat it's about the same easier easier at this angle I want you to pull team a to pull to see what happens pull [Music] all right Hulk how's that you guys exhausted okay the teams continue to move farther and farther apart simultaneously pulling and trying to twist the Statue but it's just not working we're gonna want it low it that the ropes lower yeah yeah we have no leverage up there but it looks like it's not so hard to hold it back right now right now round the neck shoulder area you can hold it back yeah and probably Colet the trireme roping it as they reach the end of the day huntin lippo have to face the reality that's so far the experiment has failed unless they can get back on track their failure will cast doubt on the Statue moving theory and on their other ideas about what happened to the islands once robust and productive people no matter how this island was de 4 stood without any trees wind and salt spray damaged the already poor soil sea birds were gone as both a source of food and nutrients that once increased the land's productivity some believed the loss of large trees meant they couldn't build canoes to leave the island in one view this is an environmental disaster leading the cultural collapse but building on previous research hunt and LeBeau came to believe that the Islanders found a new way to adapt to the crisis when we were first surveying here on the island we were really annoyed by the loose rocks that we would walk over then we looked a little closer and we realized this was actually an area that was used for cultivation and then on top of that we would see the taro growing in the rock areas and not in the soil areas it was kind of backwards of what we might have expected it confirmed what previous archaeologists believed that what look like random piles of rubble are evidence of an ingenious method to improve the called rock mulching it says you add the stones to the poor soil of Rapanui you are increasing the nutrients available to plants in addition to the phosphorus that leeches into the soil the rocks help the soil retain moisture if you look at rock mulch across the island there are probably billions of stones that are moved I mean it's just incredible how much Rock has been moved and concentrated into efforts that had to do with cultivation but was it enough to stave off disaster we have to really admire what these Charles are doing but not think that it was making their island into some incredibly productive system he just helps to put off a worse kind of agricultural collapse when Pat Kurtz studied the islands of Mangareva 1,600 miles away he found the same kind of deforested landscape as on Easter Island but ultimately the outcome for the people there was different when you compare Easter Island and Munger of above them were heavily forested but on Mangareva there's a huge Lagoon Barrier Reef very rich marine resources so the Munger Evans turned to those marine resources and really depended on them to develop their economy on Easter Island there's essentially no reef there's very limited coral very limited fish so with their backs to the wall did Easter Island descend in the conflict the population was growing the scarcity of resources and a lot of competition social conflicts start building up and tension leading group and for the end of Easter Island history there was a lot of war a lot of conflict between one group and other these sharp edged obsidian implements found scattered across the island are often seen as The Smoking Gun weapons proof of a people at war what I have in my hand is obsidian to and I think definitely it was used for defense or attack a sub-weapon but again huntin lippo disagree saying these obsidian implements were everyday tools the edge here has a lot of you swear that's consistent with carving and wood hard materials and used with plant materials but these implements have actually been found embedded in human skulls I think most of the evidence that we have it points more to use as a weapons we have found caches of them next to us call that the mark exactly the shape of this tool engraved on the gothcorp the remains of some 500 Rapa Nui people have been studied to get a clearer picture of just how violent this society was enough of these bones show signs of injury and trauma that experts believe this was a place of significant conflict in my view it was a society in distress it had a lot of problems they were pushing their agricultural system very hard I think there's good signs that warfare was periodic and endemic this tumultuous period began before European contact which came in 1722 when a Dutch merchant ship arrived on Easter morning hence the name of the island as more Westerners arrived stories about the island grew more lurid even incorporating tales of cannibalism cannibalism seems to turn up when Europeans start to talk about it a lot in the mid 19th century we don't see any evidence like that on Easter Island we don't see chopped up human bones we don't find human remains in the earth ovens there's good reason to believe that the 19th century idea of cannibalism is that you were not yet Christianized so your christian or your cannibal and cannibal had sort of a generic meaning so could it have been something other than violence that eventually spelled the downfall of Easter Island Society we know over and over again when Europeans arrived in the Americas and in the Pacific they introduced disease they did so on really unwittingly for example I mean a disease like cholera would have a devastating impact on this population because it's waterborne and once the disease gets into water supply it's going to be easily passed on to other people and as they got sick it would pass on to them in the 19th century Peruvian slave traders also abducted hundreds of Rapa Nui people by 1877 ravaged by slavery and disease a devastated remnant of the people who over the centuries had carved and moved massive moai had plummeted to only 110 but their oral history of the time before the Europeans remains a tantalising collection tales of warfare ritual exploration and statue building whatever passage of our history we have we protected like precious informations and in our doing of archeology experience tell me how important it is to listen carefully to these little bits of information for our history the oral history says the statues walked and hunt and Lippo are trying to figure out whether it's true it's 9 a.m. on the last day of the experiment ok just 8 hours left to figure out how to move on Milan be optimistic how about their hunt and Lippo decided to set a goal marking a finish line at 50 yards we've got this marked at 50 yards 25 yards at 10 yards you know he gratefully got it even part of that way what we want to do is happen not I think right here yeah because we want it's gonna want the most like that all yep after spending the morning tying retying and tying the ropes again it's 11:30 before the experiment teams make their first attempt of the day to move o to et until they master the motion to move the statue the crane rigging will act as a safety we're gonna start with the two ropes and the two large teams we've got longer ropes this time so there's more room for you guys to pull you guys ready over there we're gonna let your side go forward to let it lean for boat you guys are gonna pull at the same time I'm gonna see if we can twist it slightly okay Ready Set oh oh ok hoo ho Oh with no luck on the first attempt the problem-solving begins yeah widen that up that's good okay go okay oh okay can twist it okay now we want to see if we can get the other way no matter what they try or how they move the team can't seem to twist the Statue forward even an inch over the next hour the statue doesn't budge oh but seems to be swinging and rocking but not moving forward things are exactly what we want I just have to trust in the way it moves and if it fails we have a crane trust the ancestors here okay so you're gonna be playing they continue to try a rocking ho to ET forward and back is the best they can do in fact it's the only thing they can do for hours hunt and Lippo are convinced the ropes need to be around the shoulders to get the leverage needed to twist the statue at the base okay so let's get can we get tension on the on the statue that they adjust the whoops again even taking the advice of a nautical knot expert when nothing else is working floors tension on here that won't slip and I think they really want those the purchase to come from right here so it's on the shoulder ready go [Music] the clock keeps ticking just three hours left to figure this out I almost lost it there okay huntin lippo struggled to understand why two ropes aren't working to move the statue forward since it worked with the wooden model they decide to try something else and everyone has an idea so there's three it's like a why cuz balloon is so one print so one rope up there just holding it would be like one room holding him back we have a dude look yeah yeah we do nothing's happening it's it basically can move it like this you know or this but we can't really get it to do what it's supposed to do so we've done is added a third rope which they think is gonna be really critical and now we think with three teams were gonna build a get the motion going take advantage of the kinetic energy that's built into the statute allow it to fall forward on the front edge of the moai but team in the middle not allowing it to fall too much as they retie the ropes lippo and hunt make a new observation thinking back to the fallen statues on Easter Island they remember moai and transport had sideways v-shaped notches where the eyes should be a feature that now seems very important the v-shape to the eyes and the bridge of the nose is perfectly suited for tying a rope around and creating a place that you can put ropes and they have friction but also tall enough to provide the leverage you need to move it perhaps the finishing is done because that area takes a little abuse with the ropes tied up high for that leverage and so you finish them add the eye sockets when the statues reach their final place on the platform's it's an intriguing speculation but it's a little late in the day for new theories so going to alternate pulling you guys are gonna be pulling back and then releasing it's 4:00 p.m. there's just one hour left to figure out how to make this statue walk with the ten people and back and more people on each side they're ready to try one last time least attention how you guys doing okay Oh [Music] [Music] [Music] awesome as the statue starts to move a few feet it all starts coming together and the safety straps come off the crane is out we'll begin the training guys we're gonna move the statue without any help exhilarated and just amazed really happy and we're gonna get right back to it here let's go for the finish line once the teams get the hang of moving the statue it becomes easy Oh confident in their ability they get a little overzealous and ho2 et takes a nosedive but there's learning even in failure when ho 280 fell he fell exactly the same way the ancient moai on Easter Island fell face-first at an angle right along the road in most cases when that statues fell they weren't able to retrieve them we've seen a couple of examples on the roads I mean some of the smaller ones they probably undoubtedly prop back up but once they got large and larger it became a pointless effort ho to ET fares better thanks to modern machinery with just minutes left in the day huntin lippo revised their goal of moving the statue 50 yards quick call this point at 10 yards the goal line once we once we get there that's gonna be our finish and we know we could move it anywhere absolutely anywhere [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] all right I feel fantastic this has been a great success about mid-afternoon I was feeling pretty low and I'm pretty high right now it moved exactly the way we thought it would we just had to figure out how to get it started what struck everyone was that once we got going there was almost no effort involved we were on the ropes and we could feel that first tug was work and then when it started swinging you could feel I mean we weren't even pulling on the ropes the the energy of the Statue moving did all the work and we were just kind of gently directing it the method the inputs that we doing on a 10-foot version are exactly the same that will be part in a 30-foot version all that would matter was scaling the initial input of energy in later experiments Hunton Lippo were able to move the Statue more than 100 yards in only 40 minutes they also successfully walked ho to 80 upgrades of three to four percent we may never know if this is how the statues were actually moved but this success presents an intriguing new explanation it perhaps goes one step further to solving the mystery what happened on Easter Island what we're doing today we're pinpointing the archaeological evidence that came from oral history the more I walk the transportation of the status is perhaps the most important contribution of these cultures to humanity if this really is how the Islanders move the statues it raises an important question do these statues that rise above this ravaged treeless landscape serve as a cautionary tale for our times or as a monument to the human ability to innovate create and survive [Applause] [Music]

Channel: BLUE GLOBE

Views: 9,688,939

Rating: 4.5502224 out of 5

Keywords: culture, history, people, society, Engineering, build, how, city, ancient, Life, country, science, Education, structures, religion, theory, discovery, videos, films, movies, music, video, movie, YouTube, watch, old, facts, why, new, documentary, film, full, news, channel

Id: mH0sIjAHBVY

Length: 50min 28sec (3028 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 01 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/iheartbaconsalt]

It's PBS NOVA S39E14 - Mystery of Easter Island (2012).