Rapa Nui Population Was Always Small, Study Finds
Rapa Nui is located 3,500 kilometers west of South America and almost 2,000 kilometers east of Pitcairn Island, which is the nearest island with people on it.
Also called Easter Island, Rapa Nui has an area of just 163 square kilometers, and is known for the giant stone statues called moai.
First visited by Europeans in 1722, its population soon collapsed as its people were murdered, or died of introduced diseases, while over 1,000 were taken as slaves in the 1860s.
However, some researchers have said the population may have already collapsed in the 1600s, as the people on the island used up all of its resources.
Some have suggested the population rose as high as 15,000 before dropping to around 1,500 to 3,000 by the time Europeans arrived. This has been used as an example of a society destroying itself by overusing its resources.
But a team of researchers from Europe, Chile and America looked at the bones of 15 people from Rapa Nui kept at France's national museum of natural history. The bones were collected between 1877 and 1935, and some were radiocarbon dated to as far back as about 1670 — well before Europeans arrived.
Looking at DNA from these bones, the researchers used the amount of genetic diversity to estimate Rapa Nui's population over 100 generations.
They did not find evidence of a population collapse in the 1600s. Rather, they found the island had a small population that slowly increased until the 1860s.
"When there's a collapse, the population level will decrease, and we'll lose genetic diversity," study co-author Anna-Sapfo Malaspinas told Live Science. But they found no genetic evidence of such a decrease.
This supports the results of a June study that looked at satellite images of traditional farmland on the island. Based on the amount of food that could have been grown, it estimated that Rapa Nui's population never went above 3,900.
