Paywalled article. Rand can you summarize in a sentence or two as to his reasoning as to why Diamond is wrong about Easter Island?
There’s some research that indicates that denuding the island of forest didn’t actually significantly harm the people on the island. For example, this story describes a genetics-based study that indicates no evidence of a population bottleneck until Europeans (and slavers from Peru) visited the island.
IIRC, disease got them and they never recovered
Which leaves me even more confused. Disease is a major causative factor in Diamond’s work. It’s in the title: Guns, Germs and Steel.
They hit on pre-contact Rapa Nui because it was much closer to a society in a bottle, like Earth as a whole without development of a space-faring civilization, which they’d declared impossible. A part of my universal basic science education I took a number of anthropology and archaeology courses. The professors were spewing their nonsense even back then and took my talk of extraterrestrial resources as a sign of mental illness.
The last part of the article is behind a paywall.
Paywalled article. Rand can you summarize in a sentence or two as to his reasoning as to why Diamond is wrong about Easter Island?
There’s some research that indicates that denuding the island of forest didn’t actually significantly harm the people on the island. For example, this story describes a genetics-based study that indicates no evidence of a population bottleneck until Europeans (and slavers from Peru) visited the island.
IIRC, disease got them and they never recovered
Which leaves me even more confused. Disease is a major causative factor in Diamond’s work. It’s in the title: Guns, Germs and Steel.
They hit on pre-contact Rapa Nui because it was much closer to a society in a bottle, like Earth as a whole without development of a space-faring civilization, which they’d declared impossible. A part of my universal basic science education I took a number of anthropology and archaeology courses. The professors were spewing their nonsense even back then and took my talk of extraterrestrial resources as a sign of mental illness.