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Friday, 26 May 2017
quote [ Whatever happened on Easter Island, it wasn't good. Polynesians landed there, farmed, thrived, built their famous statues, and then things went very bad, very fast. Sixteen million trees vanished. What happened? Was this a case of ecological collapse? Not exactly, say two anthropologists. It was, arguably, worse than that. ]
I came across this article from 2014 while I was googling whether or not the statue arms-race hypothesis was really why the Easter Islanders destroyed their ecology.
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Comments
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XregnaR said @ 8:41pm GMT on 26th May
TL;DR - rat fuck
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cb361 said @ 10:00pm GMT on 26th May
[Score:1 Funsightful]
Wasn't Rat Fuck a Dick Tracy villain?
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cb361 said[1] @ 11:19pm GMT on 26th May
TL;DR - The Easter Islanders hunkered-down and got on with the miserable job of surviving day-to-day in a much impoverished environment, without a lot of the luxuries of their forebears. And so might we.
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Kama-Kiri said @ 12:22am GMT on 27th May
It was inevitable either way - both the islanders and the rats are engineered for the survival of the species. With nothing to kill us off, we keep breeding, expanding, until we start starving to death ... the population levels off at the minimum subsistence level that allows a net population gain of zero.
What is interesting is how despite this birth rates in modern, developed countries has plummeted even though in principle there are plenty of resources. Stress, or financial disincentive... nature finds a way. |
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