Easter Island’s giant Moai statues could have ‘walked’ with just three things: a small group of people, a long rope and the use of pendulum mechanics, a new study has found.
Researchers have long debated how the indigenous people of Easter Island, also known as Rapa Nui, moved the giant human-faced Moai statues, which average weight of several tens of tons, centuries ago. Now, new research reveals that physics was on their side.
you may like
The research team virtually recreated the moai and found that with the help of three ropes and five to 60 people, the moai could move across Rapa Nui’s terrain in strides with an average length of 35 inches (89 centimeters).
Taken together, the authors write, these findings provide “compelling” evidence against the conventional view that the Rapa Nui community required vast amounts of resources and vast numbers of people to move the moai from the Rano Raraku quarry to their final location.
“What we discovered was the fact that the statues were being moved by a very small group of people in an incredibly original way,” study co-author Carl Lipo, a professor of anthropology at Binghamton University in New York, told Live Science. “When you see it happening, you’re like, ‘Of course they moved it that way.'”
“Walking” Moai experiment
Rapa Nui Island was first settled approximately 1,000 years ago. Today, the Rapa Nui people share at least 962 moai on this 164 square kilometer island. These moai are giant stone statues depicting heads and torsos ranging from 3.7 feet (1.1 meters) to 32.6 feet (9.8 meters) in height. Moai ceremonial sites are an average of 6.2 miles (10 km) from where they were mined.
However, how the Rapa Nui people moved these megaliths centuries ago has been hotly debated. One theory is that the statue “walked,” and a televised “experiment” by Lipo and his team in 2012 showed a team of 18 people “walking” a 4.8 ton (4.4 metric ton) scale replica a distance of 328 feet (100 meters) in 40 minutes.
“This wasn’t an experiment in the sense that we weren’t trying out specific ideas about numbers,” Lipo said. “Our goal was simple: What is the minimum number of people we can get together to make this work?”
He acknowledged that physical testing of how many people would be needed to move the moai should have been done before testing the replica. To put this missing piece into the puzzle, Lipo and study co-author Terry Hunt, a professor of anthropology at the University of Arizona, built virtual 3D models of 62 moai found along centuries-old roads (dubbed “road moai”).
you may like
This revealed that these statues were tilted forward by approximately 6 to 15 degrees, shifting their center of gravity in a way that would cause the moai to topple over if it stood on its own. In fact, the center of gravity was consistently lower than in the final Moai statue, and the authors suggest that this provided the necessary stability for the lateral sway produced as part of its “walking.”
The road moai also had a D-shaped base, which served as a “pivot point” for each step, the authors write. The researchers added that while all Lord Moai do not have eye sockets, the presence of eye sockets in all the last Moai attests to the fact that the finishing touches were carved upon arrival at their final destination.
The research team also modeled the physics of a “walking” moai, determining labor requirements and travel times based on ropes 65 to 98 feet (20 to 30 meters) long. This involves incorporating the moai’s mass and its irregular shape and calculating the force required to initiate its “walking” motion.
The researchers found that depending on the moai’s enormous size, it would take between 15 and 60 people to start the movement, and between 5 and 25 to continue it, indicating that this means of transportation is “remarkably efficient,” the study says.
Pulling on the rope created a rocking motion that caused the base to rotate and “step” forward. Due to the dynamics of the pendulum, once you start the step, it doesn’t take much effort.
The researchers calculated that moai can “walk” at an average speed of 1,000 feet (310 meters) per hour, and that larger moai are not necessarily slower because they have longer strides. An average-sized moai would take approximately 11,000 steps to travel 10 km (6.2 miles).
outdoor shooting
The study is an “original and valuable contribution to the debate,” Sue Hamilton, an archaeologist and professor of prehistory at University College London who was not involved in the study, told Live Science via email.
However, Hamilton said, “The data presented are consistent with a variety of interpretations, not just the authors’.” For example, she said, lord moai may have been designed differently because they served different ritual purposes, were made by different people with different levels of expertise, or were fashionable at a particular point in time.
Hamilton also emphasized that while this study shows one possibility for how the Rapa Nui people moved the moai, there are other plausible hypotheses. “The authors’ current study further demonstrates the technical possibility of upright movement of the statues (moai), but does not prove that it occurred,” Hamilton said.
For Lipo and Hunt, critics of the walking moai hypothesis “have yet to offer a plausible alternative that can explain all the evidence,” they write in their study.
Source link
