You know Easter Island as the island with the giant stone heads.

And if you know their history, you've probably heard that moving those statues is what

cost the islanders all of their trees, triggering ecological disaster that almost killed them

all.

Is that story sound science?

Or is it just a popular ecological cautionary tale?

That's coming up right now on Skeptoid.

You're listening to Skeptoid.

I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.

What really happened on Easter Island?

On Easter Sunday in 1722, a Dutch ship made Europe's first contact with a remote island

in the South Pacific, halfway between Pitcaren and Chile.

They found a mountainous green land, which would have been a paradise had it not been mysteriously

stripped of all the palm trees that had once covered it.

Even more strange were the great stone heads, up to 10 meters high, so famous today, nearly

900 of them in all, standing tall and staring silently across the landscape.

A few thousand indigenous people remained.

And beyond these meager facts, the Dutch could learn little.

What has followed has been centuries of study and conjecture over what happened on Easter

Island.

Rapa Nui to its natives, Isla de Pascua to today's Chileans.

The central reason for our lack of knowledge is that the Rapa Nui had no written language,

...