The island of Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island, never had a catastrophic population collapse, a new study proposes.
The finding may upend decades of assumptions about how overexploitation of the landscape by the Indigenous people of Rapa Nui, known as the Rapanui, caused a supposed rapid rise and catastrophic fall before any Europeans arrived. The research, which used a type of artificial intelligence called machine learning, suggests that the Rapanui population was sustainable, never going above 3,900 people. However, experts who were not involved in the study have critiqued the research, pointing out weaknesses in the data.
