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Easter Island Statues - Unexplained Historical Events

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The mystery of Easter Island and the Moai statues that inhabit it is something that most of us are at least vaguely familiar with, but the fact that there are still so many legitimate unanswered questions surrounding the island is in itself quite remarkable. The story starts on Easter Day in 1722, when a Dutch explorer happened upon something strange. He was originally in search of a hypothetical land mass called Terra Australis, thought to exist only because at the time they thought that the northern and southern hemispheres should be balanced. Instead though, he discovered an island in the Southeastern Pacific Ocean, which he would later name Easter Island due to the date of its discovery. He was surprised to discover that the island was inhabited, and he reported seeing 2,000 to 3,000 people there. This was surprising, because the island is... well… really far from anything else at all. A staggering 1,200 miles away from the nearest inhabited land, and about 2,200 miles off the coast of of Chile. And yet despite its incredible remoteness, The Rapa Nui people who called the island home managed to carve and transport a mind-blowing 887 statues, some measuring 33 feet tall and weighing up to 82 tons, an average of 11 miles each. And this all happened roughly 700 years ago. The biggest remaining question mark concerning the statues themselves is definitely their transportation. Theories have been proposed that involve ropes, sleds, rollers, leveled tracks, or even that the people slowly rocked the statues back and forth to their destination. Attempts have been made to recreate the methods that could have been used, but most resulted in damage to the statues, or would have required hundreds of people making just 0.05 miles of progress per day. The truth is, we don’t really know exactly how they did it. But however the Rapa Nui managed to move the Moai, they would have certainly needed to be incredibly patient, creative, and organized to make them a reality.

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