A New Discovery at Easter Island Could Rewrite History

Bright Side

Did you hear about the latest scoop from Easter Island? Apparently, they've stumbled upon something that could totally shake up what we know about history! It's like straight out of an adventure movie, right? Rumor has it, they found some ancient artifacts buried deep underground, and they're not like anything we've seen before. People are buzzing about whether this discovery might reveal new insights into the island's mysterious past, like who built those massive stone statues and why. It's got everyone on the edge of their seats, waiting to see what secrets these artifacts might unlock!

Transcript

00:00Welcome to Rapa Nui, better known as Easter Island.

00:03It's a tiny speck in the vast Pacific Ocean, 2,200 miles away from the coast of Chile.

00:09This island is most famous for its eerie Moai statues.

00:13This place is also home to one of the most mysterious writing systems in the world, called Ronga Ronga.

00:20We found it on 27 small wooden tablets.

00:24For years, historians have been arguing about the true history of these tablets.

00:28And now, we might have found the truth.

00:32Humans first set foot on this island in the 12th century.

00:35For many years, it was home to the Rapa Nui people.

00:38They were pretty isolated out there in the Pacific Ocean, until Europeans arrived in the 1720s.

00:44Europeans brought with them lots of troubles, leaving only a small fraction of the native population alive.

00:51Later in the 19th century, a missionary, Eugene Iroh,

00:55went to the island and discovered the wooden tablets with intricate symbols carved on them.

01:00He wrote how marvelous they are.

01:02But there are hundreds of them on the island, and that they can be found in every household.

01:07But unfortunately, not all of them survive to this day.

01:11We've only got 27 of them.

01:13Some of them were heavily weathered, burned, or otherwise damaged.

01:16And now, they're scattered all over the world in museums and private collections.

01:20Some of the languages' artifacts were carted off to Tahiti and then to Europe by Europeans,

01:26leaving none behind on Easter Island itself.

01:30The four sacred tablets found their home in a congregation in Rome.

01:34They were the ones used in the recent discovery.

01:37For years, historians have been arguing whether this writing system was made up by the islanders themselves,

01:44or they borrowed it from Europeans.

01:45To find the truth, they decided to use a technique called radiocarbon dating.

01:51All organic materials, like wood, charcoal, and so on,

01:55contain a tiny amount of a radioactive form of carbon called carbon-14.

02:00When life comes to an end, things stop taking in carbon-14,

02:05and the amount they had starts to decay over time.

02:08By measuring how much carbon-14 is left in a sample,

02:12we can assume how old this sample is.

02:14This is how we learn the age of many fossils and artifacts.

02:18So, they looked at the age of some Ranga-Ranga tablets.

02:21Three of them were crafted from trees grown in the 18th or 19th century,

02:25which aligns with the arrival of Europeans.

02:28However, one of them is older than the Europeans' first visit to the island.

02:34There are two reasons to believe that Rapa Nui people created this writing system themselves.

02:40First, Ranga-Ranga works differently from European languages.

02:44Decoding it is a pretty hard task.

02:47Unlike English, this language boasts over 400 unique glyphs,

02:51none of which resemble any known writing system.

02:54There were many attempts to decipher this language, and none of them were successful so far.

02:59And second, one of the tablets is shown to be from around the 15th century,

03:04before the Europeans arrived.

03:06The problem is that radiocarbon dating can only tell us when the wood the tablet was made from

03:11was cut down, not when the writing was put on it.

03:15And since we've only got one tablet to go by, this isn't enough to be completely sure.

03:20On the other hand, why and where would they preserve cut wood for over 200 years

03:26just to grab it and write something on it one day?

03:28But anthropologists and historians say that it's possible.

03:33Scarce wood resources might have led the islanders to reuse old driftwood,

03:38which could be centuries older than the writing itself.

03:41This is known as the old wood problem in archaeology.

03:44Plus, the tablet looks very preserved.

03:47It was maintained to protect it from wood-damaging insects, humidity, and so on.

03:52That's why it survived over the centuries.

03:55Whatever is written on it, it was probably important for the Rapa Nui people.

03:59Now, all of these are guesses and clues, but scientists are cautiously optimistic.

04:05They believe that Ronga Ronga could be one of the rare instances of independent writing invention,

04:11like those of the Sumerians or the Egyptians.

04:13But we need more evidence.

04:15In the Rapa Nui language, Rogo Rogo means to recite or to declaim.

04:21Not everyone could write, only a select few.

04:24Probably only the elite of Easter Island, mostly men, knew and could read this written language.

04:30After colonization, none of them survived.

04:33So now we have to rack our brains trying to figure out what's written here.

04:38First, scholars can't agree on what type of script it is.

04:42We aren't even sure that this was their language.

04:44But even if it was, we don't know whether it's a primitive form of writing or a fully developed system.

04:51In the 1990s, a linguist, Stephen Roger Fisher, believed he might have cracked the code of Ronga Ronga's structure.

04:59His idea was that these tablets conveyed cosmogonies.

05:02Cosmogonies are stories or narratives that explain how the universe was created and how natural phenomena came to be.

05:11They often come from ancient traditions and cultures, like those found in East Polynesia.

05:16The tablets could have talked about things like how the world began, where everything came from,

05:21and how different aspects of nature, like the stars or the mountains, were formed.

05:25This would also explain why only the wise elite could write.

05:30Fisher thought that Ronga Ronga is a mix of logographic and samasiagraphic systems,

05:36which means that some symbols represent spoken words, while others represent ideas or concepts.

05:42But deciphering them would be very hard because it requires extensive memory and knowing context,

05:48because the symbols are more like hints than complete expressions.

05:51However, other language experts disagreed with his ideas,

05:56saying there were problems with how he put together his theory.

06:00Unfortunately, Fisher couldn't prove this hypothesis.

06:04Maybe these are just drawings.

06:06If we look at the tablets, there are some things that look recognizable.

06:10People, animals, plants, and geometric shapes.

06:13There are some birds.

06:15One of them looks like a frigate bird, which Rapa Nui people associate with the deity Maki Maki.

06:20There are also fish, centipedes, and so on.

06:23Or at least these glyphs look like them.

06:26Could it be just art or a form of decoration?

06:29Maybe.

06:30But there are some problems.

06:32The glyphs show a high degree of complexity and structure.

06:35They also keep the same style.

06:37For example, there are several symbols that show something human-like with a raised hand.

06:42The only difference is different heads.

06:45As if it wasn't complicated enough,

06:46This unique writing style also uses a system known as Reverse Oostrophodon.

06:52This means that each alternate line is flipped upside down,

06:56resembling nothing seen elsewhere.

06:58We don't know why they would turn the tablet upside down after each line.

07:02But all this shows that they had some sort of system and organization behind these symbols.

07:08Plus, it seems like they use these tablets every day for some practical purpose.

07:13But there's some hope for the future.

07:16New technology, like AI and other computer programs,

07:19might help us understand lost languages.

07:22We already started creating algorithms that could help us solve other mysteries,

07:26like the Voynich manuscript.

07:29Academics even organized the Vesuvius Challenge,

07:32a machine learning competition that, in 2023,

07:35cracked the riddle of the ancient Herculaneum scrolls.

07:38The scrolls were buried under volcanic mud after the catastrophic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD.

07:46In real life, the scrolls are very fragile,

07:49so deciphering them would be a very hard task.

07:52But with digital scanning and machine learning, it's much easier.

07:56They have a rich history.

07:58They most likely belong to the personal library of an Epicurean philosopher named Philodemus.

08:03These scrolls contain very important insights into Greek philosophy and Latin literature.

08:09If we decipher more of them,

08:11we'll learn more about the rich history of the Roman Empire.

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