00:00why is it that these 25 wooden tablets are the only ones no person on earth can read
00:03they came from easter island the nearest mainland is more than 3 000 kilometers away
00:08the nearest place people actually live is more than 2 000 kilometers away it's one of the most
00:13isolated places humans have ever settled and on this tiny island a people independently invented
00:17a writing system they carved it into wood it's called rongo rongo this may be one of the very
00:23few times in human history that a people invented writing entirely on their own today only 25 of
00:28these tablets survive in the world lying behind glass in museums and no one can read a single
00:32character on them there is an answer to this mystery and it can be dated to the exact year
00:37but to explain why that year matters we first have to dismantle a story the whole world has been
00:41telling wrong for 200 years start with the island it's 163 square kilometers about the size of a
00:49small city on this island stand nearly a thousand giant stone statues on average four meters tall
00:5412 tons the largest one is nearly 10 meters tall 82 tons all carved from volcanic rock and in the
01:01quarry nearly 400 more statues are still stuck in the rock unfinished tools left exactly where they
01:06were put down some if they'd been raised would have topped 20 meters and then everyone stopped work at
01:11the same moment so when the outside world finally started paying attention to this island here's what they
01:16saw no trees the statues face down in the grass a people who were few and poor it looked like
01:23the
01:23scene of a disaster the only question left was who did it in 2005 a scholar named jared diamond published
01:29a book that gave the most famous answer they did it to themselves migrants island hopped found paradise
01:35started raising statues to honor their ancestors then tribes competed whose is bigger whose is better
01:41to drag these giants to the coast they needed wood rollers sledges ropes the statues got bigger the
01:49trees got fewer and when the forest was gone everything collapsed topsoil eroded crops failed without
01:56trees for canoes they couldn't fish the deep sea the population crashed tribes toppled each other's statues
02:03in the darkest version there was even cannibalism it's a useful story a lush island a fallen giant a small
02:09band of survivors it works perfectly as a warning don't do this to your own world documentaries told
02:15it textbooks told it almost everyone knows it this way but it can't explain the 25 tablets a society
02:22capable of inventing writing doesn't just collapse into a state where nobody can read it ecological
02:26collapse doesn't selectively kill off the literate and when researchers actually went looking for evidence
02:31the foundation of this story began to crumble first population to eat an entire island clean you need a
02:38lot of people so the story always set the population absurdly high tens of thousands but when europeans
02:43first arrived they counted about three thousand people and they were healthy well-fed people recent
02:49surveys of how much the island could actually support point the same way this island could only ever feed
02:53three or four thousand people the supposedly overpopulated island may never have been overpopulated
02:58at all second the forest the trees really are gone nobody denies that the question is who killed
03:05them and a big part of the answer came ashore with the settlers themselves rats polynesian rats followed
03:10polynesian sailors across the whole pacific on a small island with plenty of food and no predators
03:15they bred explosively and rats loved palm seeds studies of the island's ancient palm fruits found
03:21that huge numbers have been not opened by rats a fruit hollowed out can't grow into a tree so even
03:27if
03:27humans never cut down a single tree this forest had already lost the ability to renew itself
03:31one fell and it was gone forever third the legendary civil war on islands in the pacific where wars
03:37really happened you can find fortresses defensive walls skeletons with battle wounds easter island has
03:43almost none of those and the statues lying face down mostly toppled in the late 18th to 19th century
03:47after the europeans arrived not before here i need to be fair the ecological part isn't entirely wrong
03:54the trees really did disappear people really did cut them and climate research has found a long
03:59drought what's really overturned isn't the result it's the blame it wasn't a lone tribe that destroyed
04:04itself it was rats drought and human activity together a combination that left a forest unable
04:10to come back scholars still disagree on the details i'm giving you the version with the strongest evidence
04:16then in 2024 one piece of evidence settled it completely an international team sequenced the
04:21complete genomes of 15 ancient rapanui people published in nature here's how it works
04:27your genome carries the record of your ancestors if a population ever collapsed if huge numbers of
04:32people died in a very short time it leaves a clear mark on the dna of every descendant they went
04:36looking
04:36for that mark they didn't find it the dna showed a population that grew slowly and steadily from the
04:41first settlers all the way up to the moment the europeans arrived no collapse the same study
04:46surfaced something else these people carry 61 of their ancestry from indigenous south americans
04:52the mixing happened between roughly 1250 and 1430 before columbus ever reached the americas
04:57in other words the people we imagined were stranded on a lonely island degenerating into self-destruction
05:02had actually sailed thousands of kilometers reached the american continent and sailed thousands of
05:06kilometers back they were among the greatest navigators in human history so when the first
05:11europeans arrived in 1722 this society was still standing the collapse hadn't happened yet
05:16so when did it happen to answer that we have to meet a man his name was naira the highest
05:21chief
05:22of the island in the mid 1830s under him rongo rongo almost became a formal religion
05:27he toured the island daily visiting school after school asking students how their lessons were going
05:31he would hold up a tablet and ask them to read it read well and he praised them read badly
05:36and he
05:37blamed the teacher and confiscated the tablet naira died in 1859 three years later
05:431862 eight ships sailed over from peru they'd come to seize laborers for the guano mines
05:48they took more than a thousand islanders almost all the adult men went including the king the king's
05:54son and the old men who could still read rongo rongo word eventually spread international pressure
06:00mounted the peruvian government was forced to order them sent home but by then of the thousand plus
06:05only about a hundred were still alive and on the voyage back they caught smallpox one by one they
06:10died at sea only fifteen people finally made it back to the island those fifteen brought smallpox home
06:16with them and the next year 1863 missionaries arriving on the island ordered every rongo rongo
06:21tablet burned the 25 that survived today were hidden by the islanders themselves
06:26by 1877 easter island had only 111 people left 15 years down by over 90 percent then came a frenchman
06:34who on the island fenced off the land and drove the islanders off their own territory
06:38in 1888 chili declared the island annexed now back to the opening question that writing system didn't
06:45die in some ancient ecological collapse it died in 1862 in the cargo holds of peruvian ships the people
06:52who could read it were carried away shipload after shipload the writing went with them and it never came
06:57back so those tablets still lie behind glass and no one on earth can read a single character on them
07:02but they didn't disappear from a surviving population of about 30 the robin nui held on
07:08in the 1990s the largest row of statues was raised back onto its platform today more than 8 000 people
07:14live on the island the people the whole world wrote off as a cautionary tale are still here
07:18back then researchers arrived saw a barren island statues facedown a broken society then read the whole
07:24scene backwards they assumed the islanders had done it to themselves they looked at a crime scene and
07:29mistook it for a suicide and one last thing the 15 skeletons that provided that genome the ones in
07:35paris are still in a museum there they were the ones taken away when the research was done the first
07:41request the robin nui made was send them home so here's my final question to you if those 15 people
07:47had never been taken to paris there would be no genome study no evidence of their innocence so do you
07:54too fast think about it first because once they're gone the next time someone claims this people
07:59destroyed themselves there won't be a second sample of dna left to prove them wrong
08:03so
08:03you
08:03you
