Some recent research on the collapse of the Rapa Nui or Easter Island culture suggests that the collapse never really happen - or rather, that it didn´t happen before the arrival of European colonialists.
Jared Diamond´s scenario in "Collapse" was always hard to believe, since it entails that the Polynesian inhabitants of the island were too stupid to realize that the trees on the relatively small island were disappearing due to the islanders´ own activities (as in actually cutting them down faster than they could grow back), and that they couldn´t predict that this would destroy all their chances to build boats and leave the rock. Cannibalism promptly followed. Humans can be remarkably silly, but can they really be *this* silly? That seems unlikely, since humanity has survived for hundreds of thousand of years in a wide variety of habitats.
Unless, of course, Diamond was projecting *our own* stupidity on the Easter Islanders...
A case could be made!
New evidence: Easter Island civilization wasn´t destroyed by war
Resilience, not collapse: What the Easter Island myth gets totally wrong
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