Easter Island

When you get on the plane and the cabin staff hand out pillows and blankets you realise it is going to be a long flight. In fact Easter Island is nearly 4,000 km (2,360 miles) away from the South American mainland, and 2,000 km (1,240 miles) from Pitcairn Island. That's nearly half as far again as the distance between London and Moscow. It is one of the most isolated places in the world.

Until 1967 when the airport was built Easter Island was only visited once a year by a Chilean warship bringing supplies. It's completion allowed flights from Tahiti and Santiago, and tourism became a possibility, prompting the Chilean government to invest in the island's infrastructure. The most astonishing change came about in 1988 when the runway was extended to provide an emergency landing site for the US space shuttle, and with that the Easter Islanders' transition from Stone Age to Space Age was complete.

There is much speculation concerning the history of the Island, and, due to the absence of historical records, archeologists are unable to agree upon a common theory. The assumption is that the Island was first settled around 500AD although how early seafaring people found this remote speck nobody knows. The belief that Polynesians were the first settlers was thrown in to doubt in 1947 when Thor Heyerdahl sailed a balsa raft, Kon-Tiki, from Peru to Tahiti. He went on to make excavations on Easter Island and made a compelling argument that the first islanders actually came from the Peruvian coast. He believed they were later joined by a group of Polynesian settlers and the two groups lived in harmony until dwindling resources and war resulted in the South American group being wiped out. This theory is now largely discounted, but there still is not unanimity amongst archeologists on the origins of the Islanders.

The first Europeans stumbled upon the Island in 1722 and noted the similarity of some natives to Polynesians, but others to white Europeans with reddish hair.  At this time the famous Moai were still standing, many up to 9 metres tall, and were regularly being worshipped. Just over 50 years later when Cook set foot on the Island, the natives were fewer in number and were living in a miserable state with little land under cultivation. Many of the stone statues had been overturned and they were no longer being worshipped. Although pollen samples show the Island was heavily forested in 500AD, by the beginning of the 19th century there were no trees left. Most writers now believe the population had simply outgrown its resources. The food supply was  failing, the forests were felled and the soil began to erode. Without wood for canoes to escape the tribes turned on one another in destructive wars. The Moai were toppled and cannibalism became common.  It's a sobering thought that some say this is a foretaste of the demise of the human race as population growth leads to the consumption of the Earth's limited resources with increasing voracity.