The painstaking process of science
The history of Easter Island is being re-written right before our very eyes. A recent, popular, theory held that the island suffered from a man-made ecological disaster that wiped out the native civilization, but now the argument is being made that the disaster was actually rodent-made and capped off by genocide by foreign invaders. American Scientist has a very interesting article on this new development. I don’t know who’s right, although I generally find man-made genocide a plausible explanation, but what’s really interesting is the rigorous process that advanced knowledge about the island’s history that the article chronicles. Read it and marvel.
