taras said:You are either missing (until 10pm on Thursday) or have missed Horizon investigating Easter Island on BBC2.
mejane said:You're probably correct, James.
I'm not very good with visual formats* so I don't tend to take much attention to TV, but the impression I got was certainly "we introduced desease to a perfect community - we bad!"
I always thought that the civilization of Easter Island collapsed long before Europeans arrived as they had cut down all all the native trees on the island to "please the gods" by building and transporting those huge efigies (sp?) ... the arrival of the Spaniads and their viruses was just the last resort.
I could be wrong, of course
Jane.
*I'm not blind or "visually impaired"; I just think in terms of sound... I may be weird.
MadCat said:I felt that the depletion of the palm trees would more likely have resulted from climatic changes (which may have also caused the depletion of fish and birds in the area).
And one of their major exports was Highlanders and the Scots poor to the West Indies and the Americas! As bonded slaves.jamesveldon said:On the subject of slavery: Scotland was one of the major european slave tradors. You dont get that on shortbread tins.
The whole point of some museums, particularily the 'great' museums of Empire, is to contain and neutralise otherness, alieness and the 'savage.' To make it safe, for repressed and stunted petit bourgesois sensibilities.Mana said:While we are on the subject of Easter Island I'd just like to say how totally unimpressed I am with the positioning of the British Museum's statue. It's on a big pedestal next to the coffee shop. The coffee shop! Jeez. The lighting in that area is appalling and so you can barely see the petroglyghs carved on the statue's back. This particular statue is in an excellent state of preservation (due to it being buried) and you can see feck all of 'classic' moai features. Ok, rant over
AndroMan said:And one of their major exports was Highlanders and the Scots poor to the West Indies and the Americas! As bonded slaves.
Bilderberger said:Errrrrrrrrr...........I think the programme made the point that the eyes were looking upward......heaven-ward........above the normal mortal day-to-day human.
Or did I just imagine this?
Bilderberger said:I see your point - I just took "over people" as meaning upwards. Not really sure what they meant now - and, yes, the simulations were looking quite horizontal.
Off topic - "The Empire Never Ended"..............I am just finishing VALIS at the moment. What a crazy book. I don't read sci-fi as a rule but gave this a try and have been pretty impressed.
The inscrutable and mysterious stone giants of Easter Island have had archaeologists scratching their heads for generations, puzzling over the massive monoliths and the South Pacific natives that carved them centuries ago.
Now there's another riddle: whether two of the legendary sculptures -- peddled by a Miami art gallery on behalf of a one-time aide to former Chilean strongman Augusto Pinochet -- are authentic artifacts that may have been spirited illegally from Chile.
Or are they fakes?
Easter Island Cancer Drug
4/6/2004 5:25 AM
By: Medstar.com
Far-away Easter Island has become an exotic port-of-call for medical researchers. First, they discovered a drug made from its bacteria can help kidney transplant patients. Now a similar drug may be a kidney cancer fighter.
Ed Onley, 68, gets a blood test every week to monitor his treatment. Two years ago, he lost a kidney to cancer. Last year tests found it had spread to his lungs. He’s in a study for an experimental drug called CCI-779.
“I play golf,” Ed said. “I live my normal life so I think it's going very well."
CCI-779 is a derivative of an anti-rejection drug found in the soil of Easter Island, a tiny Pacific island best known for its giant stone carvings. The drug appears to disrupt the growth and survival signals of cancer cells.
“By blocking the activity of a key protein, it's able to halt cancer growth and cause tumor regressions in animal models,” Medical Oncologist Dr. Gary Hudes said.
So far, Ed's results are encouraging. “After eight weeks, I had a CAT scan taken and it showed significant improvement. My cancer nodules had reduced in size, and of course we're hopeful that that continues."
Patients don't seem to be sidelined by severe side effects.
“So it doesn't slow them down too much, and that's what we really seek in a cancer treatment,” Dr. Hudes said. “Not only to control the cancer, hopefully extend life, but also to make that life a quality life, without too many compromises."
The earth beneath the mysterious Easter Island statues may help defeat kidney cancer.
A new phase of this research is set to begin in Summer 2004 at 100 sites worldwide.
For more information and to learn more about renal cell carcinoma and clinical trials, call 1-800-4-CANCER.
CCI-779 for Cancer
More than 30 years ago, researchers discovered a bacterial-produced compound in soil samples taken from Easter Island. The natural compound, given the name rapamycin (sirolimus), is now an important immunosuppressant medication. More recently, researchers began testing analogues, or chemical derivatives, of rapamycin. In laboratory tests, one of those analogues, CCI-779, was found to have activity against several types of solid tumors.
CCI-779 appears to work by inhibiting the activity of a certain protein (mTOR) that regulate growth of cancer cells. Researchers will soon begin phase III trials of CCI-779 for patients with kidney cancer. Participants will be randomized into one of three study groups. One group will get only the CCI-779. A second group will get only alpha-interferon, a standard medication for kidney cancer. The third group will get a combination of CCI-779 and alpha-interferon. The international trial will take place at sites in the U.S. and worldwide.
The Food and Drug Administration has placed CCI-779 on fast-track development for kidney cancer. The drug is also being tested for several other types of cancer, such as multiple myeloma, pancreatic cancer, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, prostate cancer, breast cancer, several types of brain tumors, melanoma, and lung cancer.
New Easter Island theory presented
A University of Hawaii anthropologist and colleagues are blaming rats and Dutch traders for the mysterious abandonment of Easter Island.
Nearly all Polynesians on the South Pacific island, who built hundreds of 10-ton stone statues, inexplicably vanished. Conjecture has included the natives deforested the island to transport the statues, triggering catastrophic erosion, USA Today reported. According to the theory, the remaining inhabitants then were decimated during a cannibalistic civil war in about 1650.
But anthropologist Terry Hunt blames the Polynesian rat for deforesting the 66-square-mile island's 16 million palm trees.
He and his colleagues told USA Today the disappearance of Easter Islanders probably was caused by visiting 18th-centruy Dutch traders, who took diseases and slave raiding to the island.
Easter Island is located more than 2,000 miles from the nearest population centers, making it one of the most isolated places on Earth.
Hunt presented his findings during an American Anthropological Association meeting last week in Washington.
http://www.physorg.com/news8793.html
Easter Island’s Controversial Collapse: More To The Story Than Deforestation?
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 095435.htm
The famous stone sculptures on Easter Island where Dr. Stevenson and Rapanui scientist Sonia Haoa have worked with Earthwatch volunteers for the last 20 years to uncover new twists in the story of Easter Island. (Credit: Charles H. Whitfield)
ScienceDaily (Feb. 18, 2009) — Easter Island (Rapa Nui) has gained recognition in recent years due in part to a book that used it as a model for societal collapse from bad environmental practices—ringing alarm bells for those concerned about the health of the planet today. But that’s not the whole story, says Dr. Chris Stevenson, an archaeologist who has studied the island—famous for its massive stone statues—with a Rapa Nui scientist, Sonia Haoa, and Earthwatch volunteers for nearly 20 years.
The ancient Rapanui people did abuse their environment, but they were also developing sustainable practices—innovating, experimenting, trying to adapt to a risky environment—and they would still be here in traditional form if it weren’t for the diseases introduced by European settlers in the 1800s.
“Societies don’t just go into a tailspin and self-destruct,” says Stevenson, an archaeologist at the Virginia Department of Historic Resources. “They can and do adapt, and they emerge in new ways. The key is to put more back into the system than is taken out.”
While evidence suggests the Rapa Nui people cut down 6,000,000 trees in 300 years, for example, they were also developing new technological and agricultural practices along the way—such as fertilization techniques to restore the health of the soil and rock gardens to protect the plants. As a result, every rock on Easter Island has probably been moved three or four times, Stevenson said.
“The story that Chris’s research team is piecing together on Easter Island with the help of Earthwatch volunteers—rock by rock, sample by sample—is one that offers us hope in the human spirit of innovation, and the power of people to change. What a timely lesson,” said Ed Wilson, President and CEO of Earthwatch.
Other archaeological evidence indicates that the Rapanui people radically changed their societal structure from one dominated by chiefs to one that was much more egalitarian in nature, too, which effectively leveled out their consumption patterns.
“That was the big adjustment that gets the population back to being more or less sustainable,” Stevenson says. “It was like telling today’s corporate head that the company can’t afford the million-dollar remodel of his office,” Stevenson says. “But it didn’t matter because BANG, the Europeans arrive with their dirty diseases”: the final nail in the coffin, he said.
Giant statues give up hat mystery
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8236349.stm
By Sudeep Chand
Science reporter, BBC News
The ancient statues have giant red hats
Archaeologists have solved an ancient mystery surrounding the famous Easter Island statues.
At 2,500 miles off the coast of Chile, the island is one of the world's most remote places inhabited by people.
Up to 1,000 years ago, the islanders started putting giant red hats on the statues.
The research team, from the University of Manchester and University College London, think the hats were rolled down from an ancient volcano.
Dr Colin Richards and Dr Sue Hamilton are the first British archaeologists to work on the island since 1914.
They pieced together a series of clues to discover how the statues got their red hats. An axe, a road, and an ancient volcano led to their findings.
Dr Richards said: "We know the hats were rolled along the road made from a cement of compressed red scoria dust."
Each hat, weighing several tonnes, was carved from volcanic rock. They were placed on the heads of the famous statues all around the coast of the island.
Precisely how and why the hats were attached is unknown.
Like an altar
An axe was found in pristine condition next to the hats. The scientists think it might be an ancient offering.
A ceremonial axe, known as an adze, was found next to the hats
Dr Richards told BBC News: "These hats run all the way down the side of the volcano into the valley.
"We can see they were carefully placed. The closer you get to the volcano, the greater the number.
"It's like a church; you can't just walk straight to the altar.
"The Polynesians saw the landscape as a living thing, and after they carved the rock the spirits entered the statues."
Dr Richards and Dr Hamilton are joint directors of the "Rapa Nui (Easter Island) Landscapes of Construction Project". They will be working on the island over the next five years.
Dr Richards added: "We will look to date the earliest statues. Potentially this could rewrite Polynesian history."
rynner2 said:I never thought there was any mystery about the hats.
This sounds like someone trying to justfy their grant money...