"Based on a 5-year excavation of two Moai found within the Easter Island quarry called Rano Raraku, the Easter Island Statue Project released the first definitive study to reveal the quarry as a complex landscape and link soil fertility, agriculture, quarrying and the sacred nature of the Moai. Chemistry testing suggests the soil in the quarry itself was made more fertile by the act of quarrying, with traces of taro, banana and sweet potato in the area. " Source: Science Daily.
"...Ancient Rapanui carvers worked at the behest of the elite ruling class to carve nearly 1,000 Moai because they, and the community at large, believed the statues capable of producing agricultural fertility and thereby critical food supplies, according to a new study from Jo Anne Van Tilburg, director of the Easter Island Statue Project, recently published in Journal of Archaeological Science."
2014 tourist video showing the Rano Raraku quarry. Good views, but the audio's not the best.
"New images from the 2012 excavation of Easter Island’s iconic statues reveal the renowned heads are not only connected to giant bodies, but the bodies are covered in mysterious designs and symbols [petroglyphs], which researchers have likened to tattoos." Source: Ancient Origins (2018).
Note: This is fairly old news. The statue's buried bodies were being excavated back in 2010 and the petroglyphs were clearly visible then, according to this 2012 Live Science story. The petroglyphs can be seen in a photo accompanying the story and in the video report above.
Rock art has been discovered all over Easter Island and something like 300 sites were known back in the 1980s, according to the Easter Island Statue Project (EISP). Whatever the case, it wouldn't be surprising if the designs on the enigmatic statues were intended to represent tattoos. "Tattoo (tatau) is an ancient Polynesian and Micronesian practice that is a deeply traditional part of social, economic, and aesthetic life," according to the EISP.
Easter Island is famous for its monolithic stone heads, but the island also has a few prehistoric or at least aboriginal caves which are fairly obscure. I think the video above shows the Ana te Pahu Cave, aka the "Banana Cave," named after the banana trees growing around it, but I could be wrong about that. I haven't been able to find much information about the cave beyond some tourist-oriented sites and they usually don't include much archaeological detail. If Vic Stefanu is correct in the video when he says that the cave was occupied around 1000 AD, then it can only be called "prehistoric" in a relative sense. At that time, for example, Europe was in the Middle Ages and Japan was already a couple centuries into the Heian period.
"It's possible that the Birdman practices had been going on during the reign of the statue cult; however, it eventually took over as the predominate religion on the island and was still in practice up untill 1866-67 [when it was suppressed, naturally, by Christian missionaries]. High on the rim of the crater known as Rano Kau was the ceremonial village of Orongo. Built to worship the god of fertility, Makemake, it became the site of a grueling competition." Source: Mysterious Places.
"One of the most famous motifs on Easter Island is that of the Birdman, a therianthropic figure, half man and half bird, connected to cult events at the sacred site of Orongo," according to the Bradshaw Foundation.
Note: "The prehistory of Australia is the period between the first human habitation of the Australian continent and the colonization of Australia in 1788 which marks the start of consistent documentation of Australia. This period is estimated to have lasted between 40,000 and 60,000 years." Source: Wikipedia.
Prehistoric Australia had its share of giant creatures like the "thunder bird" Genyornis and the bizarre Thylacoleo, a carnivorous marsupial the size of a lion, and the first humans who settled in Australia may have encountered Megalania, a huge predatory monitor lizard thought to have disappeared about 50,000 years ago. Also known as the "giant ripper lizard," Megalania" is the largest terrestrial lizard known to have existed." (Wikipedia)
According to the BBC (2011), the venomous Megalania "could easily have caught prey of twice its own weight, and could have tackled animals of up to 10 times its own weight," so it wouldn't have had any trouble taking on a human being. Growing up to 23 feet long and weighing over a thousand pounds, "a fully grown giant ripper lizard would be able to tackle even the largest Diprotodon," a hippopotamus-sized marsupial. Aboriginal humans armed with little more than wooden spears would have had little chance against one of these predatory lizards.
It would be interesting to find out if some of the legends of the Australian aborigines could be traced back to prehistoric encounters with the Megalania. It's probably impossible to know, but Aboriginal mythology is full of creatures said to lurk in "swamps, billabongs [seasonal river channels], creeks, riverbeds, and waterholes." The Aborigines have at least two lizard deities: Adnoartina, the lizard guard of Uluru, and Mangar-kunjer-kunja, a lizard god who is thought to have created humans, but they hold protective and generative roles. If it's remembered at all, I'm guessing that Megalania would appear in Aboriginal legends as some kind of mythological monster.
"A new study from ANU indicates the most likely route the ancestors of Aboriginal people took to enter Australia for the first time tens of thousands of years ago." Source: Archaeology News Network.
"Co-lead researcher Shimona Kealy said these people probably travelled through Indonesia's northern islands, into New Guinea and then Australia, which were part of a single continent between 50,000 and 70,000 years ago, when sea levels were 25-50 metres below the current level."
"Nan Madol is an archaeological site adjacent to the eastern shore of the island of Pohnpei [in Micronesia]," according to Wikipedia. "...Nan Madol was the ceremonial and political seat of the Saudeleur Dynasty, which united Pohnpei's estimated 25,000 people until about 1628. Set apart between the main island of Pohnpei and Temwen Island, it was a scene of human activity as early as the first or second century AD. By the 8th or 9th century, islet construction had started, with construction of the distinctive megalithic architecture beginning 1180–1200 AD ... The earliest settlers on the island were probably Lapita culture people from the Southeast Solomon islands or the Vanuatu archipelago."
"Off the coast of a remote Micronesian island lay the ruins of a once-great city of man-made stone islands that inspired the city of R’lyeh in H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos." Source: Atlas Obscura. (1)
"Impressive in their own right, these ruins represent the remains of megalithic architecture on an unparalleled scale in Micronesia ... Evidence of the earliest human activity dates back to the first or second century BC. The construction of artificial islets started probably about 8th and 9th century AD. However, the megalithic structures were built in period of 12th to 13th century, about the same time as the stone construction of the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, or Angkor Wat in Cambodia."
(1) I have no idea how accurate the Lovecraft connection is here. According to Wikipedia, "the Polish ethnographer and oceanographer Jan Kubary (1846–1896) made the first detailed description of Nan Madol in 1874," so Lovecraft (1890 - 1937), a fanatical antiquarian, could easily have been aware of the site. In his classic story The Call of Cthulhu, the sunken city of R'lyeh is located in the southern Pacific, though at different coordinates.
This isn't ancient history, but who cares? I love maritime archaeology and the story of the Batavia shipwreck, mutiny and massacre is dramatic and bloody.
"On the morning of the fourth of June 1629, the Batavia was wrecked on Morning Reef, on the Houtman Abrolhos (Lat. 28º 29.422S, Long. 113 º 47.603E), off the coast of Western Australia. She was the first of the Dutch ships lost off the west coast of Australia. The shipwreck was a prelude to an extraordinary tragedy." Source: Western Australian Museum.
I'm not even going to try to summarize what happened next, but this is one of the craziest and most brutal sea stories I've ever run across. Highly recommended.
Video from 2010. Much of the evidence presented in this video has apparently been disproven by later research.
The theory that the ancient Polynesians reached South America before Columbus is based, in part, on chickens and sweet potatoes.
"Among the intriguing indications that contact might have been made between Polynesians and the native peoples of South America was the supposed pre-Columbian presence of non-native chickens, allegedly introduced to the continent by seafarers from South Pacific islands. More evidence comes from the ubiquity of the sweet potato, a South American native, in the South Pacific—it was already widespread throughout the islands by the time James Cook sailed into the region in 1770." Source: National Geographic 2014.
Since this National Geographic article was written, DNA research has apparently disproved the idea that the chickens studied in South America provided a link with Polynesia:
"Researchers sequenced mitochondrial DNA from 22 chicken bones found at Polynesian archaeological sites and 122 feathers from modern chickens living on islands across the South Pacific. They used an enzyme to remove any contamination by modern DNA that may have clouded the results of earlier studies. When the team compared the 'cleaned-up' DNA of Polynesian chickens with that of ancient and modern South American chickens, they found the two groups were genetically distinct." (National Geographic)
As for the sweet-potato connection, it doesn't hold up, either. According to Science Daily (2018), "New evidence shows that sweet potatoes arose before there were any humans around to eat them. The findings also suggest that the sweet potato crossed the ocean from America to Polynesia without any help from people. The discovery raises doubts about the existence of pre-Columbian contacts between Polynesia and the American continent."
Video from 2014. Whether they got there before Columbus or not, the Polynesians definitely had the capability to reach South America.
According to a 2014 Science Magazine article, "Polynesians from Easter Island and natives of South America met and mingled long before Europeans voyaged the Pacific, according to a new genetic study of living Easter Islanders."
A later (2017) study, however, found that the people living on Easter Island before Columbus were genetically isolated:
"A study published Thursday in the journal Current Biology found only evidence of Polynesian DNA in human remains on the island that predate European contact in 1722." Source: New York Times (2017).
What's the truth? Who knows? The two DNA studies involving Easter Island directly contradict each other, so it would appear that DNA results aren't as ironclad as we have been led to believe. Whatever the case, though, it still seems highly likely, at least to me, that Polynesians reached the New World a long time ago. Considering their ability to make long sea voyages and spread from island to island across the ocean, I'd be amazed if some of them didn't make it all the way to South America. What kind of impact they had is another question.
"The ancestors of the Hawaiian race came not from the islands of the South Pacific – for the immigrants from that direction were late arrivals there – but from the northern direction (welau lani), that is, from the land of Kalonakikeke, now known as Alaska.
Note: According to the legend, the ancient Hawaiians traveled from Taiwan to Alaska and then to Hawaii. The distance from Taiwan to Alaska is over 4,000 miles and the distance from Alaska to Hawaii is around 2600 miles, so that would have been an epic voyage, to say the least. This is all mythology, of course, but it does reflect a general background of prehistoric migration across the Pacific. And it's possible that the Hawaiians are related to the prehistoric people of Taiwan, an island with a deep Stone Age background.
Video from 2016.
Interestingly enough, all of these related Polynesian cultures may actually have originated in Taiwan and the surrounding area. Taiwan, originally attached to China until rising sea-levels cut it off from the mainland around 10,000 years ago, was originally populated by Paleolithic farmers. According to Wikipedia, "They are believed to be the ancestors of today's Taiwanese aborigines, whose languages belong to the Austronesian language family, but show much greater diversity than the rest of the family, which spans a huge area from Maritime Southeast Asia west to Madagascar and east as far as New Zealand, Hawaii and Easter Island. This has led linguists to propose Taiwan as the urheimat [homeland] of the family, from which seafaring peoples dispersed across Southeast Asia and the Pacific and Indian Oceans."
Maybe the legends of Hookumu Ka Lani & Hookumu Ka Honua reflect, in a distorted way, the real history after all.