With the help of the idols, the natives built an entire infrastructure.
A new study has definitively resolved one of the greatest archaeological mysteries — how the inhabitants of Easter Island moved the giant stone statues known as moai. The natives transported them in an upright position, rocking them side to side, which created the illusion of walking.
As reported by Archaeology News, researchers analyzed nearly 1,000 statues and concluded that the D-shaped base and forward tilt were specifically designed for their transportation. To test the hypothesis, a team of 18 successfully moved a 4.3-ton replica of a moai 100 meters in 40 minutes using ropes.
This method explains how statues weighing up to 80 tons could cover great distances and debunks previous theories of horizontal transportation. The findings also align with local legends that describe the moai as "walking" to their pedestals. The ancient roads of the island appear to have been part of a unified engineering system that stabilized the statues during movement.
Easter Island, or Rapa Nui, is an island in the southeastern Pacific Ocean, a territory of Chile (along with the uninhabited island of Sala y Gómez, it forms the province and commune of Isla de Pascua in the Valparaíso Region). Along with the Tristan da Cunha archipelago, it is the most remote inhabited island in the world. The distance to the continental coast of Chile is 3,514 km, and to Pitcairn Island, the nearest inhabited location, it is 2,075 km. The island was discovered by Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen on Easter Sunday in 1722.
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