The collapse of the Rapa Nui society on Easter Island in the South Pacific Ocean may have been triggered by changes in the Earth's climate 500 years ago. The Rapa Nui people inhabited the remote ...

Rapa Nui, sometimes known by its colonial name of Easter Island, is perhaps an extreme example, being one of the most isolated places on Earth. It was peopled more than 800 years ago by Polynesian ...

When British explorer James Cook arrived at Rapa Nui — known to him as Easter Island — in 1774, he described small bands of malnourished people barely sustained by a barren, treeless strip of ...

More than 800 years ago, Polynesians sailed thousands of kilometres across the Pacific Ocean to one of the most remote islands on Earth, Rapa Nui. Now, a study of ancient genomes from descendants ...

By the time British captain James Cook arrived in 1774, the Rapa Nui population had plummeted and was decimated further in the 1800s by smallpox epidemics and Peruvian slave raids. Chile annexed ...

The moai at Easter island, built by the Rapa Nui people TravelingOtter via ... when British explorer James Cook arrived to find the statues in apparent ruins. And despite previous accounts ...

Archaeologists have long assumed that the ancient society that erected the colossal Moai figures on Chile’s Rapa Nui ... It was only in 1774 that James Cook found the giant statues in ruins ...

Why Trust Us? For decades, archeologists have debated whether the writing system of Rapa Nui (Easter Island), known as Rongorongo, was invented independently or influenced by Europeans.

But barely a trace remains of what is Rapa Nui’s most tantalising cultural legacy: a mysterious form of writing called Rongorongo. James Lyon/Getty How to read Rongorongo (Credit: James Lyon ...