The history of Easter Island is important because it offers a lesson in long-term survival in an isolated and resource-poor environment. In his review of our book, The Statues That Walked, Paul Bahn makes some potentially misleading assertions (Nature 476, 150–151; 2011).

He implies that we have overlooked other people's work, but those studies are unpublished. We instead acquired our own data, controlling for content and quality.

Our excavations and radiocarbon dating indicate that Easter Island was colonized several centuries later than Bahn contends (T. L. Hunt and C. P. Lipo Science 311, 1603–1606; 2006). Settlement of this and other islands in eastern Polynesia occurred over the past 800–1,000 years. On the basis of new evidence, most archaeologists working on Easter Island now reject the notion that its population collapsed before the arrival of Europeans.

It is generally agreed that the island was almost completely deforested by the time Europeans arrived in 1722. We never argued that rats were the only cause of deforestation, which happened over centuries and resulted from people burning vegetation for agriculture, and from rat predation of seeds.

Although there is skeletal evidence for some violence on the island, only a few examples indicate mortal wounding. As we explain in our book, the statues were a focus of competitive signalling that staved off lethal violence.