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Volume 633 Issue 8029, 12 September 2024

Island life

The cover shows some of the imposing moai statues on the island of Rapa Nui (also known as Easter Island), one of the most remote inhabited places in the world. People have been living on the island from at least the thirteenth century, but key aspects of its history remain controversial, in particular whether the inhabitants were responsible for ‘ecocide’ — over-exploiting their natural resources and so inducing a self-inflicted population collapse in the 1600s — and whether there was any contact between the Polynesian ancestors of the inhabitants and Indigenous Americans. In this week’s issue, J. Víctor Moreno-Mayar, Anna-Sapfo Malaspinas and colleagues suggest answers to both these questions. By analysing the genomes of 15 people who lived on the island between 1670 and 1950, the researchers infer a steadily growing population that would have declined only after Europeans arrived in 1722 and the Peruvian slave raids of the 1860s, thereby providing no evidence of a self-imposed population decline in the seventeenth century. They also found evidence that the ancient Polynesians who peopled Rapa Nui interbred with Indigenous Americans between 1250 and 1430, long before Europeans reached the island.

Cover image: William Mulloy Library, Rapa Nui Museum

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