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Article: Overpopulation and the Fate of Easter Island.(Brief Article)(Letter to the Editor)
- Article from:
- The World and I
- Article date:
- September 1, 2001
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2001 News World Communications, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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To the Editor:
I discovered your splendid magazine at a bookshop in Singapore when looking for reading matter for the trip home. I especially enjoyed Ambassador Eckert's article "The Mysterious Moai" [March 2001, p. 186]. He helps to put the amazing statues (moai) in geographic and cultural context. Unfortunately, Eckert did not tell the story of the mystery behind the natives.
What had happened to the Polynesian peoples who first colonized this remote piece of paradise? The reconstructed story is told in Ecology by Stanley Dodson et al. (Oxford University Press). It is thought that they arrived in the fifth century C.E. The pollen record shows that ...