After centuries of debate, scientists think they may have solved the mystery of why the ancient people of Easter Island abandoned work on the statues they are famous for and suddenly disappeared, as if they all went to the store for milk and failed to return.
“We’ve found evidence that the Easter Islander population was decimated as the result of a dispute over the regulation of large sugary drinks,” said Bob Payne, lead archeologist for a university research team that based its findings on an extensive study of the island’s ancient sporting venues, movie theatres, and fast-food restaurant parking lots.
“It’s clear that the island’s statue carvers, who’d been unhappy with one particular local chief ever since he’d tried to institute noise restrictions limiting the amount of stone chipping they could do on nights and weekends, had finally had enough,” said Payne.
Scattered all over the island are piles of what were originally thought to be stone chips from the quarries. But Payne’s team discovered that the “chips” are actually the broken shards of returnable bottles, which he believes points to some kind of deadly deception on the part of the carvers.
“It’s likely the carvers lured the chief’s allies – consisting mostly of those who could afford to commission more than one or two statues a year — to one of the more popular fast-food restaurants and then quickly did them in with obesity-causing 16 oz. drinks,” said Payne.
After that, Payne surmises, the carvers, having dispatched the people whose investments generated most of the jobs on the island, had no more incentive to finish the statues, which, it turned out, worked only moderately well as a form of currency, especially if you needed change.
“With little reason to stay, the survivors all probably sailed, unknowingly, to Peru, aboard large Polynesian voyaging canoes whose navigators’ skills were not up to those of their contemporaries,” Payne said.
There does appear to be a happy ending to the story, though.
According to Payne, most of the stone carvers settled on the slopes of the Andes, where home prices were reasonable, taxes were a fraction of what they’d been on Easter Island, and the first primitive convenience stores offered sugary drinks in any size you wanted.
Equally fortunate, Payne said, the Easter Island survivors’ skill as carvers, coupled with their deep understanding of noise abatement ordinances, has allowed them to spread across the globe, to the street corners of virtually every major city, where they have flourished as the producers of the Andean flute music we all know so well today.
Bob, you are a crazy man and we appreciate it.