For years, researchers have debated how the Indigenous people of Easter Island, or Rapa Nui, managed to move their giant ...

Based on 3D modeling and testing on a moai replica, researchers think that small groups of people may have used ropes to ...

The "walking moai hypothesis" could end a long-time debate over how ancient engineers moved these iconic statues around ...

For decades, textbooks and documentaries have claimed the Rapa Nui people destroyed their own island - cutting every tree to move their stone statues and dooming themselves to extinction. But that ...

Evidence is now stronger than ever that the mysterious population collapse of Rapa Nui never actually happened. Recent ...

The mystery of how the roughly 130,000 pound statues traveled from quarry to resting place may be solved.

Easter Island statues, traditionally known as moai on the remote island of Rapa Nui in the South Pacific, are some of the ...

Although rapamycin eventually became a billion-dollar drug, many of the people instrumental to its discovery—most importantly, the people of Rapa Nui—have been largely forgotten in both a monetary and ...

An antibiotic discovered on Easter Island in 1964 sparked a billion-dollar pharmaceutical success story. Yet the history told about this “miracle drug” has completely left out the people and politics ...

Rapa Nui (Easter Island) is famous for its stone statues (moai) shown above. It is one of the most remote landmasses ever colonized by humans during pre-industrial times, sitting 1,290 miles from the ...

(The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.) Ted Powers, University of California, Davis (THE CONVERSATION) An antibiotic ...