Easter Island

At www.robertschoch.com there is a link to a pdf of an article he had published elsewhere, The Mysteries of Easter Island. Robert Schoch, wearing a hat that is almost a replica of the hat that David Rohl favoured when in Egypt, is co-author, with Gary Baddeley. It begins by querying how old the Easter Island statues might be – were they all erected in fairly recent times, and asks were they constructed by Polynesian voyagers or are they considerably older. Schoch, looking at the weathering on some of the statues and the fact some of them are buried up their chins in sediment, which is a considerable depth, dismisses the idea of landslides of mud and sediment and uses a bit of classic geological detective work – or the impression is that is what he applies. The conclusion is reached that the statues could be sorted by style and the amount of erosion, oldest to recent, and this they say comes up with the fact the older statues are made largely from hard basalts whereas the more recent examples were made from volcanic tuff. The quarry for the latter is obvious but that for the basalt is nowhere, they claim – where could they have quarried the stone? For some reason they reach the conclusion the quarry must now be submerged – and changes in sea level are responsible. This means the older statues are ancient and a finger is pointed towards the end of the Ice Age – and we are again in controversial territory. They claim the end of the Ice Age involved a massive rise in the oceans and therefore this is when the basalt quarry was flooded – which will take a team of divers to discover. However, the end of the Ice Age may not be the only time sea levels were re-configured – the events at 6200 and 3100BC spring to mind including as they do a couple of hundred years of climate deterioration. Looking at the World Atlas of the Oceans Easter Island is one of several volcanoes growing up from the bottom of the ocean and therefore it would be difficult to think in terms of a larger land mass – in fairly recent times. What is intriguing is a long ridge of submerged land that is marked as the 'Nazca Ridge' – a more interesting proposal and not too many miles distant from Easter Island. This is further exacerbated by reason the rongorongo markings bear an uncanny resemblance to the markings on the ground in the Nazca desert of South America – at the further end of the ridge. Unfortunately, the coast of South America appears to have been subject to uplift during the Holocene – the opposite to submergence. What we need to bear in mind here is that Schoch favours the idea there was an otherwise unknown Ice Age civilisation and Easter Island sinking beneath the waves is all part of the spin.