段落A

Easter Island, or Rapu Nui as it is known locally, is home to several hundred ancient human statues – the moai. After this remote Pacific island was settled by the Polynesians, it remained isolated for centuries. All the energy and resources that went into the moai – some of which are ten metres tall and weigh over 7,000 kilos – came from the island itself. Yet when Dutch explorers landed in 1722, they met a Stone Age culture. The moai were carved with stone tools, then transported for many kilometres, without the use of animals or wheels, to massive stone platforms. The identity of the moai builders was in doubt until well into the twentieth century. Thor Heyerdahl, the Norwegian ethnographer and adventurer, thought the statues had been created by pre-Inca peoples from Peru. Bestselling Swiss author Erich von D?niken believed they were built by stranded extraterrestrials. Modern science – linguistic, archaeological and genetic evidence – has definitively proved the moai builders were Polynesians, but not how they moved their creations. Local folklore maintains that the statues walked, while researchers have tended to assume the ancestors dragged the statues somehow, using ropes and logs.

段落A：复活节岛

复活节岛，当地称为Rapu Nui，拥有数百座古老的人形雕像——摩艾。这个偏远的太平洋岛屿在波利尼西亚人定居后，孤立了数百年。所有投入到摩艾中的能量和资源都来自岛上自身。然而，当荷兰探险家于1722年登陆时，他们遇到的是一个石器时代文化。摩艾是用石器雕刻的，然后没有使用动物或车轮，却被运送到数公里之外的巨大石台上。直到20世纪，对摩艾建造者的身份存在疑问。挪威民族学家和冒险家托尔·海耶达尔认为这些雕像是由秘鲁的印加前人建造的。畅销书作家埃里希·冯·丹尼肯则认为它们是外星人留下的。现代科学——包括语言学、考古学和遗传学的证据——已经明确证明摩艾的建造者是波利尼西亚人，但并不能解释他们如何搬动这些雕像。当地的民间传说称雕像会行走，而研究人员倾向于认为祖先们用绳索和木材来拖动雕像。

段落B

When the Europeans arrived, Rapa Nui was grassland, with only a few scrawny trees. In the 1970s and 1980s, though, researchers found pollen preserved in lake sediments, which proved the island had been covered in lush palm forests for thousands of years. Only after the Polynesians arrived did those forests disappear. US scientist Jared Diamond believes that the Rapanui people – descendants of Polynesian settlers – wrecked their own environment. They had unfortunately settled on an extremely fragile island – dry, cool, and too remote to be properly fertilised by windblown volcanic ash. When the islanders cleared the forests for firewood and farming, the forests didn’t grow back. As trees became scarce and they could no longer construct wooden canoes for fishing, they ate birds. Soil erosion decreased their crop yields. Before Europeans arrived, the Rapanui had descended into civil war and cannibalism, he maintains. The collapse of their isolated civilisation, Diamond writes, is a ‘worst-case scenario for what may lie ahead of us in our own future’.

段落B：环境灾变

当欧洲人到达时，复活节岛上只剩下一片草地，只有几棵瘦弱的树木。然而，在20世纪70年代和80年代，研究人员在湖泊沉积物中发现了保存下来的花粉，证明几千年来该岛曾覆盖着茂密的棕榈森林。只有波利尼西亚人到达后，这些森林消失了。美国科学家贾里德·戴蒙德认为复活节岛人——波利尼西亚定居者的后裔——毁坏了自己的环境。他们不幸地定居在一个非常脆弱的岛屿上——干燥、寒冷，风吹不到火山灰。当岛上居民砍伐森林用作柴火和农耕时，森林没有重新生长。由于树木稀缺，他们无法再制造木质独木舟用于捕鱼，他们开始吃鸟类。土壤侵蚀导致作物收成减少。在欧洲人到来之前，拉帕努伊人陷入了内战和 cannibalism。戴蒙德认为，他们孤立的文明崩溃是我们未来可能面临的最糟糕情况。

段落C

The moai, he thinks, accelerated the self-destruction. Diamond interprets them as power displays by rival chieftains who, trapped on a remote little island, lacked other ways of asserting their dominance. They competed by building ever bigger figures. Diamond thinks they laid the moai on wooden sledges, hauled over log rails, but that required both a lot of wood and a lot of people. To feed the people, even more land had to be cleared. When the wood was gone and civil war began, the islanders began toppling the moai. By the nineteenth century none were standing.

段落C：摩艾的建造

他认为摩艾加速了自我毁灭。戴蒙德解释说，这些雕像是陷入偏远小岛的竞争酋长们展示权力的方式。他们通过建造越来越大的雕像来竞争。戴蒙德认为他们在木制的雪橇上放置摩艾，并沿着木材轨道拉动，但这需要大量的木材和人力。为了养活人口，他们不得不进一步开垦土地。当木材用尽并开始内战时，岛上居民开始推倒摩艾雕像。到19世纪，岛上已没有一座摩艾雕像屹立。

段落D

Archaeologists Terry Hunt of the University of Hawaii and Carl Lipo of California State University agree that Easter Island lost its lush forests and that it was an ‘ecological catastrophe‘ – but they believe the islanders themselves weren’t to blame. And the moai certainly weren’t. Archaeological excavations indicate that the Rapanui went to heroic efforts to protect the resources of their wind-lashed, infertile fields. They built thousands of circular stone windbreaks and gardened inside them, and used broken volcanic rocks to keep the soil moist. In short, Hunt and Lipo argue, the prehistoric Rapanui were pioneers of sustainable farming.

段落D：考古学家的观点

夏威夷大学的特里·亨特和加利福尼亚州立大学的卡尔·利波考古学家认为复活节岛失去了茂密的森林，是一场"生态灾难"，但他们认为岛上的居民并不应该为此负责。摩艾雕像也不应该受到指责。考古挖掘表明拉帕努伊人为保护荒芜、贫瘠的土地资源做出了巨大努力。他们建造了数千个圆形石质挡风墙，进行园艺，并使用破碎的火山岩保持土壤湿润。亨特和利波认为，史前的拉帕努伊人是可持续农耕的先驱者。

段落E

Hunt and Lipo contend that moai-building was an activity that helped keep the peace between islanders. They also believe that moving the moai required few people and no wood, because they were walked upright. On that issue, Hunt and Lipo say, archaeological evidence backs up Rapanui folklore. Recent experiments indicate that as few as 18 people could, with three strong ropes and a bit of practice, easily manoeuvre a 1,000 kg moai replica a few hundred metres. The figures’ fat bellies tilted them forward, and a D-shaped base allowed handlers to roll and rock them side to side.

段落E：摩艾的运输方式

亨特和利波认为，建造摩艾是一种有助于岛上居民维持和平的活动。他们还认为摩艾的搬运不需要大量人力和木材，因为它们是直立行走的。在这个问题上，亨特和利波表示，考古证据支持拉帕努伊的民间传说。最近的实验表明，只需要18人，三根结实的绳索和一点点练习，就可以轻松将一尊1000千克的摩艾复制品移动几百米。雕像的胖肚子使其向前倾斜，D形底座可使人们将其侧翻摇摆。

段落F

Moreover, Hunt and Lipo are convinced that the settlers were not wholly responsible for the loss of the island’s trees. Archaeological finds of nuts from the extinct Easter Island palm show tiny grooves, made by the teeth of Polynesian rats. The rats arrived along with the settlers, and in just a few years, Hunt and Lipo calculate, they would have overrun the island. They would have prevented the reseeding of the slow-growing palm trees and thereby doomed Rapa Nui’s forest, even without the settlers’ campaign of deforestation. No doubt the rats ate birds’ eggs too. Hunt and Lipo also see no evidence that Rapanui civilisation collapsed when the palm forest did. They think its population grew rapidly and then remained more or less stable until the arrival of the Europeans, who introduced deadly diseases to which islanders had no immunity. Then in the nineteenth century slave traders decimated the population, which shrivelled to 111 people by 1877.

段落F：岛上的灭绝

此外，亨特和利波相信陷害岛上树木的并不完全是定居者本身。消失的复活节岛棕榈树的化石证据显示了波利尼西亚老鼠的牙齿留下的微小凹槽。老鼠与定居者一同抵达，根据亨特和利波的计算，几年时间就会在岛上繁衍生息。它们会阻止慢生长的棕榈树重新种植，从而注定了拉帕努伊的森林灭亡，即使没有定居者的砍伐活动。毫无疑问，老鼠也会吃鸟蛋。亨特和利波也没有发现拉帕努伊文明在棕榈森林消失后崩溃的证据。他们认为岛上的人口迅速增长，然后在欧洲人抵达之前保持相对稳定，欧洲人引入了对岛民没有免疫力的致命疾病。然后在19世纪，奴隶贸易商人大量屠杀了岛上的人口，导致到1877年岛上只剩下111人。

段落G

Hunt and Lipo’s vision, therefore, is one of an island populated by peaceful and ingenious moai builders and careful stewards of the land, rather than by reckless destroyers ruining their own environment and society. ‘Rather than a case of abject failure, Rapu Nui is an unlikely story of success’, they claim. Whichever is the case, there are surely some valuable lessons which the world at large can learn from the story of Rapa Nui.

段落G：结论

亨特和利波的观点是挑战了贾里德·戴蒙德的环境毁灭论。他们认为复活节岛的环境灾变并非由岛上居民的过度开发和摩艾的建造所致，而是一系列因素的综合结果，包括外来物种的入侵和生态系统的演变。他们指出，拉帕努伊人为了适应岛上的环境限制，采取了可持续的农耕和保护土壤的措施。同时，他们对摩艾的建造和搬运方式提出了新的解释，认为这不需要过度的人力和资源。