Does Easter Island have natives?

The Rapa Nui are the indigenous Polynesian people of Easter Island. The easternmost Polynesian culture, the descendants of the original people of Easter Island make up about 60\% of the current Easter Island population and have a significant portion of their population residing in mainland Chile.

What is the current population ethnicity of Rapa Nui?

Polynesian
The Rapanui are a Polynesian people, the majority of whom live on Easter Island. A few hundred live on mainland Chile and in Tahiti. As of 2013, only 2,553 people self-identified as Rapanui, comprising about 0.3 per cent of Chile’s total indigenous population.

What happened to the natives of Easter Island?

In this story, made popular by geographer Jared Diamond’s bestselling book Collapse, the Indigenous people of the island, the Rapanui, so destroyed their environment that, by around 1600, their society fell into a downward spiral of warfare, cannibalism, and population decline.

Who originally lived on Easter Island?

The Austronesian Polynesians, who first settled the island, are likely to have arrived from the Marquesas Islands from the west. These settlers brought bananas, taro, sugarcane, and paper mulberry, as well as chickens and Polynesian rats. The island at one time supported a relatively advanced and complex civilization.

How many heads are on Easter Island?

Archaeologists have documented 887 of the massive statues, known as moai, but there may up as many as 1,000 of them on the island. Most were carved from volcanic rock between 1100 and 1680.

Do the Easter Island heads actually have bodies?

As a part of the Easter Island Statue Project, the team excavated two moai and discovered that each one had a body, proving, as the team excitedly explained in a letter, “that the ‘heads’ on the slope here are, in fact, full but incomplete statues.”