In Jared Diamond’s “Twilight at Easter,” we travel across the mysterious Easter Island as he describes the most intriguing fact about this place: the island consists of monolithic stone statues that had once been found all over the island despite the apparent lack of means to create them or ways of transporting them to their different coastal locations. This central mystery of standing statues had been explored since the earliest recorded European contact by Jacob Rogeveen in 1722. While the mystery initially centered on why and how the statues were built on this denuded island, Diamond explores the mystery in modern terms and focuses on the environmental context, in particular the lack of trees that would have been used to sustain life in this remote place. Yet apart from the historical and scientific explanation of these people – seemingly so remote from us –Diamond makes striking and apparently strange direct comparisons with our way of life. In particular he mentions......
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