[MUSIC PLAYING]
NARRATOR: Dawn breaks over the giants of Easter Island.
This is the most mysterious place on earth,
adrift in the Pacific 2 and 1/2 thousand miles from the coast
of South America.
For 250 years, these huge stone statues
have challenged explorers.
Who are these giants?
Where did they come from?
Some weigh 80 tons.
Was this how they were moved?
Why did the statue builders suddenly down tools
and abandon their work forever?
Mysteries from the files of Arthur C. Clarke,
author of "2001" and inventor of the communication satellite.
Now in retreat in Sri Lanka, he ponders the riddles
of this and other world's.
There can hardly be a place on earth
that's been as extensively studied as Easter Island.
Archaeologists have sketched, measured, and mapped
more than 19,000 sites, but they had
to jostle for space with anthropologists,
agriculturalists, historians, seismologists, and plenty
of other experts, not to mention TV crews.
But no one can hope to answer the central riddle
of this mysterious island.
No written history from the age of giants has ever been found.
So we'll never know the purpose of
these extraordinary sculptures.
NARRATOR: The statues on their rock platforms
are called moai by the islanders, the Rapa Nui people.
no one knows why they were built in the hundreds
across the island, but 250 years of investigation
have pried some of their secrets from them.
Some wear head gear, some are half buried,
some look to the heavens, some stand in groups.
For anthropologist, Jo Anne Van Tilburg,
this is a place of pilgrimage.
The giants were hone from the rock
of the Rano Raraku volcano.
It's one of the wonders of the mysterious world.
This amazing place is the place of creation.
This is the quarry on Easter Island, Rano
Raraku, where nearly all of the statues on the island
were made.
The Rapa Nui people made these statues
using a Stone Age technology.
They used stone tools and hacked into the stone with those stone
tools in a prescribed manner, so that it was very clear what
each individual was doing.
It was a very well organized work effort.
They first sort of hacked out, cut out, a rectangular block,
shaped it slightly, and then undercut it,
moved it out, and began to finish
some of the details later.
The Rapa Nui people believe the moai are the living
face of their ancestors.
I think that these moai represent family units
and the effort of family units to move forward,
to get a position, in their culture,
to push themselves upward with this huge status symbol
that they carved and moved.
The longer I work here, the less I know.
That much I'm certain about.
The more answers I think I've got,
the more questions develop.
It just seems to me like this is a place of never
ending, enigmatic thinking.
This is the place of-- it's been called a place of mystery.
It is.
I think there are questions we will never know how to form.
There are answers we'll never be able to get
out of these silent sentinels.
NARRATOR: Freed from their volcanic bedrock,
the statues went from here to every part of the island.
The ancient track from the quarry at Rano Raraku
was known as the Sacred Way.
What's not known is just how the giants traveled along it.
There are statues in the parks and streets
near my home in Colombo.
Most of them are much smaller than the Easter Island giants,
yet erecting them was far from easy.
Not long ago, the government restored
a huge statute, which had fallen down centuries before.
Even with modern technologies, it
proved to be what one newspaper called a feat that even
engineers shudder to touch.
So how on earth did the Easter Islanders transport and raise
their giants?
NARRATOR: Even the most modern Japanese crane
and mechanical diggers find raising the moai tough going.
In 1934, this French and Belgian expedition
had no such technology.
They made off with their moai the hard way.
It took 100 islanders and all the ship's crew to drag
a six ton statute by sledge.
Only after a struggle did they winch it on board
for show in a Belgium museum.
Prague, capital of the Czech Republic,
home of a man who devotes every waking moment
to shifting heavy objects.
Pavel Pavel moves heavy plant for a living and for fun.
The problems of moving the moai had Pavel hooked.
A giant was cast in concrete, the manpower roped in
and a legend was put to the test.
It said the giants had walked.
Pavel showed this could happen by rocking
his giant from side to side.
Today, he's testing different claims.
First, that the moai were dragged on their backs
over rollers.
The workers of Prague are enlisted and put into harness.
It only takes 20 strong men to get
nine tons of moai a rolling.
The support team's hard pressed to keep up with the rollers.
This method was probably used for small statutes.
It means between 5, 10, 15, maybe 20 tons on this trail.
Now, I would like try experiment to pull statue only on grass
without rolls, without nothing, only on sledge and on grass.
I will meed more people.
In every case, maybe three times more people.
NARRATOR: Even with three times the manpower,
without rollers to help it, the moai won't budge an inch.
The experiment wasn't successful,
but I'm satisfied because we can see that this way is nonsense.
Now we can try with smash potatoes.
We will put many potatoes under sledge, and we will see.
People on Easter Island believe that this is solution,
and that sledge with statue was pulled
on layer from potatoes smash.
It's legend only.
NARRATOR: Legend speaks of Easter Islanders
pulling their statues on yams, the sweet potatoes
found everywhere in the Pacific, but nowhere in Prague.
The Pavel, ordinary potatoes must do.
Legend may be true.
Legend is true that potatoes helped for lubrication.
NARRATOR: In America's cowboy country,
Professor Charlie Love, also has moving on his mind.
Like Pavel Pavel, he's cast himself a moai.
Charlie Love wanted to try out the walking theory as well,
but with wooden feet on the statue, rollers under it,
and a posse of choreographed cowboys.
On local TV news, Charlie has pulling power.
CHARLIE: On three.
One, two, that's it, pull.
NEWS ANCHOR: Now, here's something
you don't see every day, a 13-foot high, 17,600 moai.
But the 25 Rock Springs volunteers couldn't budge
this moai from the soft dirt.
NARRATOR: Getting the giant to move
can need a little 20th century help.
CHARLIE: Watch your back.
Back outta the way.
Outta the way.
The single greatest problem that we
had in any of the moving methods was choreography,
and I think, perhaps, that if you belonged to the lineage
that this statue was going to pertain to you
might have better chances at choreographing the moving of it
then if you're in Rock Springs, Wyoming
with a bunch of Americans.
Because getting them together, explaining exactly what you're
going to do, and then having them do it in unison,
and not be catastrophic about it,
meaning pulling the statue over or having it fall on someone,
that takes a lot of coordination.
We were eventually able to move the statue.
In terms of how far can you move it,
and how fast can you move it, we moved
our statue on a level ground about 132 feet
in the space of two minutes.
What you're probably looking at on Easter Island
is a lesson in how people can get
together to do spectacular things
and cooperate at a huge level.
I mean, it must taken hundreds of people
all neatly coordinated to move some of those big ones.
I think there are loads of mysteries
left on Easter Island.
I think the biggest one, the most pressing one currently,
is you've noticed, you've been staring at this statue.
It has no topknot on it.
How did they get the topknots on the top of the statues?
NARRATOR: No one knows what the topknots, or pukao, were for.
Whether they were crowns, turbans, or hairstyles,
only a few giants wore them.
Those that did became even more awesome.
Made of red volcanic rock called scoria,
the topknots weighed as much as 11 tons.
Mounting them on the giants is a heavyweight problem,
even for Pavel Pavel.
His first task is to overcome the topknots resistance.
Luckily, he knows his potatoes.
The mash should ease things.
Pavel uses only ropes, tree trunks,
manpower, and ingenuity, all that the Easter Islanders had.
Finally, the Prague pukao is safely in place.
Back on Easter Island, wild horses won't
drag one secret from the moai.
What power did the giants possess
to make people haul them up to 14 miles over rocky terrain?
It's puzzled every adventurer.
From the Dutchman, Admiral Jacob Roggeveen,
who discovered the island on Easter day
in 1722, to Captain James Cook in 1774.
He wondered if the statues showed that a race of giants
had actually lived here.
The Frenchmen, la Perouse, didn't think the giants were
religious idols, but noted that the natives
showed the statutes respect.
During the First World War, Katherine Scoresby Routledge
cataloged every single moai.
She unearthed no answers.
French academic, Alfred Metraux sought the truth
in the island's legends.
In the 1940s, Thor Heyerdahl thought that the giant builders
came from South America.
He retraced that journey on his kon-tiki raft.
The giants themselves maintain a stony silence.
They stand, most of them, with their backs
to the sea watching over the communities whose ancestors
some say they represent.
But there are a few exceptions.
These stand inland, set askew on their rock platforms.
For astronomer, William Liller, these moai provide some clues.
We found that there were approximately 14
that were aligned with the equinoxes,
with the solstices, those special points where
the sun rises on the first day of the winter,
on the first day of spring, and it was unusual to find so many.
It's not what you would expect.
The chances of it happening by accident are exceeding slim,
so therefore, there must have been some reason behind it,
and the obvious answer was they did it to show the direction
towards the rising sun on these very
special dates, the shortest day of the year, et cetera.
To them, the stars, the heavens, the sun, the moon,
these were the closest other pieces of land that they knew.
They were able to tell where the sun would rise.
They were able to tell where the moon would rise,
the motions of the stars, and they wanted to memorialize
these in stone by building platforms
and building moai that would look
in these very special directions.
We found that this particular platform
and this particular moai, this statue,
had been twisted around relative to this plaza out in front,
so that it was looking off in that direction.
And it turns out, we found that that is precisely the direction
in which the sun rises on the shortest day of the year, 21st
of June down here.
And at the same time, it rises just
to the right of a small little hill
over there called Mata Maunga, and it was very probably,
we believe, made to mark that particular special direction
in the sky.
NARRATOR: Liller believes moai like this
were also farming calendars.
The islanders that lived in the inner parts of the island,
those were the crop growers, and they had to know when
the time was ripe for planting their crops,
and so by noting when the sun rose on the shortest
day of the year, they knew-- and shortly afterwards, it was
going to start to get warm and they should have their crops
planted.
NARRATOR: In 1978, two chance discovery
was made here at Anakena.
It opened the eyes of the archaeologists and the statues.
An Easter Islander found two strange objects.
In a flash of insight, she put one and one together.
She found the components of an eye made
of coral and red scoria, something
that was placed inside the socket of the statue.
This coral portion was first found, and we've found,
or other archaeologists have found,
these things on several other sites on the island,
and people usually thought they were
ceremonial bowls or some sort of an artifact like that.
But with the magic that comes with finding objects
on the same sight but not understood in terms of how
they relate, it was made clear that these two
pieces went together.
And this eye suddenly opened up a whole range
of possibilities and opportunities
for better understanding the statues.
Coral and red scoria is found often
in association with crematoria and with burials.
So we believe they're sacred materials associated
with funeral ceremonies.
When these eyes were in the statues,
some of those kinds of ceremonies
must have been going on.
Hundreds of statues lie unfinished
in and around the quarry where they were carved.
It looks as though the sculptors had just put down
their tools for a tea break.
But what really brought this extraordinary undertaking
to an end?
We can only speculate.
NARRATOR: However they moved the giants,
the islanders needed trees.
But today, Easter Island is desolate.
There's barely a branch to be seen.
I With the help of the Chilean Navy,
agronomist, Gerardo Velasco, is looking for Easter
island's lost forests.
He believes traces may lie deep in the lake
at the heart of this crater.
Under the water, deep in this mud,
lay layer upon layer of sediments.
Preserved in them are pollens from thousands of years ago.
They hold the key to tell experts what vegetation
grew on the island and when.
These sediments are the leaves of a book waiting to be read.
The harvest of today's exploratory probe
will be flown across the Pacific to New Zealand
and Professor John Flenley.
What I'll do is to open up the core
and take out from a particulate depth, a piece as a sample
of about 1 cubic centimeter.
It will end up on a microscope slide,
and then we can look at that under the microscope,
and see what we've got in the way of pollen.
Let's have a look at what we've got.
We found stacks of pollen, and mostly
of one particular species, a kind of palm.
It seems to be now extinct, but it
was very similar to the Chilean Wine Palm, a big tree.
And it became extinct only during the last 2,000
years, during which people arrived on the island.
The island had formally been forested.
We know it is now completely without trees,
and perhaps, the removal of the trees
was the thing which had triggered the collapse
of the civilization.
When the trees have been cut down,
there were no more rollers, and people couldn't
move statues without rollers.
Therefore, there's no point in continuing to make them.
NARRATOR: On a fishing trip to these remote cliffs,
Gerardo Velasco netted another clue.
He suddenly noticed neat cylindrical holes,
all that was left of palm trees swept away
and entombed by flowing lava.
I started to look around and found several holes
of remarkable features resembling the typical palm
trunk, and at that moment, I was so excited because it fitted
exactly what had been found in the craters,
pollen samples, pollen cores, made
the whole picture quite clear.
They were definitely trunks to my view.
They are straight, very, very regular,
unlike the gas tubes in caves that we are so
familiar with in this island.
They're absolutely regular, and if you look inside,
you can even see the imprints of the leaves of the palm.
Eventually, when the moais were carved,
and they had to be rolled, probably many of these trees
had to be cut down to make the rollers.
They provide excellent rollers.
These trunks, they're perfectly cylindrical.
When they had no rollers, of course,
they couldn't move the moais anymore, so we believe.
NARRATOR: Or could the moais themselves literally
point to the reason for the end of the giant building age?
All around the island, they lie, face down or up,
toppled from their rock platforms.
Historians thought they were demolished by warring tribes.
But one geologist realized that Easter Island lies
at the heart of one of the world's
most active earthquake zones.
He found that 80% had fallen in the same direction,
to the west.
Knocked over, he believes, by seismic waves.
Easter Island is clear in the middle
of a very active quake region.
This means to me is the propagation of seismic wave
in one direction, from the west of the island,
and you found 80% moais fall down in that direction.
NARRATOR: Professor Foran concludes
the statue builders tried to fight the earth's upheavals.
From building huge moai on small platforms,
they moved to smaller statues on bigger and bigger bases.
But in the end, they were forced to give up.
But still, the moai continue go down, fall down.
They maybe thinks god don't like our work.
It was not the problem of tree topple the moai.
It was earthquake.
I find the idea that the statue builders
gave up because earthquake's kept undoing
their work very plausible.
It's a natural human reaction, and as to the theory
that the islanders brought down their civilization by damaging
the environment, it shows that we don't have a monopoly
on ecological disasters.
So perhaps there's a lesson here for all of us
in the mysterious fate of Easter Island.