One of the world’s greatest mysteries may have been solved after 900 years

For 900 years, the mystery of how the famous Easter Island stone figures ended up where they are has baffled experts.

Now, a team of researchers think they know how the ancient Rapa Nui people managed to move the monolithic heads across rough land.

Easter Island is home to nearly 1,000 of the huge statues, known as moai. They were forged from compacted ash inside the extinct volcano on the island.

Some of the statues measure 33 feet high and weigh some 86 tonnes, making their movement to various parts of Easter Island inconceivable.

Researchers Carl Lipo and Terry Hunt believe they know how the statues were moved and who they were made by.

In a recent study published in The Journal of Archaeological Science, the pair said they believe large ropes were used to shimmy the statues across the rocky terrain – and they were made by individual tribes, rather than one chief.

And, unlike other studies, which think they were crafted by a powerful tribe, it’s thought that individual clans and families carved their own.

‘We see separate workshops that really align to different clan groups that are working intensively in their specific areas,’ Lipo said.

‘You can really see graphically from the construction that there’s a series of statues being made here, another series of statues here and that they’re lined up next to each other.’

‘The presence of monuments became circular evidence for hierarchy. Monuments meant chiefs because chiefs built monuments.’

Minute differences in the faces of the moai point to this as well – some appear to have more feminine features, or larger noses.

And rather than being dragged to their locations by tribesmen, it’s believed locals used ropes to ‘rock’ and ‘walk’ the statues to their locations.

Lipo said: ‘Once you get it moving, it isn’t hard at all—people are pulling with one arm.

‘It conserves energy, and it moves really quickly. The hard part is getting it rocking in the first place.’

Hunt and Lipo even tested the ‘walking’ theory on smaller models and found it was easier than other methods previously thought to have been used.

In only 40 minutes, a team of 18 people were able to move the massive statues 100 metres – meaning this could be the way ancient people moved the moai.

‘It shows that the Rapa Nui people were incredibly smart. They figured this out,’ Lipo said.

‘So it really gives honour to those people, saying, look at what they were able to achieve, and we have a lot to learn from them in these principles.’

Are there any other ways the statues could have been moved?

Researchers initially believed the statues were moved by people placing them on wooden sleds and dragging them.

But this would have been arduous and taken a lot of manpower – the new method proposed by Lipo and Hunt found it took much less effort to ‘walk’ the statues into their positions.

What is the meaning of the moai statues?

The true meaning behind the headstones is unknown, but the most common theory is that they were carved by Polynesian citizens on the island as representations of their dead ancestors so they could project their ‘mana’ over their descendants.

These statues are actually full-body figures that became partially buried over time.

When was Easter Island discovered?

Though the island had been inhabited by the Rapa Nui people, descendants of Polynesian explorers between 300 and 1200 BC, Easter Island was ‘discovered’ by the Dutch in the 1700s.

Captain Jacob Coggeveen stumbled upon the island, thousands of miles off of Chile, on Easter Sunday in 1722, giving the island its distinct name in honour of the holiday.

After an initial skirmish between the Dutch crew and the Rapa Nui, the natives gave their visitors sixty chickens and bunches of bananas, in exchange for linen.

Descendants of the Rapa Nui still live on the island, sharing a rich culture and speaking their own language.

Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.

For more stories like this, check our news page.