Scientists finally solve mystery of Easter Island heads revealing how they moved 900 years ago

While the world is full of mysteries, scientists believe they have finally figured out one of them that is tied to an ancient culture on Easter Island.

If you go on YouTube, there is likely an endless list of videos talking about some of the greatest mysteries of the world.

Someone talking about Stonehenge, or the pyramids, you know the classics.

But one that might not appear as much is the massive statues of Easter Island in Chile, for the simple reason that experts believe they now know how these massive things were moved.

For those that don’t know, for years, researchers and scientists have been puzzled by these 12-14 ton statues or Moai that appear to just be giant heads above the ground.

In actuality, many of the statues are full-bodied, but it is only the heads that have remained above the ground.

While we do know the Rapa Nui people of eastern Polynesia made them between the years of 1250 and 1500, it has long puzzled experts on how they were moved around the island.

The walking of the statues looks pretty impressive and makes sense, according to the researchers (National Geographic)

That is, until now, with researchers even recreating how the people would have moved the extremely heavy structures.

Binghamton University Professor of Anthropology Carl Lipo and the University of Arizona’s Terry Hunt have been studying the monoliths and concluded that the Rapa Nui people likely used a rope and pulley system to ‘walk’ the statues down specially designed roads.

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. The question is, if it’s really large, what would it take? Are the things that we saw experimentally consistent with what we would expect from a physics perspective?”

In action, it does look rather impressive as the statue almost waddles from left to right to its destination.

The team designed their own 4.35-ton replica Moai and, with only 18 people, were able to make the statues walk 100 meters in just 40 minutes.

He added: “The physics makes sense. What we saw experimentally actually works. And as it gets bigger, it still works. All the attributes that we see about moving gigantic ones only get more and more consistent the bigger and bigger they get, because it becomes the only way you could move it.”

He then added that the roads also support the idea that the statues were moved this way.

"We actually see them overlapping each other, and many parallel versions of them. What they are probably doing is clearing a path, moving it, clearing another, clearing it further, and moving it right in certain sequences. So they’re spending a lot of time on the road part."

The team is so confident that this is how it was done all those hundreds of years ago, Lipo has challenged anyone else to prove them wrong.

"Find some evidence that shows it couldn’t be walking," he said. "Because nothing we’ve seen anywhere disproves that."

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