For a hundred years the public was led to believe the Easter Island statues were no more than a head down to the shoulders. Now we know they extended far below that down more than 20 feet below.
Challenges: 1) The statues, the public learned recently (2012), have full bodies that extend far beneath the surface as much as 25'. 2) There are ahu, megalithic platforms, one of which is built of well-dressed, precisely fitted, megalithic blocks. 3) Some of the statues, and the ahu just mentioned, are made of basalt, a hard volcanic rock and 4) the island is dotted with stone houses.
The Easter Island of today is far different than that prior to 2012. That is when photos of the full bodies were revealed; then it became abundantly clear that the problems of quarrying, transporting and lifting the statues, onto their final resting positions, was far more difficult to explain than before. Now for the hard facts.
Over 900 statues have been recorded to date on the island, along with nearly 150 ahu, platforms. These structures have long attracted the interest of the public, anthropologists and archaeologists, the latter paying particular attention to several, post-2012 “mysteries”, namely how statues weighing up to 82 tons and measuring as much as 32 feet in height were transported from the quarries to their platforms or other locales, a very serious problem indeed.
A team of men using nothing but manual labor cannot lift any stone statue out of a quarry to transport it, using the average weight of 20 tons and height of about 20 feet. (Any that weighed 50+ tons are utterly beyond consideration since archaeologists have to prove their proposals they would have to lift the heaviest, not the average, in order to prove they could be lifted at all.)
But we shall proceed with the average sized statue, allowing academia some latitude. However, we shall never forget that the LIFT is the critical first action, and insist it be addressed right after the quarry-men cut and undercut and freed the block from the bedrock. There is simply no way around this first action and it is the paramount part of the process that must be explained logically. (Only proven via demonstration)
The statues made out of basalt are of particular concern. The established tools seem capable of working the volcanic tuff-bedrock, both to quarry and carve the blocks. However, not adequate to cut the basalt and carve the intricate designs we see.
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Basalt is alongside granite, on the MOHS hardness scale, with diamond being a 10, it ranges between (MOHS) 7-9. That means you need a tool harder and more durable than that to cut and work the raw stone. No such tools have ever been found on Easter Island.
Every statue had to be lifted up on several occasions at minimum A) out of the quarry. B) up off the ground after the alleged transport horizontally - from the quarry across the rough, hilly landscape – and placed upright at the final site and then C) finally, at some of the locations the red hats, weighing several tons, had to be set on top of the heads.
For many of the Ma’oi that last point is a final insult we must add. Once the statue was hauled to the site and erected, a red hat (scoria, volcanic stone) had to be lifted up and placed on top of the head. This meant that both surfaces were flat. Clearly, this last challenge puts the problem over the top. (Insert)
The above photo shows that the tops of the heads are about 10 feet above the platform. The hat is about 4’ in diameter and weighs at least several tons. Given the difficulty of quarrying, transporting and erecting the statue once that was accomplished came the hat-lift to crown the statue.
No one has shown how these were lifted up into position, and it is no easy proposition. Ladders would not help obviously. Only several men could position themselves to lift the heavy rounded-stone hats and that is an impossibility. How could they get up to the top of the head? Simply put, we are looking at an unsolved conundrum without the use of hoists and/or cranes.
Furthermore, the hats are made of scoria, another hard volcanic stone, 5-6 MOHS. The quarry that produced them has been located and excavated, sure it is possible to roll them to the ahu since they are round. However, the tools to carve rough, uneven scoria into the round shape of the hats have not been found and the lift up atop the statue remains unsolved.
A quick survey of the quarry locations shows that they were located uphill from the ahu.
There are ways to try to solve the horizontal transport problem. You can throw numbers at it, a large team of men pulling ropes, seems to solve this issue. That is not possible with the lift however.
Without equipment, given only a team of men using brute strength, you can only position so many around a 20’ tall statue weighing 20 tons, to get a grip under and hoist it up, in fact, not enough men to achieve a lift by any stretch.
I submit this is why archaeologists, do not illustrate this problem, but skip over it and focus on the lateral transport of megaliths across the ground. But it is all too obvious, whether at the Great Pyramid or here on Easter Island, the megaliths -- even the red hats) are megalithic -- had to be lifted before they could be dragged or rolled. Then lifted again into position whether prior to vertical placement or on top of the heads.
Some investigators would put the intractable problem back at the starting point, the quarry. They point out that it is impossible to explain, and or show, how any quarry crew could undercut the large statues to free them from the bedrock. Examine the next insert to get a feel for the challenge. (Insert)
The difficulty is obvious and not only formidable but perhaps intractable. We see that a channel was dug around the statue and the beginnings of the form were carved out of the raw bedrock on the upper surface. But that is child’s play compared to the problem of undercutting the massive block, to separate the bottom from its attachment to the solid mountainside bedrock.
Then comes the impossible first lift out of the volcanic rock described previously. I did not even factor in the true difficulty of freeing the statue from the bedrock; nor did I include the fact that the transport problem included moving the statues across often rough, uneven terrain.
Archaeologists have claimed to have solved the transport problem. However, though on first blush, it appears a quite ingenious solution, in fact it is a complete bust. Let’s examine how they propose the natives moved the giant statues from the quarry to their final resting sites. (Insert)
First, the initial take quickly gives way to the realization that the model that was used to walk the statue is a fraction of the size of the real Ma’oi. Not only is the body less than one-quarter the size of the authentic statues, the face and head are much, much smaller.
Next, they put the test on flat terrain whereas the actual topography, from the quarry to the sites, is anything but flat!
I won’t go so far as to charge the team with intellectual fraud but this is a ‘cheat’ of large proportions; and it was broadcast by the global mass media. It absolutely minimizes the scope of the problem bymany orders of magnitude. It is like claiming that because I can lift 300 lbs., I can lift 1200 lbs. Not so, there is a physics issue of orders of magnitude that must be taken into account.
This is how academia subverts the real issues that ancient megalithic sites present. Also how they confuse the public, into believing they have solutions, at the same time.
The radical challenges summarized above involving quarrying, lifting, transporting and erecting the statues - infact - remain unresolved. (Insert)
The stone blocks forming the wall above exhibits very smooth, finished surfaces. They were needed to tightly fit them together in an almost seamless fashion. The blocks were also given irregular-shapes, and have rounded edges, and small triangular stones filling in gaps.
All of these features would require very high grade tools, and master stonemasons, to achieve the results we observe. (In fact, we see this type of sophisticated construction in the Peruvian Andes.) Again, the quarrying, lifting, transporting -- and lifting upwards to place the second tier on top of the first -- must be logically explained.
Is there any evidence that the native Rapa Nui, who are credited with creating the statues and wall, were master stonemasons and sculptors? Once again we shall press for an answer to the following question, why didn’t they go on building similar artifacts after these if they were so important to their native traditions?
Geologist Dr. Robert Schoch of Boston University summed up his observations of Ester Islant in the following quote:
“I am a trained geologist (Ph.D. in geology and geophysics from Yale University, 1983) and, studying the varying levels of weathering and erosion and the degree of sediment build up around the moai (some that have been excavated were buried in up to six meters of sediment), I quickly became convinced that the standard story was improbable, to say the least. The high levels of sedimentation around certain moai suggested a much greater age than a mere 1,500 years…”
Dr. Schoch is basically telling us that in his professional view, as a geologist, that the fact the Easter Islander statues were buried under so much sediment (dirt), negated the timeline proposed for the Rapa Nui erecting them. The way he expressed that…”to say the least” implies that in his estimate they must have been erected at a much, much more ancient point in time.
Of course what we want to know is by whom? I must add that trying to solve the massive puzzle of ancient history is the greatest adventure on earth, hope you agree!
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