In his bestselling 2005 book Collapse, Jared Diamond offered the societal collapse of Easter Island (aka Rapa Nui), around 1600, as a cautionary tale.

In a new paper published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, the researchers offer intriguing evidence that suggests the people of Rapa Nui continued to thrive well after 1600.

"This degree of resilience has been overlooked due to the collapse narrative and deserves recognition.".

While it's generally agreed that people arrived in Eastern Polynesia and on Rapa Nui sometime in the late 12th century or early 13th century, "We don't really know very much about the timing and tempo of events related to ahu construction and moai transport," Lipo told Ars.

This allowed the researchers to test Diamond's "collapse" hypothesis by building a more precise timeline of when construction took place at each of the sites.

"Their work adds to the growing body of evidence that has accumulated over the last 10 years that the previous narratives of collapse on Easter Island are not correct—and need to be rethought," Seth Quintus, an anthropologist at the University of Hawai'i, Mānoa, told Sapiens.

"The collapse narrative as these authors describe it is a straw man they have set up that does not accurately reflect the actual hypothesis," Van Tilburg told Sapiens.

Lipo acknowledges that some critics have suggested his team cherry-picked its radiocarbon dating, which he dismisses as "simply baloney and misinformed thinking." According to Lipo, some radiocarbon samples can be biased due to issues with "old carbon": that is, the samples were taken from chunks of burned wood or charcoal, for instance.

"As scientists, our strategy has been to explain the evidence we find, which means explaining the archaeological record (and the radiocarbon ages) that we have available.

In addition, because of the island's small size, Lipo says that human impact would have been "pretty much instantaneous." So "unless people got to the island and hid in a single cave for centuries, we would have evidence to show their impact," he added.

"Calling something a 'straw man' hypothesis is one way of changing one's narrative to say that 'we have been saying that all along,'" he said?

"It's a specious statement and entirely misleading." He counter-argues that Diamond's "evidence" for the collapse argument was quite specific: the arrival of people on the island as early as 700 CE, an "ecological paradise" that existed when humans arrived, massive population sizes (up to 30,000), evidence of erosion, overfishing, widespread group-level warfare, and cannibalism.

"Our work has consisted of just examining the archaeological evidence that should be apparent to support his claims," said Lipo.

But Lipo and his colleagues plan to continue their studies of Easter Island, testing hypotheses with data generated from the record through additional fieldwork, remote sensing, and artifact analysis.

"Diamond (and others) tend to cast statue construction as just a 'cultural' thing that got out of control," said Lipo.