Societal collapse on Easter Island: eco-tragedy or eco-fable?
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There's nothing like a 'lost civilisation' to spark interest in a gripping tale of destruction and lost knowledge. But when it comes to the tales of lost civilisations, limited facts are often embellished by documentary-makers and writers. "So often, the facts are sacrificed for a nice yarn," says Colin Hope, an Egyptologist and director of the Centre for Archaeology and Ancient History at Monash University, Melbourne.
For many lost civilisations, such as Atlantis and Easter Island, the yarn goes far beyond the evidence. But, for others, recent research is revealing startling gems of truth at the heart of some previously disregarded or overlooked stories - such as the great cities of Africa or even El Dorado, a fabulous city reputed by Spanish conquistadors to lie hidden deep within the Amazon jungle.
So what do researchers really know about our lost civilisations? Where do the facts end and the fantasy begin?
Atlantis
It's a region of the southern Spanish coast. It's an island in the Strait of Gibraltar. It's Ireland. Or, if you're inclined to believe a team of Russians, it's 150 km off the tip of southwest England.
"Every year, Atlantis pops up somewhere," says Dale Dominey-Howes, who researches ancient volcanic eruptions and earthquakes at the University of New South Wales, Sydney.
No 'lost civilisation' has captured the public imagination quite like Atlantis. Two and a half thousand years since it was first described by the Greek philosopher, Plato, its possible location is still hotly debated by scientists as well as the media.
Plato wrote of a great island, which was home to a noble civilisation descended from Poseidon, god of the sea and earthquakes. As this race increasingly bred with mere mortals, it degenerated, went to war with Athens and eventually was destroyed.
"There were earthquakes and floods of extraordinary violence," Plato wrote. "In a single dreadful day ... the island of Atlantis was ... swallowed up by the sea and vanished."
While some Atlantis enthusiasts hold that Plato's story describes a genuine civilisation, philosophers are far less sure. "The idea was that we should use the story to examine our ideas of government and power," writes University of Arizona philosopher Julia Annas in Plato: A Very Short Introduction. "We have missed the point if instead of thinking about these issues we go off exploring the seabed."
But if the civilisation itself was fictional, were elements of the story at least inspired by real events? If so, some argue, surely these were events that occurred in Plato's homeland - what we now know as Greece.
Dominey-Howes thinks that the story of Atlantis is most likely based on an eruption on the island of Santorini, in Greece in 1628 BC. The volcano " basically collapsed into the sea at the end of the eruption," he says. "The ocean poured into the hole in the ground, and then exploded out."
At the epicentre, the waves are thought to have been higher than 100 metres.
"The tsunami travelled out in all directions. It was like dropping a pebble into a pond. The ripples ran out around the east Mediterranean, creating destruction."
In fact, he says, the eruption ended the great Bronze Age Minoan civilisation.
Others think the idea for Atlantis can most closely be identified with Helike, a once-flourishing city-state about 150 km west of Athens. Helike was home to a highly revered, sacred grove of Poseidon that promoted peaceful co-existence with neighbouring states. But one night in 373 BC (when Plato was in his mid-fifties), a terrible earthquake wiped out the city.
Dominey-Howes, for one, is convinced that the story of Atlantis was not pure fiction. "Often myths are embedded in some element of the truth."
Lost civilisations of the Amazon
In 1999, at the end of the rainy season, Alceu Ranzi was on a flight bound for Rio Branco, the capital of the Brazilian state of Acre, which lies in the western Amazon.
"We were approaching the city, and I was just looking at the landscape. I was really surprised to spot a large and perfect circle on the ground. I am a geographer, and I understood that an enormous and perfect circle was not natural."
At the time, Ranzi, who spent his academic career at the Federal University of Acre, in Rio Branco, had no idea how momentous this discovery was to become. He had found evidence of a lost, great civilisation deep within the rainforest - a find that would help to transform ideas about the prehistory of the Amazon.
Over the next 10 years, Ranzi worked with scientists from Spain and Brazil to investigate the region. In late 2009, they published an astonishing paper in the journal Antiquity - it described over 200 geometric earthworks spanning an area more than 250 km across.
One site has been dated to around 1283 AD, but the team believe others could date back to 200 or 300 AD. They think the structures are the remains of fortifications, homes, roads, bridges, squares and ceremonial sites.
Ranzi insists that he hasn't found El Dorado, the mythical, wealthy lost civilisation reputed by the conquistadors to lie deep in the Amazon rainforest (at least, he says, they found no gold). But the structures do "point to a sophisticated pre-Columbian, monument-building society," the team writes in their paper.
The finds are a wonderful example of the complex societies that existed in the Amazon before Columbus's arrival in 1492, says Michael Heckenberger, an anthropologist at the University of Florida in Gainesville, who has visited the site, and who has also found evidence for dozens of ancient, densely packed prehistoric towns and villages in the south-eastern Amazon.
In 1993, Heckenberger lived with an indigenous Amazonian tribe called the Kuikuro, near the headwaters of the Xingu River. He soon heard about nearby remains of an ancient settlement, and started mapping them in detail. In 2008, he published his work in the journal Science.
As well as traces of roads and homes, he found defensive walls around towns, agricultural fields and dams and ponds. "The ways they constructed their tropical forest landscapes were remarkable," he says. In fact, he thinks that these societies were as ordered and planned as any medieval European town.
All of this suggests that dozens of complex, developed societies lived in the Amazon river basin before being largely wiped out by European diseases.
To most people, the Amazon is the quintessential case of pure nature slowly being destroyed as humans intrude, says Heckenberger. In fact, what seems pristine has itself been shaped by people. He hopes that more work might reveal techniques for sustainably farming the region.
For his part, Ranzi is keen that his discovery should provide a welcome source of tourism income to the region.
Easter Island
According to received wisdom, around the year 800, migrants from Polynesia arrived at a remote island, whose nearest inhabited neighbours were Chile, 3,700 km to the east, and the Pitcairn Islands, more than 2,000 km to the west.
After about 400 years, they set about cutting down the forest and soon wiped it out. The trees they destroyed had been supplying edible fruit and food for birds (another food-source), as well as wood for canoes for fishing, bark cloth, and fibre for rope. Deforestation also increased soil erosion and crop yields plummeted.
The islanders stopped erecting their famous monumental stone statues, because there were no longer big logs and ropes available to transport them.
There were food shortages and, according to oral histories, increased violence between clans and even cannibalism. When Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen 'discovered' the island on Easter Day, 1722, he described a sparsely populated land with a "wasted appearance that could give no other impression than of singular poverty and barrenness."
This story is often used as a warning of our potential environmental destruction. "The parallels between Easter Island and the whole modern world are chillingly obvious," writes Jared Diamond of the University of California, Los Angeles, in his 2005 book, Collapse. "Easter's isolation makes it the clearest example of a society that destroyed itself by overexploiting its own resources."
But is this really true? According to Terry Hunt of the University of Hawaii and Carl Lipo of California State University at Long Beach, there are problems with the story. And there is scant evidence for the 'ecocide' scenario given by Diamond and others.
They think the truth about the downfall of this civilisation could be darker still.
There's no doubt that the islanders cut down trees. But rats introduced in the original canoes could also have devastated the forest, they say. Meanwhile, the data on soil erosion has been extrapolated from only one key site across the entire island.
And they say there is little evidence of serious food shortages as the forest fell. In fact, according to recent research, as the forest declined, the population grew.
But what of Roggeveen's description? While the island may have looked wasted to him, a member of a French expedition that visited 64 years later reported, "Instead of meeting with men exhausted by famine ... I found, on the contrary, a considerable population, with more beauty and grace than I afterwards met on any other island; and a soil which with very little labour furnished excellent provisions."
Hunt and Lipo say that the only clear signs of a crashing population came after the arrival of Europeans.
Between 1722 and 1862, an estimated 50 European ships visited the island. By the 1830s, there were reports of widespread sexually transmitted disease. After visits by Peruvian and Spanish slave boats in the 1860s, smallpox became rife.
By 1877, disease and slave raids had left only about 100 local people on the island. It seems most likely that these European influences - not environmental devastation - brought about the islanders' downfall, they say.
"Things worked out for the ancient islanders for centuries before outsiders arrived," Hunt says. "European visitors saw a pathetic state and wondered about a more glorious past. What they didn't recognise was that the diseases they had introduced explained the sad state they witnessed."
Great Zimbabwe
"It's a mind-boggling experience," says Simon Adams, an expert on southern African history and pro vice-chancellor of Monash University in Melbourne.
"You walk through the park, and suddenly you see these amazing stone walls. There's no mortar. They're perfectly placed together. Away to one side there's a mountain with another fortress on top. Then your imagination runs away with you, and you wonder who lived here and what happened..."
Adams is describing 'Great Zimbabwe', a ruined stone city, shrouded in mystery.
Rumours of a great ruined settlement in southern Africa began circulating among Portuguese traders in the 16th century. One of the most popular theories of the time held that it must be the remains of Axuma, one of the cities of the Queen of Sheba. It wasn't until 1871 that a German explorer called Karl Mauch alerted Europe to the precise location of Great Zimbabwe, in the south of modern Zimbabwe.
Mauch had found a series of enclosures surrounded by massive dry-stone walls, up to 10 metres high, and soapstone and iron relics. He decided that such feats were beyond Africans, and other Europeans who visited agreed.
"For many years, there was a colonial fiction that it was too superior in quality and too impressive and too remote to have possibly been built by Africans," says Adams. "But there is a consensus these days that it clearly was built by an African civilisation, and one that pre-dated any European presence."
There are signs that the site was occupied from the third century AD. But at its height, in the 14th and 15th centuries, Great Zimbabwe is thought to have been home to between 12,000 and 20,000 people. They lived in mud houses within the towering stone enclosures, which covered an area of 7 km2.
The Great Enclosure - a separate set of structures including a tower shaped like a beehive with a surrounding wall almost 250 metres long - was probably a royal residence.
In fact, there are about 200 sites containing stone ruins in east and southern Africa. Some of these may not be affiliated with Great Zimbabwe, says Adams.
"But there's no doubt that Great Zimbabwe was more than the one site. It was actually a network of villages that all paid tribute to the central core, and it was a rich and vibrant place."
Archaeologists have uncovered a range of artefacts, including Chinese porcelain and European coins, suggesting that the city's occupants were keen traders. But exactly who they were isn't clear. They left no written documents, and while there are various oral traditions about their origins from Zimbabwe, South Africa and parts of Mozambique, it's very difficult to disentangle fact from fiction, Adams says.
Neither is it clear why the society disintegrated some time around the 15th century. But the main theory holds that environmental degradation was to blame here - that the population grew to such an extent that the surrounding land could no longer provide sufficient crops. The arrival of Arab traders on the east African coast may also have disrupted their trading operations.
Great Zimbabwe is hugely important, says Adams. "Most people know almost nothing about it, yet to me it's as impressive and important as sites in Egypt, the Mayan ruins and Machu Picchu.
"Colonialism in Africa was built upon this fiction that Africa was peopled by savages with no culture. This stands out as a powerful example of the fact that there is another Africa, whose history is not that well known even today."
Lost civilisations of the Sahara
The two shards of pottery that Carlo Bergmann found didn't look like much. But, after five days of wandering through Egypt's western desert, alone save for his camels, he was ecstatic. That day in February 1999, Bergmann realised he had stumbled across an ancient trail that had eluded Egyptologists for almost a century.
Since then, Bergmann (a former advertising executive) and a pair of German archaeologists have found 27 'stations' along the trail, which runs 350 km southwest of the Dakhla oasis (which itself is 350 km west of the Nile) - and then vanishes. "It's the first trans-Saharan road, and it shows there were pharaonic expeditions deep into the desert," says Stefan Krö, of the University of Cologne, who worked with Bergmann. But Bergmann, and others, think the direction of some of the key ideas and innovations that characterise Egypt's pharaonic civilisation might have been not from the Nile valley out, but from the western desert in.
Another team has found stone tools dating to around 5500 BC at a site called Djara, which is located between the western oases and the Nile valley. These tools turn up in the Nile valley only about 500 years later.
Meanwhile, excavations by Fred Wendorf at the Southern Methodist University in Dallas in the western desert suggest that the idea of cattle-worshipping - which was important in the time of the pharaohs - originated here. Wendorf also thinks that the use of astronomical knowledge began here, and was later adopted in the pre-dynastic era.
Taken together, these finds suggest a radical rethink of the origins of the pharaonic civilisation. Rather than being a gift of the Nile, as the Greek historian Herodotus described it, it seems to have had its origins with a people who once lived in the western desert.
But this is far from the only evidence for lost civilisations in the Sahara.
Moving west through the desert, a British team working in southern Libya has found the remains of fashionable towns and a massive network of irrigation channels that spread over thousands of kilometres. These were made by the Garamantes, a people whose civilisation peaked in the first centuries AD.
The Garamantes traded with the Romans, adopted their ways and sometimes raided their settlements. The researchers, from the universities of Leicester and Newcastle, found the remains of a Roman bath tile 1,000 km into the desert.
It's not clear why the Garamantes died out; perhaps because they used groundwater unsustainably. But they certainly represent a true lost civilisation, says David Mattingly at the University of Leicester, and they formed one of the earliest Saharan states.
The mother culture
The 'mother culture' is an idea that has gripped the imagination of millions, turning Graham Hancock, a British journalist and amateur scientist, into a best-selling author.
Hancock thinks that our great civilisations did not arise independently, as mainstream archaeologists argue, but stem from a 'mother culture' - a lost, ancient and spectacularly sophisticated society (which has sometimes been identified with the Atlantis). According to Hancock, this society was largely wiped out at the end of the last ice age, about 12,000 years ago. But he thinks its artefacts passed on knowledge, such as a map of the heavens, which inspired civilisations such as the ancient Egyptians and the builders of the Angkor Wat temple complex in Cambodia.
So where's the evidence?
He argues that the alignment of Cairo's three great pyramids of Giza were designed to commemorate the mother culture by mirroring the way the constellation Orion would have looked 12,000 years ago. Monash's Hope agrees there is a "vague similarity", and the pyramid-builders would have identified Orion with Osiris, god of resurrection. But the topography of the Giza plateau also explains the placement of the pyramids, he says.
The temples of Angkor Wat in Cambodia reflect another constellation - that of Draco - at around 10500 BC, Hancock claims. But others aren't convinced. Archaeologist Eleanor Mannika of the University of Michigan, an expert on Angkor Wat, has said that while she can see a vague resemblance, the match is not precise, and at least some of the temples' locations were determined by historic events, such as battles.
Hancock has claimed that the mother culture also built two monuments of their own: the ancient Bolivian city of Tiwanaku, and the Sphinx in Egypt. In 1995, independent Egyptologist John West and Robert Schoch, a geologist from Boston University, supported this claim when they argued that the Sphinx's pattern of erosion meant that it must have been carved at a time when the region was still very wet, probably at the end of the last ice age.
"But this idea that it had to have been carved about 12,000 years ago has been refuted," says Hope. (See "Riddles of the Sphinx", Cosmos 32, p34). There is also no other possible evidence for a sophisticated society in Egypt at this time.
"They were hunter-gatherers and fishermen. And they left no substantial architectural remains," Hope says. "So a 12,000-year-old Sphinx just wouldn't fit in with anything else."
Hancock's evidence for Tiwanaku is equally controversial. And when it comes to the location of his original lost society, the picture becomes even murkier.
For a time, he suggested that it might have been in Antarctica. Then he turned to the Yonaguni formation, an underwater region off Japan that contains steps and pyramid-like structures. But Schoch, who has dived at the site, says that it seems to be a completely natural structure.
There are two ways of looking at these sorts of unproven claims, says Hope. On the one hand, "anything that encourages general interest in the ancient world, we should encourage." But, he adds, "While broadcasters have a duty to present something that is interesting and might be controversial, the facts should be in there."
Emma Young is a Sydney-based journalist.
