{"id":612,"date":"2006-08-11T07:36:46","date_gmt":"2006-08-11T12:36:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/?p=612"},"modified":"2020-01-03T09:48:16","modified_gmt":"2020-01-03T14:48:16","slug":"the-rats-dunnit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/the-rats-dunnit\/","title":{"rendered":"The rats dunnit"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Terry L. Hunt, anthropology professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.researchgate.net\/publication\/275701235_Rethinking_the_Fall_of_Easter_Island\">proposes a new explanation<\/a> (PDF) for the environmental degradation of Easter Island.<\/p>\n<p>What Hunt believes happened is that people brought rats with them, and the population of rats mushroomed (&#8220;the rat population could have exceeded 3.1 million&#8221;). The rats fed on the island&#8217;s palm nuts, and that&#8217;s what led to the deforestation.<\/p>\n<p>His theory undermines the validity of Easter Island as a 1:1 parable for the consequences of population and deforestation; he thinks it&#8217;s unlikely that the local population grew to as many as 15,000 people, or that it was man&#8217;s deforestation of the islands (for building and fuel) that rendered it inhabitable.<\/p>\n<p>The article is a long one with a lot of detail on how Hunt came to his conclusions. Reluctantly, btw.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Terry L. Hunt, anthropology professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, proposes a new explanation (PDF) for the environmental degradation of Easter Island. What Hunt believes happened is that people brought rats with them, and the population of rats &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/the-rats-dunnit\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,28],"tags":[1451,1449,1450,1448],"class_list":["post-612","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","category-science","tag-deforestation","tag-easter-island","tag-rats","tag-terry-hunt"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/612","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=612"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/612\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6018,"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/612\/revisions\/6018"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=612"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=612"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=612"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}