The famous story — that Rapa Nui's Polynesian settlers mindlessly deforested their island, collapsed their own society, and serve as a parable for human self-destruction — is largely wrong. Rats devoured palm seeds and prevented forest regeneration as much as human axes did; the islanders adapted and endured. The true catastrophe came from outside: Peruvian slave raids in 1862–63 abducted much of the population, including the specialists who could read rongorongo, the island's still-undeciphered script. Epidemics followed, reducing the Rapanui to about 110 people by 1877. The collapse story says more about outsiders' fears than about the people who actually lived there.
It is the loneliest inhabited island on Earth, and the most misread. Rapa Nui is a speck of volcanic rock in the open Pacific, more than a thousand miles from the nearest neighbor, where a few thousand Polynesians raised hundreds of giant stone figures to watch over them. For decades a tidy story has been told about the place: that its people mindlessly chopped down every tree, fell into war and starvation, and so destroyed themselves, a parable of humans wrecking their own world. The harder truth is that the popular self-destruction story is now heavily contested, and the clearest demographic catastrophe came from outside. Rats helped strip the forest, but the Rapanui adapted and endured. Then ships arrived. Slave raiders and disease, not folly, reduced the islanders to barely a hundred people. The collapse story says more about the fears of outsiders than about the people who actually lived and died there.