Environmentalists often advance Easter Island as an example of man’s folly in destroying his environment. Jared Diamond made it the centerpiece of his best-seller Collapse, and people have begun using the term “ecocide” to refer to such short-sightedness. The history of Easter Island, they say, was one of man arriving, expanding beyond environmental sustainability and then suffering civilizational and demographic collapse before the arrival of the Europeans.

The trouble is that, as Easter Island researchers have thought for a while, this history is plain wrong. New research, summarized here, suggests that the islanders arrived about 800 years later than that chronology requires and had a successful civilization until after the arrival of the Europeans, who destroyed the civilization by the usual methods of slavery, disease and rat infestation.

The research can be found via Science magazine here, but requires a subscription or one-time payment.