Who are the people of Easter Island?

Easter Island lies in the Pacific Ocean more than 2,000 miles west of South America and 1,400 miles from Pitcairn, the nearest habitable island (where the mutineers from The Bounty ended up).

When the Dutch admiral, Jacob Roggeveen, arrived on Easter Day 1722, he found barren, degraded terrain and a society riven by conflict. He could not work out how the inhabitants could have created the most startling feature of the island – its hundreds of massive stone statues.

In 1955, Thor Heyerdahl, who crossed oceans in his Kon-Tiki raft to work out how ancient peoples had migrated, concluded that the island had originally been settled by people from South America. Their language, however, is a Polynesian dialect, and their tools and crops are similar to those of South East Asian cultures. Now, DNA analysis of 12 Easter Island skeletons has confirmed that the original inhabitants were indeed Polynesians who probably arrived around 400AD.

• Find out more about mummies in the timeline.

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Easter Island's stone statues
(Ancient Art and Architecture)

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