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Watch This: An Easter Island Statue Replica "Walks"

80beats
By Ashley P. Taylor
Oct 24, 2012 12:44 AMNov 20, 2019 2:07 AM

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In the video above, 18 people "walk" a 10-foot, 8,700-pound replica of an Easter Island statue along a Hawaiian road by tipping it back and forth (and yelling "heave ho," of course). They are testing the theory, put forth by archeologists Carl Lipo and Terry Hunt, that this is how the Easter Islanders transported their statues from the quarry where they were carved, a water-filled crater of an extinct volcano, to their final positions. (Others think the islanders rolled the statues horizontally along on logs.) The reenactment, of sorts, is described in a recent paper.

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