Flying into Easter Island last year I was amazed at the amount of water under me. 2300 miles from the nearest country (Chile) and 1200 miles from the nearest inhabited islands, the Pitcairns, I wondered how the original Polynesians ever found them. Only 14 miles long by 7 miles wide, Easter Island is less than a dot on the map; a good walker can circle the island in less than a day.
Yet, people found Easter Island, settled there, and developed enough of a culture to carve out the enormous Moais original to this one island and no other. A small island maybe, but not lacking in its fair share of mysteries: who were these islanders? how did they get there? and what about the Moais? To date, these massive megaliths carved out of volcanic rock using stone tools and ranging up to forty feet in height while weighing up to 75 tons are hard to explain: how were they carved? how were they moved from the quarry to their present day location, and provided they were rolled across flat ground using logs, how were they stood? Good questions for an anthropologist to answer, and although the how questions are being worked on, it is relatively certain that the why question will never be answered: after years of study and conjecture, only one thing is for sure: the Moais are there.
As tough as these islanders were, first contact with Europeans proved fatal in the short run, yet, they left something lasting behind: the Moais. And probably more lasting the even their rock sculptures are the questions they left unanswered, each one a good mystery. It’s good for a culture to have a few mysteries, I think, and I wonder if we’ll leave many behind when our time as a culture is up.