Ecology of the collapse of Rapa Nui society: Population collapse of Rapa Nui society

Collapses of food producer societies are recurrent events in prehistory and have triggered a growing concern for identifying the underlying causes of convergences/divergences across cultures around the world. One of the most studied and used as a paradigmatic case is the population collapse of the Rapa Nui society. Here, we test different hypotheses about it by developing explicit population dynamic models that integrate feedbacks between climatic, demographic and ecological factors that underpinned the socio-cultural trajectory of these people. We evaluate our model outputs against a reconstruction of past population size based on archaeological radiocarbon dates from the island. The resulting estimated demographic declines of the Rapa Nui people are linked to the long-term effects of climate change on the island's carrying capacity and, in turn, on the 'per-capita food supply'.Data accessibility. The data is available from the Dryad Digital Repository: https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.bk3j9kd7j [69]. Authors’ contributions. Conceptualization: M.L., E.M.G., S.A.E., C.L. and N.C.S. Data curation: E.M.G., N.C.-B., O.M., S.G., A.S. and S.P.-R. Formal analysis: M.L., S.A.E. and E.M.G. Investigation: M.L., E.M.G., S.A.E., C.L., C.M.S., N.C.-B., O.M., S.G., A.S., S.P.-R. and N.C.S. Methodology: M.L., S.A.E., N.C.-B. and E.M.G. Validation: M.L., E.M.G. and S.A.E. Visualization: M.L. and S.A.E. Writing— original draft: M.L., E.M.G., S.A.E., C.L., C.M.S. and N.C.S. Writing—review and editing: M.L., E.M.G., S.A.E., C.L., S.G., A.S., O.M. and S.P.-R. Competing interests. We declare we have no competing interests. Funding. M.L., E.M.G. and S.A.E. acknowledge financial support from the Center of Applied Ecology and Sustainability (CAPES; ANID PIA/BASAL FB0002) and FONDECYT proposal no. 1180121—2018. We also thank ANID FONDAP and PIA grant nos 15110009 (to CR2) and AFB170008 (to the IEB) for additional funding