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For decades, archeologists have debated whether the writing system of Rapa Nui (Easter Island), known as Rongorongo, was invented independently or influenced by Europeans.
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A new study that uses radiocarbon dating to assess the age of four Rongorongo tablets shows that one of the tablets predates the arrival of Europeans in the 1720s.
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However, the date only reflects when the wood was felled, and sample size of one isn’t large enough to be entirely certain.
Today, humans inhabit—or have, at the very least, explored—pretty much every corner of the planet. But that immense proliferation of Home sapiens across the globe was a slow process. With the first humans leaving Africa between 60 to 90 thousand years ago, the species slowly spread across the Earth over many millennia. And one of the last places these ancient humans made their way to was the southeastern Pacific island of Rapa Nui, known more broadly as Easter Island.
Located 2,360 miles off the coast of Chile—which annexed the country back in 1888—Rapa Nui is one of the most isolated places in the world. Its native people, who are also named the Rapa Nui, first arrived on the island’s shores between 1150 and 1280 CE, and lived in isolation until the arrival of Dutch navigator Jacob Roggeveen in 1722.
While Europeans eventually discovered the impressive moai statues for which the Rapa Nui are best known, they also stumbled upon a yet-undeciphered script known as Rongorongo—a three-dimensional writing system that uses pictorial signs known as glyphs.
But because this script wasn’t first described until 1864, archaeologist and historians have since pondered an enduring question: Did the Rapa Nui independently invent this language, or where they influenced by Europeans?
Now, a new study is attempting to solve this linguistic conundrum by suggesting that, using radiocarbon dating, one of the 27 wooden objects containing Rongorongo inscriptions pre-dates the arrival of Europeans, at around 1493 to 1509. This finding suggests that the Rapa Nui could’ve possibly invented Rongorongo independently—a rare feat throughout human history, and one usually associated with complex states.
The other strong piece of evidence for this homegrown language theory is that Rongorongo functions much differently than European languages, which would appear to suggest no discernible outside influence. Lead author Silvia Ferarra, an archeologist and linguist at the University of Bologna, Italy, published her team’s findings in Scientific Reports in early February.
“The question is of crucial importance, as it implies the possibility of an independent invention of writing, similarly to what happened in other parts of the world where writing was an original creation, e.g., in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China and Mesoamerica,” the paper reads. “If Rongorongo predates the arrival of external travelers, it could represent another, and the latest, invention of writing in human history.”
While one of the four wood tablets examined provides pre-European evidence for the language, the discovery also comes with a few caveats. For one, radiocarbon dating can only detect when a tree was cut down, not inscribed—though, Ferrara suggests that centuries old wood would be unsuitable for such a task. But, more importantly, the wood tablet provides only a sample size of one, as the other examined tablets all fell on the other side of the European divide.
To gather further evidence, Ferrara would have to examine the other remaining tablets, which are all that is left of the long-forgotten language. But they’ve been scattered across the globe, and are not easy to access. For now, the search continues in the effort to place the contributions of these native people in the correct historical context.
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