On the latest episode of “The Astounding Pop Mech Show,” Andrew Daniels, Shawn Gorman, and Emma Frederickson discuss a 500-year-old mystery on Easter Island.

For decades, an influential theory blamed the Rapanui for their own downfall—a story made famous by Jared Diamond’s book Collapse. New evidence tells a different tale ...

Easter Island just got a lot more mysterious—new clues are challenging everything we thought we knew about its ancient statues and the people who built them.

Geology textbooks describe the Earth's mantle beneath its plates as a well-mixed viscous rock that moves along with those plates like a conveyor belt. But that idea, first set out some 100 years ago, ...

Two recent studies have cast doubt on a popular theory that the ancient residents of Easter Island suffered a societal collapse because they overexploited their natural resources, an event often ...

Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island, never experienced a ruinous population collapse, according to an analysis of ancient DNA from 15 former inhabitants of the remote island in the Pacific Ocean.

The island called Rapa Nui by locals, located 2,300 miles off the coast of Chile, is tiny in size but gargantuan in legend.