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Here a theory appeared to be proved in practice! Nevertheless, archaeologists all over the world protested against this example. For one thing, they said, Easter Island had always been too short of men and food to have provided the necessary number of stonemasons to carry out the enormous task—even over many generations. For another, they claimed that no finds had yet supplied proof that the islanders had ever had wood at their disposal as building material (for rollers). After my own reflections on the spot I think I may say that the stone tool theory will not stand up for long in view of the facts, which are hard in the literal sense of the word. After Heyerdahl's successful experiment I was quite prepared to cross an unsolved puzzle off my list as solved. But when I stood in front of the lava wall in the crater Rano Raraku, I decided to let the question mark stay on my list. I measured the distance hacked away between the lava and individual statues, and found spaces of up to 6ft over a distance of nearly 105 ft. Nobody could ever have freed such gigantic lumps of lava with small primitive stone tools. Thor Heyerdahl made the natives hammer away for weeks with the old implements which were found in abundance. I saw the meagre result: a groove of a few inches in the hard volcanic rock! We, too, bashed away at the rock like wild men, using the biggest stones we could find. After a few hundred blows, there was nothing left of our 'tools' but a few miserable splinters, but the rock showed hardly a scratch. The stone tool theory may be valid for some of the small statues which originated in an age nearer our own, but in my conviction and the opinion of many visitors to Easter Island it can in no case be accepted for the excavation of the raw material for the colossal statues from the volcanic stone. The Rano Raraku crater today looks like a gigantic sculptor's workshop in which knocking off time had been suddenly announced in the middle of work. Finished, half-finished and just begun statues lie about vertically and horizontally all over the place. Here a gigantic nose towers from the sand, there feet that no shoe could fit sprawl on the scanty grass and elsewhere a face pushes its way through as if "What are you laughing at?’ my friend Hans Neuner shouted at him. 'That's what your ancestors did, didn't they?’ So far no one has been able to produce even a tolerably convincing reason why a few hundred Polynesians who found it hard enough to win their scanty nourishment took such pains to carve some 600 statues. No one has been able to give a clue as to the highly advanced techniques with which the stone blocks were freed from the hard lava. the help of ropes and about a hundred men on the heave-ho principle. gasping for breath. Mayor Ropo had stood by, shaking his head, as we attacked the rock with all our might. Ropo gave a broad grin. With a sly look on his face, he said drily: 'So the archaeologists say.