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along centuries after the lines were laid out An ancient Inca road slices across the desert, ruthlessly severing the lines. It would seem that the Incas regarded the lines as insignificant. Nevertheless, hundreds of people must have worked for years, if not for generations, in planning these lines and scratching away the topsoil to render them. The Nazca lines remain as another of early man's energetic but seemingly pointless enterprises. On Easter Sunday, 1722, Dutch admiral Jaakob Rogeveen landed on an island in the Pacific some twenty-two hundred miles from the coast of South America. The first things he saw were hundreds of giant statues squatting near the water line, staring out to sea. They were huge, eyeless heads mounted on small stone bodies. Some were as high as thirty-six feet. Admiral Rogeveen had discovered not Atlantis but Easter Island ».. a pitifully barren volcanic island with an area of forty-five square miles, with almost no trees, and with no wild-life except for hordes of bothersome insects. It was populated by cannibalistic tribes of Polynesian origin who had apparently migrated there centuries before. The current population is 270, but at one time it was considerably larger. Intertribal wars and raids by early slave traders whittled the ane eat i ALL The aku statues were quarried from volcanic rock. Some weigh as much as thirty tons. Since wood is practically non-existent on the island, the statues must have been hauled out of the quarries with ropes and sheer muscle power, dragged down to the beaches and raised "upright with more muscle power. Many of the monuments were topped with a hat, or pukao, made out of red Tock. Some of these pukaos weighed five tons. How the natives raised these five ton carvings to the tops of the erected statues is another puzzle. like the builders of Stonehenge, the Easter Islanders had to accomplish their task with the crudest kind of tools. Each statue must represent months or years of labour. There are over six hundred on the island. The statue building came to an abrupt end for some reason. So abrupt that the workers dropped their stone chisels on the spot. Their tools have been found in the quarry, next to two hundred unfinished statues, some of which measure sixty-six feet long. Various expeditions have visited Easter Island and tried to piece together the story of the a hv builders, but the surviving natives have only the vaguest legends. During the tribal conflicts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, many of the statues were overturned and destroyed rather contemptuously. Remnants of the island's culture were erased by the wars, slavers, a smallpox epidemic, and missionaries who ordered the destruction of pagan artifacts. The latter included ancient wooden tablets covered with an unknown form of writing. Only a few 1 cu eats 4 1 Scientists who have conluded that the Easter Islanders are Polynesians blithely overlook the fact that megalithic structures are virtually unknown in Polynesia and that the Polynesians never de- veloped a form of writing. One Easter Island legend stresses that wars were waged between a tribe of long-eared people and a tribe of short ears. The short ears won and presumably ate all the long ears. Perhaps the long ears were the ahu builders. population down. samples of these tablets remain in scattered museums.