Graham Hancock on archaeology: what the evidence says · JRE #2215
SUBJECT: ARCHAEOLOGY
Not a true/false call. Every claim is logged with its sources; read the exhibits below.
the date that she's found 3,000 year old banana phytoliths in Easter Island blows out of the water the notion that Easter Island was only settled a thousand years ago or less, which is the current idea of archaeology.
What the evidence says 01 / RECORD
The 3,000-year-old banana finding does not come from Easter Island (Rapa Nui). It comes from the Teouma site on Efate Island, Vanuatu, roughly 6,000 km away, where researchers identified banana (Musa) microparticles in the dental calculus of Lapita settlers dated to about 3,000 years ago (published in Nature Human Behaviour, 2020). On Rapa Nui itself, banana and other crop microfossils are associated with the post-settlement period (roughly the 13th to 15th centuries AD), not 3,000 years ago. Peer-reviewed work on Rapa Nui dates the earliest human occupation to about AD 1000 to 1300, consistent with the conventional archaeological view of settlement around AD 1200. No published study reports 3,000-year-old banana phytoliths from an Easter Island crater, so the claim conflates a Vanuatu discovery with Rapa Nui and does not overturn the accepted Rapa Nui settlement chronology.