A long time ago, I read Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, and later Collapse. Both books made very compelling polemics, but also the one time I attended one of his lectures on the same topics, I found him to be a trite, shallow, and actually, disturbingly self congratulatory. That's not to say there's not useful analysis contained in a lot of his works, but I think that some of the lack of rigour that other workers have pointed out in several of his popular anthropology/history books are well founded critiques.
I've just run into another set of works that blow Diamonds very cynical and apocalyptic use of the history of Easter Island in his books, right out of the water:
https://www.americanscientist.org/article/rethinking-the-fall-of-easter-island
The mysteries of Easter Island, subjects of speculation for centuries, yield to scientific inquiry.
The transport of Rapa Nui's (Easter Island) monumental moai statues has been debated for over a century. Based on a systematic analysis of 9
Satellite data shows the amount of food the residents of the tiny Pacific island have grown over time, pointing to a small but stable popula
