Easter Island's statues 'may have walked into place'

Nearly 1,000 statues stand on the remote island's 163 square km, but much about their origin and the people who built them remains a mystery.

With the largest statue weighing around 67131.7 kg and standing nearly 33ft tall, few of the mysteries are more perplexing than how the megaliths - known as moai - were moved miles into place from the quarries, the 'Daily Mail' reported.

Previous studies have suggested that the people who settled in Easter Island some 800 years ago laid the statues prone and rolled them into place using logs.

However, a new study has suggested that statue builders 'walked' the moai into place by rocking them from side to side.

According to the Nature report, Carl Lipo, archaeologist at California State University, claims the incomplete statues littered across the island tend to support the idea they were rocked into position.

These incomplete statues lean forward in a posture that doesn't seem to lend itself to horizontal transport, Lipo said.

He contends that broken moai along roads, which were presumably dropped and abandoned, also point to their being transported across the island vertically.

Lipo and Terry Hunt, an archaeologist at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu, tested the hypothesis with a life-size concrete model of one of the statues.

According to carbon dating, the large stone statues, or moai, for which Easter Island is world-famous, were carved from 1100-1680AD, the report said.

A total of 887 monolithic stone statues have been inventoried on the island and in museum collections so far.

Although often identified as 'Easter Island heads', the statues have torsos, most of them ending at the top of the thighs.

They were carved out of distinctive, compressed, easily worked solidified volcanic ash or tuff found at a single site.

Only a quarter of the statues were installed, while nearly half remained in the quarry at Rano Raraku and the rest sat elsewhere, probably on their way to final locations.

The largest moai ever raised on a platform is known as 'Paro'. It weighs 74389 kg and is 32.15ft long.

The team were able to get the replica moai to travel 100m in an hour and based on their findings, and Lipo suggested a small number of part-time workers could efficiently transport the statues.