"'In just a few centuries, the people of Easter Island wiped out their forest, drove their plants and animals to extinction, and saw their complex society spiral into chaos and cannibalism.'
So writes Jared Diamond in his best-selling book Collapse, which was published in 2005.
Nearly two decades later, an international team of geneticists has found evidence that this famous cautionary tale never actually happened.
The true story of Rapa Nui (named Easter Island by colonial Europeans) is not one of self-inflicted population collapse, the new findings suggest, but of cultural resilience.
In the 1600s, it seems that the ancient people of Rapa Nui were not utterly isolated on their island, and it is clear that they did not overexploit their resources to the point of 'ecocide'.