Here’s news from an island not half an hour from an early home of the Zika virus, the island of Yap. For those of us who haven’t visited the Easter Islands recently, some mystery surrounding the enigmatic Easter Island heads or moai as they are called, was cleared up recently, thanks to some circulating photos in an email that has gone slowly viral since 2012. The general public knows the Easter Island statues simply as giant heads sitting on grassy mounds. Archaeologists have known other facts about the statues – more precisely, that the statues aren’t just heads but have bodies underneath that go down many feet into the ground. The moai were all standing up until the late 18th and 19th centuries when the Europeans came or possibly because of tribal wars.

As we can tell from the images in the email, experts on the Easter Island Statue Project team are painstakingly excavating two of the statues from the earth that it has been buried under for over five hundred years. Both the

excavated statues are seven meters tall, about the height of a two-story building. Scientists have also found traces of the pigment that was used to paint the statues. Some of the statues wear red hats of volcanic stone. Experts believe the statues are the living faces of the native Polynesian’s ancestors. The statues were built between 1200 and 1500 CE, in the

We still don’t know a lot about the Rapa Nui people who built the statues. But thanks to modern technology, there are some exciting facts we are finding out about these statues and the people who built them.

These statues are remarkable particularly because each is a monolith, carved out of a single block of stone. They were not buried by the Rapa Nui but from debris and dirt that washed down onto the statues. Scientists also found that the statues were made to stand on stone pavements. The ancient engineers cut holes in the bedrock to put in tree trunks as posts. They also cut rope guides around the post holes.

Those who have seen the photos and are wondering if they are real, lay your doubts to rest.