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Easter Island: land of mystery

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Kara Sundstrom
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« Reply #15 on: July 06, 2009, 12:37:12 am »

Francis Mazière, who conducted archaeological excavations on the island in 1963, was told by a native elder that ‘very big men, but not giants, lived on the island well before the coming of Hotu-Matua’. Another related the following legend:

    The first men to live on the island were the survivors of the world’s first race. They were yellow, very big, with long arms, great stout chests, huge ears although their lobes were not stretched: they had pure yellow hair and their bodies were hairless and shining. They did not possess fire. This race once existed on two other Polynesian islands. They came by boat from a land that lies behind America.6

According to another tradition, one of the early tribes (the ‘long-ears’) were about 2.5 m (8 ft) tall, and had white skin and red hair.7

The key players in the island’s traditional history are the Hanau-eepe and the Hanau-momoko. These terms are often translated ‘long-ears’ and ‘short-ears’ respectively. However, some researchers say that this is erroneous, and that the correct translations are ‘stocky race’ and ‘slender race’. Hanau means ‘race’ or ‘ethnic group’. Eepe means ‘stocky’ or ‘corpulent’, but there is also a word epe, which means ‘earlobe’. Thor Heyerdahl says that the term was formerly spelled Hanau-epe. Whatever the correct term may be, the people referred to certainly had elongated earlobes. Today momoko carries the sense of ‘sharp-pointed’, and it is assumed that the word probably used to mean ‘slender’ or ‘weak’.8 Some writers have concluded that the Hanau-eepe were the upper class, and the Hanau-momoko the lower class.
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