“Our genetic analysis shows a stably growing population from the 13th century through to European contact in the 18th century. This stability is critical because it directly contradicts the idea of a dramatic pre-contact population collapse,” says Bárbara Sousa da Mota, a researcher at the Faculty of Biology and Medicine at University of Lausanne and first author of the study.

“We looked into how the Indigenous American DNA was distributed across the Polynesian genetic background of the Rapanui. This distribution is consistent with a contact occurring between the 13th and the 15th centuries,” says first author Víctor Moreno-Mayar, Asst. Professor at the Globe Institute’s Section for Geogenetics, University of Copenhagen.