Word: mangareva
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...shows us the last desperate Norsemen rioting and eating newborn calves and even their own hunting dogs. He lays out the decline of the Mayan empire, the extinction of the Anasazi--whose five-story buildings were the tallest in North America until the 1880s--and the final days of Mangareva, a tiny tropical island where the last inhabitants not only ate one another but dug up buried corpses and ate them...
Third, otherwise robust societies can be dragged down by the environmental problems of their trade partners. About 500 years ago, two Polynesian societies, on Henderson Island and Pitcairn Island, vanished because they depended for vital imports on the Polynesian society of Mangareva Island, which collapsed from deforestation. We Americans can well understand that outcome, having seen how vulnerable we are to instability in oil-exporting countries of the Middle East...
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