Explorers have long known there was more to the 887 statues on Easter Island - some 2,000 miles west of Chile - than just the statue heads made famous in photographs.

In October 2011, the Easter Island Statue Project revealed remarkable photos showing that the bodies of the statues go far deeper underground than just about anyone had imagined.

The project's director Jo Anne Van Tilburg says the excavation sites offer some new "strong evidence" of how the Rapa Nui ancestors managed to manipulate the heavy statues into place with limited technological resources of the day. While it used to be a fun theory to speculate whether the Easter Island statues were a product of some alien civilization, the new scientific evidence just goes to show that real history is far more grounded in reality - but no less startling.

Yahoo