Table of Contents
I keep coming back to the carved stones of two places that lie about (10,439 miles) apart. That distance is my own great-circle calculation between the two sites. One stone is a moai from Rapa Nui (Easter Island). The others are the T-shaped pillars of Göbekli Tepe in Turkey. I think the link between them matters for my research. On this page I set out what is documented, what I see myself, and what other people have concluded.
What each site is
A moai is a monolithic stone statue of a human figure made on Rapa Nui. The British Museum calls the moai “the aringa ora, the living faces of the ancestors”. Hoa Hakananai’a is one moai, now in the British Museum in London. The museum says it is carved from basalt and dates from about 1000 to 1200. According to the museum, it stood in a house at Orongo before it was taken to Britain.
Göbekli Tepe is an archaeological site in south-eastern Turkey. UNESCO says it was “erected by hunter-gatherers in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic age between 9,600 and 8,200 BCE”. Pre-Pottery Neolithic is the first part of the New Stone Age in the Near East, before people made pottery. The site has round and rectangular enclosures with limestone T-shaped pillars up to 5.5 m tall. UNESCO describes some of these pillars as “abstract depictions of the human form”.
What the two stones share
Arms and hands on the belly. An editorial in the journal Antiquity prints Klaus Schmidt’s photo of Pillar 18. It states: “The hands with fingers on the front edge indicate that these stones are schematised human forms.” UNESCO describes the arms and hands on the central pillars of Enclosure D. On moai, the arms are carved in low relief, which means raised only slightly from the stone surface. Wikipedia’s Moai article says the hands and long fingers rest along the hips and meet at the hami, the loincloth.
A belt. UNESCO says some Göbekli Tepe pillars carry reliefs of “belts and loincloths”. The same Antiquity editorial describes a belt with a clasp and a fox skin on Pillar 18. On the back of Hoa Hakananai’a there is a raised belt of three lines, called the maro, with a ring above it.
Birds and a disc. On Pillar 43, a vulture raises one wing toward a round disc. The German Archaeological Institute (DAI) reads that disc as possibly an egg, the sun, the moon or a human head. The back of Hoa Hakananai’a carries birdman figures. The British Museum links these carvings to the tangata manu religion. Tangata manu means “birdman” in Rapa Nui.
My own observation. Seeing the two photos side by side, I notice the same arrangement on both stones. Birds sit in the upper part of the stone. A round form sits close to them. This comparison is mine and is not taken from a published source.
How they differ
The age gap is more than 9,000 years, because Göbekli Tepe ends around 8200 BCE and Hoa Hakananai’a dates from about 1000 to 1200 CE.
The Göbekli Tepe pillars were set up by hunter-gatherers, while Rapa Nui was settled by Polynesian voyagers, by about 1210 CE according to a 2021 DNA study.
UNESCO calls the Göbekli Tepe pillars abstract depictions of the human form, while the moai have carved faces with heavy brows and long noses, according to Wikipedia.
The Göbekli Tepe pillars are limestone, while Hoa Hakananai’a is basalt.
The birdman reliefs on Hoa Hakananai’a are later than the statue itself, because the British Museum says the birdman religion developed around 1400, “well after Hoa Hakananai’a was carved”.
Possible readings
A shared human pattern. Özgür Barış Etli compared the hand poses in a 2015 Ancient Origins article. He calls the pose the “Birthing Posture”. He suggests that “perhaps a global shamanic culture communicated this posture through art”. A shaman is a ritual specialist who mediates with the spirit world. Etli also suggests that traumatised communities could have produced common motifs, similar to the archetypes of Carl Jung.
A direct comparison of the birds. Lee Paqui wrote on Graham Hancock’s website in October 2024. She says that “the carving of a bird found at Göbleki Tepe that is holding a ball in its outstretched wing bears a striking similarity to the Birdman carvings of Easter Island, which in many cases are holding an ‘egg’ in their anthropomorphised hands”. She also compares the Standing Man of Karahan Tepe with the hands-on-abdomen pose of excavated moai.
The lost-civilisation reading. Graham Hancock makes this link in Magicians of the Gods (2015). He writes: “Also noteworthy are the hand positions seen on the larger Gobekli Tepe pillars, with long fingers placed forward and almost meeting across the belly. Identical hand positions are seen on the Easter Island Moai.” He suggests that the same people who built and buried Göbekli Tepe were also at work on Easter Island. He dates that burial to the end of the Younger Dryas, a cold spell at the close of the last Ice Age, some 11,600 years ago. Hancock argues that the moai may therefore be much older than archaeologists think. In the same book he ties the founding of Göbekli Tepe around 9600 BCE to the date Plato gives for the destruction of Atlantis. This is a paleo-contact reading: the idea that a lost early civilisation carried knowledge to distant peoples.
A Hopi crossing. Oswald White Bear Fredericks, as Shawn Hamilton retells him on What Was the Lost Continent of Mu?, says his people left a sinking Pacific land called Kásskara, which he equates with Lemuria or Mu. They crossed a chain of islands to a land rising in the east. Of Easter Island he says: “Easter Island is the only island on our way which did not sink completely in the ocean after our passage.” A row of seven statues there recalls the crossing for the Hopi. “These statues represent the seven worlds which we must cross,” he says. Gian Rinaldo Carli, in Lettres américaines (1788), writes that the islanders take the statues for images of their old princes. He argues that the people living on the island did not make the works, and that more cultivated peoples, since submerged, raised them (printed p. 254). I review his letters at Lettres américaines. I set the Hopi account beside Carli’s, and beside the hand poses above. They are readings, not documented history.
I do not take a final position here. I keep the documented features, my own observation and these readings apart, so each can be checked on its own.
Related on this site
- What Is Göbekli Tepe Pillar 43?: the Vulture Stone and the Ethical Skeptic’s sky reading.
- Polynesian DNA: how and when Polynesians reached Rapa Nui.
- What Was the Lost Continent of Mu?: James Churchward’s claims about Pacific stone art.
- Lemuria/Mu: channelled texts that place Easter Island in Lemuria.
- Taurid meteor stream: the Younger Dryas catastrophe in the Göbekli Tepe region.
Sources
- British Museum, Hoa Hakananai’a collection record (object Oc1869,1005.1).
- British Museum, Moai Hoa Hakananai’a, contested objects.
- Wikipedia, Hoa Hakananai’a.
- Wikipedia, Moai.
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre, Göbekli Tepe.
- Antiquity editorial with Klaus Schmidt’s photo of Pillar 18, PDF.
- German Archaeological Institute, Tepe Telegrams, Of animals and a headless man. Göbekli Tepe, Pillar 43 (2016).
- Özgür Barış Etli, The Statues and Symbolic Gestures that Link Ancient Göbekli Tepe, Easter Island, and Other Sites Around the World, Ancient Origins, 9 June 2015.
- Lee Paqui, The Standing Man of Karahan Tepe and the Moai Kavakava of Easter Island, grahamhancock.com, 19 October 2024.
- Graham Hancock, Magicians of the Gods, 2015, chapter 18, “Ocean”.
- Shawn Hamilton, The Mysterious Past of the Hopi: From Kásskara to the Americas, grahamhancock.com, 25 June 2020. He quotes White Bear from the transcript made for Josef Blumrich.
- Gian Rinaldo Carli, Lettres américaines, Tome II, Boston and Paris, Buisson, 1788, p. 254.
- Science, DNA offers surprises on how Polynesia was settled (on the 2021 study by Ioannidis and colleagues).
