Easter Island's mystical statues may have been 'walked' into place

The mystical Stone Heads of Easter Island may have been walked into position, according to a team of scientists.

There are nearly 1,000 statues on the remote Polynesian island and their origin and the people who built them remains shrouded in mystery.

But one thing has always led to debate: how exactly did the tribe move the moai - some of which weigh more than 80 tones - to their final destinations without the benefit of modern technology?

A team led by Archaeologists Carl Lipo of the California State University Long Beach and Terry Hunt of the University of Hawaii believed that the statues' bases were carved so they could lean forward to make them easier to transport.

The researchers illustrated the theory by creating a five-ton replica of one of the statues and moving it into an upright position on a dirt path in Hawaii.

With just a few ropes, a team of 18 people could rock the statue back and forth, each time inching the statue on just a little bit more. The mode of transport would have taken about two weeks.

The bases would then have been flattened to stand the statues upright once they reached position.

Lipo said the findings may help dismantle the traditional storyline of Easter Island, or Rapa Nui, that a crazed maniacal group destroyed their environment, by cutting down trees to transport gigantic statues.

Previous studies have suggested that a lost civilization chopped down trees on the island, laid the statues prone and rolled them into place using logs.

However, a professor Jo Anne Van Tilburg at the University of California, Los Angeles, has dismissed the findings from last year that suggested the massive rocks could have been walked upright across the hilly terrain.

She used a replica in 1998 to show that moving the statues horizontally along parallel logs worked.

Christopher Stevenson, an archaeologist at Virginia Commonwealth University, also added weight to the debate by pointing out that the roads were rough and uneven.