Science Archaeology 3D map of Easter Island takes you places visitors aren't allowed One of the world's most isolated islands is open to virtual tourists. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Nestled in the South Pacific Ocean, some 6,000 people live on the most isolated, inhabited island in the world: Rapa Nui. Known to many as Easter Island, a name Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen coined after landing on the island on Easter Sunday 1722, Rapa Nui is roughly double the size of Disney World, or 63.2 square miles. And every year, some 100,000 people visit the remote island to see the famed 13-foot-tall moai statues or Easter Island heads .

Amazon Prime Day is live. See the best deals HERE. Science Archaeology How Easter Island's famed heads'walked' The mystery of how the roughly 130,000 pound statues traveled from quarry to resting place may be solved. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Rollers, wooden carts, and even alien life are just a few of the theories of how people moved the iconic moai statues of Easter Island (also called Rapa Nui).

Paris – Native Americans and Polynesians bridged vast expanses of open ocean around the year 1200 and mingled, leaving incontrovertible proof of their encounter in the DNA of present-day populations, scientists revealed Wednesday. Whether peoples from what is today Colombia or Ecuador drifted thousands of kilometers to tiny islands in the middle of the Pacific, or whether seafaring Polynesians sailed upwind to South America and then back again is still unknown. But what is certain, according to a study in Nature, is that the hook up took place hundreds of years before Europeans set foot in either region, and left individuals scattered across French Polynesia with signature traces of the New World in their DNA. "These findings change our understanding of one of the most unknown chapters in the history of our species' great continental expansions," senior author Andreas Moreno-Estrada, principal investigator at Mexico's National Laboratory of Genomics for biodiversity, said. Archeologists and historians have tussled for decades over whether Oceana islanders and native Americans crossed paths during the Middle Ages, and how, if they did, that contact might have unfolded.