The Riddles of Civilizations (Second Version)

Ulisse - The Pleasure of Discovery – Season 12

In this episode of Ulysses, Alberto Angela takes a journey through ancient civilizations and their enigmas, exploring one of the world's most extraordinary archaeological sites, in the heart of the Pacific Ocean: Easter Island. We follow the incredible history of this civilization from the first navigators arriving on the island to the erection of the Moai, the famous stone giants. We try to discover where the first inhabitants came from, considering that the island is located almost 4,000 km from any inhabited coast or island, retracing the feat of a famous Norwegian ethnologist and navigator, Thor Heyerdahl, who built a wooden raft and crossed the Pacific to prove that the first populations had come from the coasts of South America. Other scholars, based on analysis of objects and bones discovered in tombs, argue that the inhabitants arrived from the opposite direction, namely from Polynesia. Who, exactly, were the inhabitants of Easter Island?