How exciting! Great find orathaic! I'm surprised this hasn't been on the main news!

Ah, and now I learn why :)

why?

Holy shit!

Yeah, why Sarg?

The sailing ship carving in particular blew me away. When do you suppose that was made??

Because it is not a surprise that 'Moai' have heads because, although these particular ones have only just been excavated, many 'Moai' statues have been excavated before and shown to have bodies as well as heads.

There's one in the British Museum, for example.

Moreover, many of Easter Island's 'Moai' statues do have the bodies on display, above ground - and so the only reason this story comes as a 'surprise' to us is because we are so used to seeing 'head-only' images of Easter Island 'Moai' statues because this is the popular, 'mysterious' image the media and fans like to perpetuate.

That first sentence was terribly-worded, I know :)

http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/aoa/h/hoa_hakananaia.aspx

So, really, we've known since 1774 that Moai Easter Island statues have heads :)

Sailing ships.would.have been common place at the end of the first millennium, so that doesn't surprise me at all.

Ah, so to actually answer the question of why this hasn't been on the news: Because it is not news.

But I give orathaic a +1 anyway for something that is still interesting :)

They have underwears! O.O

News to me ;p

Pretty cool statues, probably not made by aliens...

Much more interesting is that their method of transportation was waddling.

"Sailing ships.would.have been common place at the end of the first millennium, so that doesn't surprise me at all."

Not one that looks like that

We should celebrate this discovery with a game of the Easter Island diplomacy variant

http://www.diplom.org/Zine/W2000A/Cole/Easter.html

what Sargmacher said ... this is actually pretty well known and reported already, still cool, but not news

Whoa, that's amazing. Almost looks shopped. They're really buried? I would never have guessed.

yes you would have

Interesting set of pictures!

But yeah, I'm not convinced that that's a ship. It looks too symmetrical for me.

Actually, the rigging of a liking lordship when the sails.are dropped looks a lot like the triangular shape in the image and the Macedonia empire had ships with triangular sails.

Viking longship - stupid dumbphone.

Draugnar:
I was looking at this:
http://www.thethinkbox.ca/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/easterislandboat.jpg
Do you mean square sails? I don't see anything triangular in this image.

I guess it is a square sail (with a mast down the middle, probably making people think it's two sails), I thought I had seen a triangle, Well then this is even more likely as a sailboat. Vikings and Egyptians of the time period both had symmetrical single square sailed boats and I'm sure others did as well.

As far as the sail being set "parallel" to the boat's body, that is done when you are sailing into the wind. While you can't go head on, if the wind is a bit off one side of the bow or the other, you set your sheets almost parallel to the body of the craft (even on square sheets) and they act like a perpendicular airfoil. So nothing about that ship is outside of what would have been sailed in the late 9th and early 10th century.

And yes, one of my hobbies is sailing. I'm getting ready to buy my third sailboat, just debating on what I want to get. I'm leaning toward sthis.

http://www.westwightpotter.com/products/potter-15/

Features of the Potter 15 include:

4 Oz. White 110% Lapper Jib
On Boom Jiffy Reefing System
Boom Vang

Might as well be speaking Greek.

110%? wow, thats a lot!

Is it one of those spinney things where it spins morr than one time around?

A lapper jib is a jib that overlaps the main sail. 110% means it overlaps by 10%.

yeah, i just think it's funny, that wouldn't call it a 10% overlapping jib, because 110% sounds soo much better! :) advertising, helping confuse mathematical literacy for as long as we have enough to read numbers...

Where would you use it, Draugnar?

And by the way, I see three 'masts', each with little rectangles on it. It could, I suppose, that the 'sails' are being depicted perpendicular to thr length of the ship, but it still doen't look right to me. And really, the Egyptians of this period still had square sails?

Actually it is 110% because a job can be less than 100% if it doesn't fill the gap between the forestay and the mast.

As far as the drawing goes, it is crude so I see the edges of the sail where you see more masts. I can't speak for certain about what the Egyptians of 900 AD sailed.

As far as sailing here goes, I have Huston Woods' Acton Lake 30-40 minutes away and Brookville Lake a little over an hour away from my house.

Jib not job - Thank you Droid Dumbphone.

Draugnar: Point being then it is not at all obvious that it's a ship, ha ha.

Point granted, JECE.

Draugnar: I must now concede that I'm impressed by your rare concession!

I was just going on *if* it was a boat that it wasn't necessarily out of the realm of sailing boats during that time, considering the crudeness of the picture. But I actually thought the same thing when I first saw it... That's a boat?

Ha ha, yeah.

By the way, I just noticed the lakes you mentioned. I had to look them up: Jesus they're far away. I don't think I ever visited those parts.

http://i.imgur.com/e3edt.jpg

Miami U of Ohio is in Oxford and Huston Woods is just outside it. It's a nice 600 acre or so lake perfect for sailing with a horsepower and no wake limit such that only small fishing boats, pontoon party boats, canoes/rowboats, and sailboats are on it. Brookville is a lot bigger but has sections of it designated as no wake so the sailboats and the water skiers don't have to be concerned with each other.

Can you reduce your wake by getting out of the water (on a hydro-foil)?

Just wondering how a no wake limit is measured...

Hydrofoils have wakes.

No wake is like having a crude speed limit that's measured by sight. It's a judgement call in most cases.

I guess that a hydro-foil reduces it's wake by reducing the displaced water, but how much of a reduction is possible is not something i'm familiar with.

The prop on a hydrofoil produces so much wake and, while hydroplaning reduces displacement, the mass of the craft is still there so the hudrofoils themselves put out a significant wake. Typically, no wake means no white capping and a maximum height and travel distance to the blue water wake.

Look at the wake and spray coming off this one...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hydrofoil_old.jpg

Remember, the hydrofoil is about reducing friction by reducing surface area, but the mass still exerts the same amount of force on the water surface, it just does it over a much smaller surface area.

Hmm, the mass/area = pressure wave would be an important impact, as contrasted with a lower pulse from a large area displacement.

Though with the reduced friction i'd have imagined less energy lost to the water, and thus a smaller net impact... Also the fact that some of the hydrofoil is underwater would limit the surface impact...

The picture says it all. Huge spray coming off the hydro-foils is normal and they also throw up major rooster tails off their props which, when on plane, are barely in the water.