On Easter Day, 1722, Dutch explorers   landed on Easter Island  . It was the first time that Easter Islanders had met people from the outside world. The strangers were about to discover something very strange themselves --that they were on an island with hundreds of huge stone statues  . The Dutch explorers wondered where the Islanders had come from and why and how they had built the statues. Now science is putting together the story.     The first people to arrive on the island came there around A.D. 700. The society that developed there was based on fishing and farming to feed the population, which grew to 12,000. Its success showed itself in a way that has become the island's trademark  : hundreds of huge stone figures --the moai.     None of the moai was standing when scientists first arrived. People put them back up later; but how had a Stone Age society ever made, moved and set them up there in the first place? And why?     There are nearly 900 moai on Easter Island, and while the questions about them remain unanswered, no one doubts the years of effort that must have gone into making them.     The real killer of the Easter Islanders came from across the ocean. After 1722, it became popular for explorers to visit Easter Island, bringing diseases. The final blow   came in 1862, when slave traders came from Peru and took away 1,500 people, one-third of the population. Before the Dutch explorers arrived on Easter Island,   _  .
Easter Island was separate from the outside world they knew where Islanders had come from they discovered something dangerous the huge stone statues were upright