The desert thing makes sense to me. In many cases, it didn't used to be desert. The Southwest of the Anasazi was green and verdant like Northern Colorado. That's why they descended into cannibal nomads who became the Navajo, Apache and Hopi, who were stuck in a parched wasteland. It's one of the principal complaints of the Jews against Islam - "When you kicked us out of Palestine it was green and healthy and now it looks like the Golan Heights." There's definitely merit to the idea but the environment it's presented in doesn't support the argument. It's not like the Rapa Nui intended to bring their rats with them. It's almost more accurate to talk about the Dutch and their chickens, which are now the apex predator of Kauai.
I've been trying to find information on this and so far I haven't hit on anything related to a common origin of these three peoples, but then, the sites I've looked at aren't exactly scholarly in nature. Care to point me in the right direction?That's why they descended into cannibal nomads who became the Navajo, Apache and Hopi, who were stuck in a parched wasteland.
http://www.learner.org/interactives/collapse/chacocanyon.htm... http://cpluhna.nau.edu/People/anasazi_collapse.htm The search string I used was "anasazi collapse."
I didn't know that the Dutch introduced chickens to Kauai. I thought that chickens were generally part of the Polynesian colonization. Here's an article I read about the spread of chickens.
My bad. Got my stories mixed up. The dutch brought Mongooses. The chickens are due to cockfighters' roosts being destroyed by hurricane Iniki.