A New Easter Island Statue Was Just Uncovered in a Volcano Crater

Volunteer scientists working with three universities in Chile have helped to uncover a new statue on Easter Island, according toThe Guardian. The moai was found in a volcano crater, and the discovery was announced by the Ma'u Henua Indigenous community, which oversees the land where the moai was found, this week.

"What we've seen today is very important, because this is part of the history of the Rapa Nui people," Salvador Atan Hito, a leader of the Ma'u Henua Indigenous community, told Reuters in a statement.

The statue was found on February 21 half buried about five feet deep, while the volunteers were working on a restoration project involving marshland in the crater in the Rano Raraku volcano. The find comes just months after a fire in October charred other existing moai.

The Ma'u Henua community is now looking to find funding so that the newly discovered statue can be further studied to understand its origins. Right now, there are no plans to move it. It will stay in the ground.

The moai wasn't the only big discovery of the week. Over in Egypt, scientists revealed a 30-foot-long hidden corridor inside the Pyramid of Giza, Reuters reported. The hidden passageway could mark the opportunity for new discoveries to be made inside the 4,500-year-old pyramid.

"We're going to continue our scanning so we will see what we can do ... to figure out what we can find out beneath it, or just by the end of this corridor," Mostafa Waziri, head of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, said in a press statement.

Both new discoveries make me feel a bit hopeful. Most days, the new thing is an AI bot that is going to terrorize senior citizens or a chatbot that promises to do my job. It's genuinely uplifting to know that even now, there's so much left of the world's history to discover.

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