Easter Island's population never collapsed, but it did have contact with Native Americans, DNA study suggests

The remote Pacific island of Rapa Nui, commonly known as Easter Island, never experienced a "self-inflicted population collapse," a new analysis of ancient DNA reveals.

Researchers have long debated whether the Polynesian island's population plummeted due to deforestation, the overexploitation of local resources and warfare during the 1600s, before the arrival of Europeans a century later, according to a study published Wednesday (Sept. 11) in the journal Nature.

But now, after studying the genomes of 15 inhabitants of the Polynesian island, researchers think there was never a rapid drop in population after all.

For the analysis, the team received approval from Rapa Nui community representatives to study human remains at a museum in France. The bodies had been removed from the island, which is located 2,300 miles (3,700 kilometers) west of mainland Chile, during colonization sometime during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. 

DNA taken from these 15 historical individuals showed there was "no evidence of a genetic bottleneck" that would have signified a collapse in the 17th century. Instead, the DNA evidence revealed that the island's small population "steadily increased" until the 1860s, when Peruvian slave raids overtook the island and decreased the population by one-third, according to the study.

Related: Obsidian blades with food traces reveal 1st settlers of Rapa Nui had regular contact with South Americans 1,000 years ago

"We don't think that we have any evidence at a genetic level of a collapse," study co-author Anna-Sapfo Malaspinas, a postdoctoral researcher of evolutionary genomics at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, told Live Science. "When there's a collapse, the population level will decrease, and we'll lose genetic diversity."