View of Moais -- stone statues of the Rapa Nui culture -- on the Ahu Tongariki site on Easter Island, 3700 km off the Chilean coast in the Pacific Ocean, on August 12, 2013.

(Getty Images/AFP )

Easter Island -- with its iconic stone-head statues and mysterious past -- has long been the subject of fierce debate among academics.

More than 2,000 miles west of the Chilean coast, Polynesians traveling in canoes settled on 63 square miles of lush land and , according to Smithsonian Magazine. Carbon dating from archaeological samples sets the arrival of these settlers around 1200 A.D.

Once settled, the Rapa Nui people set out making the famous Easter Island heads as a spiritual exercise of respect for their ancestors. European explorers reached Rapa Nui 500 years later on Easter in 1722, the island, and its native population, were desolate.

There have been several explanations for the implosion of Rapa Nui society, to deforestation caused by the island's original settlers, according to American Scientist.

A new study published in the journal PNAS, however, says thatover centuries rather than a sudden, large-scale collapse.

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What's generally accepted by the archaeological community is that the Rapa Nui people underwent a great leap backward: abandoning agricultural sites and retreating into the island's natural caves. As LiveScience reports, , perhaps caused by a competition for resources.

The researchers were stunned to find that the bulk of Easter Island's regression took place centuries before Europeans arrived.

"The results of our research were really quite surprising to me," study co-author Thegn Ladefoged, an anthropologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, told LiveScience. "Indeed, in the past, we've published articles about how there was little evidence for pre-European-contact societal collapse."

Ladefoged and the rest of the research team conducted tests on tools from different parts of the island. The more tools found in an area, the more likely it was that humans were active there.

As discovered by the researchers, the Rapa Nui people moved from an area prone to droughts, to an area with low soil fertility before jumping to a plot of land that was both rainy and fertile.

"It is clear that people were reacting to regional environmental variation on the island before they were devastated by the introduction of European diseases and other historic processes," Ladefoged said.

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