Easter Island

“The mayor directed building of a one-person and two-person reed boat, which apparently was nigh unsinkable and rode the waves elegantly. Having arrived at this point, it was probably not too much of a stretch to lash multiple boats together to get a much larger boat. The bulrush reed they used for building these boats was the totoro, a fresh-water reed found at Lake Titicaca, Peru, and which the Easter Islanders planted down in the marshy recesses of their extinct volcanoes.”
So although there was recent thought the Easter Islanders were totally stranded after all the trees were gone, maybe not. Heyerdahl also cites plants as a tie between South America and the Islands.
“The most important plant on Easter Island when Roggeveen and Captain
It is said that the last thing he did before he left Peru was to stop at Xusxo (Cuzco) in the north on his way from Lake Titicaca down to the Pacific coast. In Cuzco he appointed a chief named Alcaviza and ordered that all his successors should lengthen their ears after he himself had left them. When the Spaniards reached the shores of Lake Titicaca, they heard from the Indians there too that Con-Ticci Viracocha had been chief of a long-eared people who sailed on Lake Titicaca in reed boats. The pierced their ears, put thick sheaves of totora reed in them, and called themselves ring rim, which meant ‘ear’. The Indians added that it was these long-ears who helped Con-Ticci Viracocha transport and raise the colossal stone blocks weighing over a hundred tons which lay abandoned at Tiahuanaco.”
The Inca have legends of white long-eared rulers, backed up by mummified Caucasian bodies complete with red hair. Pedro Pizarro had also mentioned that it was especially the long-ears who were white-skinned.
The long-ears once ruled a great empire and left stone monuments. According to the Inca they frequently sailed to the Galapagos Islands. Then the legend says that before the first Incas, the sun-god Kon-Ticci Viracocha sailed off with his subjects, never to return.
The Spanish recorded that the ruling Incan families called themselves orejones or long-ears because
The oldest person know to have use ear gauging is Otzi the Iceman, discovered high in the Alps and believed to have originated from 3300 BC. Otzi had gauged ears, and also tattoos, providing proof that body decoration was common at least five thousand years ago. Ear gauging was, and still is, used by tribal elders to signify status.” Ear gauging has been seen in Thailand and Myanmar (Burma). The Ainu of Japan observed a similar custom, as did the Berawan people of Borneo, but this has now all but died out.