section_path: Regional history/Oceania
section_name: Oceania
paragraph_text: Oceania
  
  Easter Island was hit by a great famine between the 15th and 18th centuries. Hunger and subsequent cannibalism was caused by overpopulation and depletion of natural resources as a result of deforestation, partly because work on megalithic monuments required a lot of wood.
  
  There are other documented episodes of famine in various islands of Polynesia, such as occurred in Kau, Hawaii in 1868.
  
  According to Daniel Lord Smail, " ' Famine cannibalism ' was until recently a regular feature of life in the islands of the Massim near New Guinea and of some other societies of Southeast Asia and the Pacific."
  
  When Russian explorer Otto von Kotzebue visited the Marshall Islands in Micronesia in 1817, he noted that Marshallese families practiced infanticide after the birth of a third child as a form of population planning due to frequent famines.