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~ Kon Tiki
photo: Kon-Tiki Museum, Oslo
Today is the birthday of Norwegian adventurer and ethnographer, Thor Heyerdahl. He is notable for his Kon-Tiki expedition in 1947, in which he drifted 8,000 km (5,000 mi) across the Pacific Ocean in a primitive hand-built raft from South America to the Tuamotu Islands.
I had switched my career ambitions a few years earlier from Paleontology to Archaeology (link below) with my discovery of the Tutankhamun explorations in Egypt in 1926; I became fascinated with ancient cultures and empires, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Aztec, etc.
Heyerdahl (born in 1914) is one of the greatest and most controversial explorers of the 20th century known for having crossed part of the Pacific Ocean in 1947 on an open boat, the Kon-Tiki, built of balsa wood, in order to question the origins of the Polynesian people.
The basis of the Kon-Tiki expedition was Heyerdahl's belief that the original inhabitants of Easter Island (and the rest of Polynesia) were the "Tiki people", a race of "white bearded men" who supposedly originally sailed from Peru.
He described these "Tiki people" as being a sun-worshipping
fair-skinned people with blue eyes, fair or red hair, tall statures, and
beards. He further said that these people were originally from the Middle East, and had crossed the Atlantic earlier to found the great Mesoamerican civilizations. By 500 CE, a branch of these people were supposedly forced out into Tiahuanaco where they became the ruling class of the Inca Empire and set out to voyage into the Pacific Ocean under the leadership of "Con Ticci Viracocha"
Twenty years later, he repeated the feat with the boats Ra II and Tigris, this time made of reeds, with which he crossed the Atlantic with Ra II and sailed along the gulfs of Oman, Persia and finally Aden with Tigris. Throughout his life, he tried to overturn the scientific consensus on the origin of the Polynesian peoples by trying to prove that they did not originate in East Asia but in South America. He alienated the scientific community with his work, but he participated largely in the popularization of these themes and of science in general. In particular, he contributed to popularizing the idea that there were probably contacts and therefore transoceanic links between the ancient cultures of the world.
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