Thor Heyerdahl was a Norwegian adventurer and ethnographer with a background in biology. He specialized in zoology, botany, and geography. While he had great qualifications, Heyerdahl was most remembered for his Kon-Tiki expedition in 1947, in which he drifted 5,000 miles across the Pacific Ocean in a primitive hand-built raft from South America to the Tuamotu Islands. There was a reason for his trip, and it was not accidental or done as a form or self-rescue. The expedition was supposed to prove that the legendary sun-worshiping red-haired, bearded, and white-skinned “Tiki people” from South America drifted and colonized Polynesia first, before actual Polynesian peoples. Heyerdahl’s hyper-diffusionist ideas on ancient cultures were, for the most part, widely rejected by the scientific community, even before his famous expedition.
Heyerdahl was fascinated by various patterns he noticed between the ancient cultures. He thought that common traditions seemed like more a coincidence than a reality. So, the Norwegian adventurer decided to build a simple raft that might have been the kind used by ancient peoples, to prove that ancient cultures could have interacted with each other across oceans. In 1947, Heyerdahl sailed his raft 4,300 miles from Peru to French Polynesia. He called the raft Kon-Tiki. It was made of balsa logs and hemp rope. He was not alone in the raft, because he assumed that anyone who would have made that trip would have done so in a group setting. Finally, after 101 long days, he and his small crew arrived successfully at their destination. In Heyerdahl’s mind, the trip proved that ancient people could have made that same trip.
He liked making these unprecedented and very primitive voyages and made two more similar voyages during his life. In the Ra II expedition of 1970, Heyerdahl sailed 4,000 miles from Morocco to Barbados in a simple reed boat. And in 1977, he sailed down the Tigris River, down the Persian Gulf, and across the Arabian Sea before being forced to end his journey in the Red Sea due to local turmoil. Heyerdahl made these other voyages to demonstrate the possibility of contact between widely separated ancient peoples. But despite these trips, he couldn’t prove anything definitive. Heyerdahl had always felt like he had proved his point, but unfortunately, that didn’t mean that the scientific community was willing to accept his opinion.
Heyerdahl was married three times…first to Liv Coucheron-Torp (1936 – 1947), then to, Yvonne Dedekan-Simonson (1949 – 1969), and finally to Jacqueline Beer 1991. He had 5 children. He died on April 18, 2002, in Colla Micheri, Italy, while he was visiting close family members. The Norwegian government gave him a state funeral in Oslo Cathedral on April 26, 2002.
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