in Oslo, Norway In 1947 Heyerdahl and five fellow adventurers sailed from
Peru to the
Tuamotu Islands,
French Polynesia in a
raft that they had constructed from
balsa wood and other native materials, christened the
Kon-Tiki. The
Kon-Tiki expedition was inspired by old reports and drawings made by the Spanish
Conquistadors of
Inca rafts, and by native legends and archaeological evidence suggesting contact between
South America and
Polynesia. The
Kon-Tiki smashed into the
reef at
Raroia in the Tuamotus on 7 August 1947 after a 101-day, 4,300-nautical-mile (5,000-mile or 8,000 km) journey across the
Pacific Ocean. Heyerdahl had nearly drowned at least twice in childhood and did not take easily to water; he said later that there were times in each of his raft voyages when he feared for his life. Heyerdahl believed he had proven his theory of accidental settlement of Polynesia, in which he assumed that Polynesians lacked the skills, knowledge, and technology of reaching remote islands intentionally. However, Heyerdahl’s raft had no windward sailing capability and was only capable of drifting downwind. Thus, his theory could not account for the similarities of Polynesian societies on islands from Hawaii to Tahiti. Instead, the 1976 voyage by the
Polynesian Voyaging Society of the performance-accurate Polynesian voyaging canoe
Hōkūleʻa demonstrated the historic ability of Polynesian voyagers to sail on a reach, across the trade winds which parallel the Earth’s latitude and switch direct on opposite sides of the equator. Heyerdahl's book about
The Kon-Tiki Expedition: By Raft Across the South Seas has been translated into 70 languages. The documentary film of the expedition entitled
Kon-Tiki won an
Academy Award in 1951. A dramatised version was released in 2012, also called
Kon-Tiki, and was nominated for both the
Best Foreign Language Oscar at the
85th Academy Awards and a
Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film at the
70th Golden Globe Awards. It was the first time that a Norwegian film was nominated for both an Oscar and a Golden Globe.
Expedition to Easter Island In 1955–1956, Heyerdahl organised the Norwegian Archaeological Expedition to
Easter Island. The expedition's scientific staff included
Arne Skjølsvold,
Carlyle Smith,
Edwin Ferdon,
Gonzalo Figueroa and
William Mulloy. Heyerdahl and the professional archaeologists who travelled with him spent several months on Easter Island investigating several important archaeological sites. Highlights of the project include experiments in the carving, transport and erection of the notable
moai, as well as excavations at such prominent sites as
Orongo and
Poike. The expedition published two large volumes of scientific reports (
Reports of the Norwegian Archaeological Expedition to Easter Island and the East Pacific) and Heyerdahl later added a third (
The Art of Easter Island). Heyerdahl's popular book on the subject,
Aku-Aku was another international best-seller. In
Easter Island: The Mystery Solved (Random House, 1989), Heyerdahl offered a more detailed theory of
the island's history. Working with
Rapanui archaeologist
Sonia Haoa Cardinali and using other Rapanui evidence, he claimed the island was originally colonised by
Hanau eepe ("Long Ears"), from South America, and that Polynesian
Hanau momoko ("Short Ears") arrived only in the mid-16th century; they may have come independently or perhaps were imported as workers. According to Heyerdahl, something happened between Admiral Roggeveen's discovery of the island in 1722 and James Cook's visit in 1774; while Roggeveen encountered white, Indian, and Polynesian people living in relative harmony and prosperity, Cook encountered a much smaller population consisting mainly of Polynesians and living in privation. Heyerdahl notes the oral tradition of an uprising of "Short Ears" against the ruling "Long Ears." The "Long Ears" dug a defensive moat on the eastern end of the island and filled it with kindling. During the uprising, Heyerdahl claimed, the "Long Ears" ignited their moat and retreated behind it, but the "Short Ears" found a way around it, came up from behind, and pushed all but two of the "Long Ears" into the fire. This moat was found by the Norwegian expedition and it was partly cut down into the rock. Layers of fire were revealed but no fragments of bodies.
Theory on Polynesian origins 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". () based on archaeological, linguistic, and genetic studies, as opposed to Heyerdahl's eastern origin hypothesis Heyerdahl said that when the Europeans first came to the Pacific islands, they were astonished that they found some of the natives to have relatively light skins and beards. There were whole families that had pale skin, hair varying in colour from reddish to blonde. In contrast, most of the Polynesians had golden-brown skin, raven-black hair, and rather flat noses. Heyerdahl claimed that when
Jacob Roggeveen discovered
Easter Island in 1722, he supposedly noticed that many of the natives were white-skinned. Heyerdahl claimed that these people could count their ancestors who were "white-skinned" right back to the time of Tiki and
Hotu Matua, when they first came sailing across the sea "from a mountainous land in the east which was scorched by the sun". The ethnographic evidence for these claims is outlined in Heyerdahl's book
Aku-Aku: The Secret of Easter Island. Heyerdahl described these later "Native American" migrants as "Maori-Polynesians" who were supposedly Asians who crossed over the
Bering land bridge into
Northwest America before sailing westward towards Polynesia (the westward direction is because he refused to accept that Polynesians were capable of sailing against winds and currents). He associated them with the
Tlingit and
Haida peoples and characterized them as "inferior" to the Tiki people. were Polynesian. Furthermore, examination of skeletons offers evidence of only Polynesian origins for Rapa Nui living on the island after 1680.
, a performance-accurate replica of a Polynesian double-hulled wa'a kaulua'' voyaging canoe, sailed from
Hawaiʻi to
Tahiti against prevailing winds in 1976, partly to disprove Heyerdahl's drift hypothesis on his much more primitive and unsteerable
Kon-Tiki balsa raft It is overwhelmingly rejected by scientists today. Archaeological, linguistic, cultural, and genetic evidence all support a western origin (from
Island Southeast Asia) for Polynesians via the
Austronesian expansion. "Drift voyaging" from South America was also deemed "extremely unlikely" in 1973 by computer modeling.
Hōkūleʻa also remains fully operational, and has since completed ten other voyages, including a three-year
circumnavigation of the planet from 2014 to 2017, with other sister ships. Heyerdahl's hypothesis was part of early
Eurocentric hyperdiffusionism and the
westerner disbelief that (
non-white) "stone-age" peoples with "no math" could colonize islands separated by vast distances of ocean water, even against prevailing winds and currents. He rejected the highly skilled voyaging and navigating traditions of the
Austronesian peoples and instead argued that Polynesia was settled from boats following the wind and currents for navigation from South America. As such, the
Kon-Tiki was deliberately a primitive raft and unsteerable, in contrast to the sophisticated
outrigger canoes and
catamarans of the Austronesian people. Anthropologist and
National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence
Wade Davis also criticized Heyerdahl's theory in his 2009 book
The Wayfinders, which explores the history of Polynesia. Davis says that Heyerdahl "ignored the overwhelming body of linguistic, ethnographic, and ethnobotanical evidence, augmented today by genetic and archaeological data, indicating that he was patently wrong."
Paul Theroux, in his book
The Happy Isles of Oceania, also criticizes Heyerdahl for trying to link the culture of Polynesian islands with the Peruvian culture. Recent scientific investigation that compares the DNA of some of the Polynesian islands with natives from Peru suggests that there is some merit to some of Heyerdahl's ideas and that while Polynesia was colonized from Asia, some contact with South America also existed; a number of papers have in the last few years confirmed with genetic data some form of contacts with
Easter Island. Responding to one of these papers, archaeologist Terry Hunt said "It is good to see this kind of research, but a definitive answer isn't really possible given the lack of chronological control... Native American genes reaching Rapa Nui with European contact cannot be ruled out." ==Boats
Ra and
Ra II==