Thor Heyerdahl and his wild adventure across the ocean in a homemade boat

Determined to prove that ancient peoples could communicate across the oceans, Norwegian ethnographer Thor Heyerdahl built a raft out of balsa logs and hemp rope, which successfully crossed it. Pacific Ocean in 1947.

When Thor Heyerdahl looked at the ancient world, he himself saw patterns. Artifacts, languages, and cultural practices such as pyramid building in different cultures convinced Heyerdahl that ancient humans may have interacted with each other across the oceans. And so he set out to prove it.

Over the past 30 years, Heyerdahl has completed a number of transoceanic voyages to demonstrate that ancient humans could influence each other. Traveling in a simple boat, he and his small group crossed thousands of nautical miles to prove that such voyages were also possible in ancient times.

Thor Heyerdahl with artifacts from Easter Island in 1957. (Photo: Rex).

In the end, Heyerdahl's voyages do not prove anything definitive, but they do suggest that ancient humans may have embarked on similar voyages.

And although Heyerdahl's beliefs were largely disproved in his day, some modern-day scholars still see what he is seeing.

How did Thor Heyerdahl become an adventurer?

Born on October 6, 1914 in Larvik, Norway, Thor Heyerdahl became fascinated with the world at an early age. His mother, Alison, was the head of the Larvik Regional Museums Association and inspired her son's interest in nature and animals.

To pursue that interest, Heyerdahl enrolled at the University of Oslo to study zoology and geography in 1933. But Heyerdahl's academic career was short-lived. Restless and eager to see the world, he dropped out of school in 1936 and moved to Polynesia with his new wife, Liv Coucheron Torp.

Thor Heyerdahl with his first wife, Liv Coucheron Torp, during their time in French Polynesia.

There, living on Fatu-Hiva in the Marquesas archipelago of French Polynesia, Heyerdahl began to wonder how early humans settled there. Historically, he concluded that they may have ridden the Eastern Current to move from South America.

Heyerdahl himself reached this conclusion for several reasons. The first creature was a Polynesian that ate South American plants like sweet potatoes and seems to share some myths and legends with the Peruvians. Heyerdahl believes this is not a coincidence, but evidence that ancient civilizations somehow interacted with each other.

He began to develop his ideas as the years passed, although the pursuit of his answers was briefly stalled during the Second World War. Heyerdahl later served in the Free Norwegian Armed Forces in the north of the country. But when the war ended, he returned to his research work.

There's just one problem - most scholars don't support Heyerdahl's theory. They argued that the ancient people had migrated to Polynesia from the West, from Asia, and that the ancient South Americans would not have been able to cross the ocean.

So Thor Heyerdahl decided to prove that such a border crossing was possible. In 1947, he was about to travel from Peru to French Polynesia in a simple boat.

The Voyages of Thor Heyerdahl

On April 28, 1947, Thor Heyerdahl began proving his theory that the islands of Polynesia could have been contacted by ancient South Americans. With five others, Heyerdahl climbed onto a raft made of balsa logs tied together with hemp rope.

The raft was named Kon-Tiki, and the expedition set out to the East.

Thor Heyerdahl and the Kon-Tiki raft in 1947.

'The Kon-Tiki expedition opened my eyes to what the ocean really is,' Heyerdahl wrote of the journey in his 1950 book Kon-Tiki. 'It's a conveyor belt, not an isolator'.

After 101 days at sea, Heyerdahl and his crew successfully landed on the French Polynesian atoll, Raroia. With that, Heyerdahl demonstrated that the ancients could make the same 4,300-mile journey by simple watercraft.

But Thor Heyerdahl doesn't stop there. In addition to his expeditions to the Galápagos Islands and Easter Island - both places Heyerdahl believes were settled by South Americans - Heyerdahl also began to examine other transatlantic connections between ancient cultures. .

In the late 1960s, he turned his attention to Egypt. Heyerdahl was intrigued by the similarities between the ancient Egyptians and the ancient Mexicans, such as the Egyptian construction of the pyramids and the ruins of Chichén Itzá in Mexico.

In 1969, he set out on a transatlantic voyage from Morocco to Barbados in a reed boat named Ra to demonstrate to scholars who suspected that the ancient Egyptians might have made a voyage. go like that, is wrong.

Thor Heyerdahl, dressed in blue, oversaw the construction of his ship Ra in front of the Egyptian pyramids.

However, unlike Kon-Tiki, Ra's first trip was a failure. Heyerdahl's ship sailed 600 miles from Barbados after traveling 3,000 miles. Determined to prove his theory, Heyerdahl made the trip again in 1970 with Ra II.

After 57 days at sea, the reed boat successfully made the 4,000-mile trip from Morocco to Barbados.

'I still don't know what exactly this proves,' Heyerdahl wrote, as reported by The New York Times.

'I have no theory but a seaworthy and Atlantic reed boat is a transport. But later on I will consider it a miracle if the multitude of maritime expeditions in operation throughout the ancient millennia never happened. were washed away while struggling to avoid being caught. shipwrecked in the terrifying currents around Cape Juby'.

Seven years later, Thor Heyerdahl makes another trip to explore possible connections between ancient cultures in the Middle East. After building a reed boat called the Tigris, Heyerdahl and his crew sailed down the Tigris River to demonstrate that the ancient Sumerians may have influenced cultures in modern-day Egypt and India. now.

However, that voyage came to an unexpected conclusion when Heyerdahl and his crew arrived in Ethiopia. When officials refused to allow them to dock because of the ongoing conflict, Heyerdahl burned his boat.

'Our planet is bigger than the bundles of reeds that carried us across the sea,' he and his crew wrote in a letter to the UN.

At that time, Heyerdahl was in his 60s, the explorer decided to retire from his sea life. But he feels that he himself has left a significant impact and raises important questions about how early civilizations may have interacted.

He said: 'I have demonstrated that all pre-European ancient civilizations were able to communicate between the oceans with the primitive ships they had at their disposal. I feel that the burden of proof now rests with those who claim the ocean is necessarily a factor in isolating civilizations'.

But did Thor Heyerdahl really prove his opponents wrong?

The Legacy of the Norwegian Explorer

At the time of Thor Heyerdahl's death on April 18, 2002, most scholars still believed that Polynesia was settled by migrants from the West - not the East, as Heyerdahl suggested.

Indeed, recent genetic studies suggest that Polynesia was first settled by people from Asia, possibly from Taiwan or the Philippines.

However, according to Science Norway, other genetic studies have suggested that Heyerdahl had something - and that the ancient Polynesians did in fact have South American DNA.

Thor Heyerdahl in 1990 in Oslo, Norway.

Meanwhile, other modern scholars argue that by contrast, people who sailed from Polynesia influenced the ancient peoples of South America. After all, many Pacific island cultures have a long tradition of traveling to other islands by simple watercraft.

For now, it's a question that needs more exploration, discussion, and testing. But that's all Thor Heyerdahl really wanted.

"I challenged a lot of old dogma, and this stimulated a lot of discussion," Heyerdahl said before his death. 'And in science, you need discussion'.