Heyerdahl, Thor

(born Oct. 6, 1914, Larvik, Nor.—died April 18, 2002, Colla Michari, Italy) Norwegian ethnologist and adventurer. After a trip to Polynesia convinced him that Polynesian culture bore traces of South American cultures, he built a raft, the Kon-Tiki, and sailed it from South America to Polynesia in 1947 to demonstrate the possibility of such contact, a trip recounted in his best-selling Kon-Tiki (1950). In 1969 he sailed a reconstruction of an ancient Egyptian reed boat (the Ra) from Morocco to the Caribbean to show that the Egyptians could have had contact with the early peoples of Central and South America. In 1977 he took the reed craft Tigris from the Tigris River in Iraq across the Arabian Sea to Pakistan and back to the Red Sea to demonstrate the possibility of two-way trading journeys that could have spread ancient Sumerian culture eastward. Although he inspired many with his daring expeditions, his theories have not been generally accepted by anthropologists and his methods have been questioned.

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