Thor Heyerdahl

Norwegian anthropologist and adventurer (1914-2002)

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Thor Heyerdahl was a Norwegian anthropologist and adventurer who conducted daring ocean voyages to test his theories about ancient human migration and contact between distant civilizations. His most famous expedition was the 1947 Kon-Tiki voyage across the Pacific Ocean on a primitive raft, which demonstrated that ancient peoples could have traveled vast distances using simple technology and helped spark public interest in questions about early human history.

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Thor Heyerdahl KStJ ( Norwegian pronunciation: [tuːr ˈhæ̀ɪəɖɑːɫ]; 6 October 1914 – 18 April 2002) was a Norwegian adventurer and ethnographer with a background in biology with specialization in zoology, botany and geography.

Heyerdahl 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. The expedition was supposed to demonstrate 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. His hyperdiffusionist ideas on ancient cultures had been widely rejected by the scientific community, even before the expedition.