Thor Heyerdahl would have been one hundred years old today.
And I’m glad to be able to celebrate my childhood hero. I was absolutely captured by his thesis of a Westward Polynesian colonization, and his famed raft Kon-Tiki through which he popularized his view and attempted to establish it as at least plausible.
The Wikipedia article cites the mainstream of today’s opinion about his thesis. The anthropolgist Robert Suggs is the harshest, asserting the “Kon-tiki theory is about as plausible as the tales of Atlantis, Mu, and the ‘Children of the Sun.'” While anthropologist and National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Wade Davis points out with devastating summation how my hero “ignored the overwhelming body of linguistic, ethnographic, and ethnobotanical evidence…” Adding the last nails to the coffin, how those perspectives have been supported “today by genetic and archaeological data” all pretty much establish “that he was patently wrong.” While there is some evidence of contact between the South American mainland and Polynesia, Hyerdahl’s real thesis of that Westward colonization has pretty much be laid to rest.
After Kon-tiki he spent years in similar Quixotic adventures, attempting to sail across the Atlantic in a reed boat. He built another to show the possibility of a sea connection between Mesopotamia and the Indus valley. He also made a number of explorations in support of a historic Odin. And more…
What he represented for me was the possibility of adventure, and of change. Living a terribly constrained life I saw in his story, particularly that time on that raft crossing the Pacific how I could launch out from an old world and adventure on to a new one.
Very important for me.
Maybe important for many…
While his science was at best at the edge he remained loved by the public and particularly adolescents, and I’m glad to see he was treated with affection and respect by the larger community, being awarded some eleven honorary doctorates and at his death with a state funeral.
And today, I was told he gets a Google doodle, although I haven’t seen it yet.
Should that all such adventurers of the heart be so honored…
And so a call to celebration for all who sail their raft, or row their boat…
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In