Thor Heyerdahl

Through his oceanic expeditions on primitive rafts and boats, documented in books, films, and television programs, Norwegian anthropologist Thor Heyerdahl (born 1914) has popularized ideas about common links among ancient cultures worldwide.

Since his voyage across the Pacific on the Kon-Tikiin 1947, Thor Heyerdahl has been the modern world's most renowned explorer-adventurer. He has made four oceanic trips in primitive vessels to demonstrate his theories that ancient civilizations may have spread from a common source through sea voyages. His expeditions to sites of ancient stone statues in the Pacific Ocean and pyramids in Peru have also attracted great interest. More than a dozen books about his adventures have sold tens of millions of copies worldwide. Heyerdahl's work has included several documentary films and hundreds of articles for journals and magazines. But while he has gained more popular attention than any contemporary anthropologist, the scientific community largely has rejected his controversial theories.

Early Love of Nature

Heyerdahl was born into an upper-class family in the coastal village of Larvik, Norway, in 1914. His father, Thor, was president of a brewery and a mineral water plant, and his mother, Alison Lyng Heyerdahl, was chairman of the Larvik Museum. His mother, an ardent atheist, studied zoology, folk art, and primitive cultures, and influenced her son greatly. His father was an avid outdoorsman. By age seven, young Thor had started his own zoological museum, filled with specimens of sea shells, butterflies, bats, lemmings, and hedgehogs. It was housed in an old outhouse at his father's brewery.

Heyerdahl and his parents spent summer holidays at a log cabin in the wilderness, where Thor made friends with a hermit and learned much about nature. He also made many winter camping trips by sled and ski to remote locations with his schoolmates. According to his school friend Arnold Jacoby, in his book Senor Kon-Tiki, "Thor was convinced that modern man had … an over-loaded brain and reduced powers of observation. Primitive man, on the other hand, was an extrovert and alert, with keen instincts and all his senses alive…. Civilization might be compared with a house full of people who had never been outside the building." Throughout his early life, Heyerdahl was determined to go "outside the building" and live in a more primitive setting.

In 1933, Heyerdahl entered the University of Oslo and specialized in zoology and geography. In Oslo, he spent a lot of time in the home of a wealthy wine merchant and family friend who had a huge library of Polynesian artifacts. With his girlfriend Liv Torp, Heyerdahl decided to quit college and make an expedition to the South Seas. His father agreed to finance the trip. Heyerdahl and Torp were married on Christmas Eve in 1936, and the next day they set out for Fatu Hiva in the Marquesas Islands, their hand-picked Garden of Eden. On the island Heyerdahl discovered evidence that Peruvian aboriginal voyagers had visited the islands. The inhabitants told him stories of Kon-tiki, a bearded, white sun king who arrived over the sea. Heyerdahl's stay on Fatu Hiva is recounted in his 1996 book, Green Was the Earth on the Seventh Day.

Daring Raft Voyage

In 1938, the Heyerdahls returned to Norway and settled in a log cabin in a mountain wilderness near Lillehammer. He wrote a book in Norwegian about their expedition to Fatu Hiva, Pa Jakt efter Paradiset (On the Hunt for Paradise). The couple had two sons, Thor and Bjorn. Heyerdahl did field research among American Indian tribes in British Columbia in 1939 and 1940, trying to support his theory that two waves of migration from the Americas had settled Polynesia, one from the northern hemisphere and one from the south. During World War II, Heyerdahl trained as a wireless radio operator in Canada and was active for a few months in the Norwegian resistance behind German lines.

After the war, Heyerdahl found little acceptance of his ideas in academic circles. He planned a dramatic experiment to convince his critics that a voyage by ancient peoples from Peru to Polynesia was possible. In 1947, he and a crew traveled to Peru and built a raft made of nine balsa logs, which they named the Kon-Tiki. Following the Humboldt Current, the voyagers covered 4, 300 miles of ocean in 101 days. Heyerdahl detailed the extraordinary journey in his book, The Kon-Tiki Expedition. The book was "the first great post-war adventure story to catch the imagination of the world, " according to biographer Christopher Ralling. It was translated into dozens of languages and sold more than 20 million copies. Heyerdahl's documentary movie of the voyage won him an Academy Award in 1951. "That film won the Oscar because it was so badly shot they knew it couldn't have been faked, " Heyerdahl told Pope Brock of People. "It was done after 20 minutes instruction from a Bell & Howell dealer, and I filmed at the wrong speed."

Brock noted that the book and film created a global audience for Heyerdahl's adventures: "They saw a Ulysses, the last of the bold and bearded seafarers. Ever since then, Heyerdahl has shown that same genius for attracting followers and funding; he has transformed a crabbed and insular science into world theater." But while the Kon-Tiki voyage captured public attention, it was met with scientific disdain. To advance his theories further, Heyerdahl wrote an 800-page scholarly work, American Indians in the Pacific: The Theory behind the Kon-Tiki Expedition, published in 1952.

While Heyerdahl was achieving fame, his constant travels had weakened his marriage. The couple divorced, and he married Yvonne Dedekam-Simonsen in 1949. They had three daughters, Anette, Marian, and Elisabeth, and in 1958 settled in a remote Italian Alpine village. They divorced in 1969.

Explorations Worldwide

In 1953, Heyerdahl went to the Galapagos Islands, off the South American coast. There, he and his companions found evidence that indigenous people of South America had visited the islands long before the Incan Empire. In 1955, Heyerdahl led an expedition to Easter Island, the remote Polynesian island where enormous stone statues of unknown origin had been discovered in 1722. His team found a carving of a reed ship at the base of one of the statues and much other evidence that the island had been populated by at least three migrations from South America, the earliest in the fourth century. He wrote about this expedition in two books, Aku-Aku: The Secret of Easter Island and The Archaeology of Easter Island.

Heyerdahl was among a group of scientists called "diffusionists, " who believed that ancient cultures had come from a common source through land and sea migrations. The opposing camp, called "isolationists, " thought that civilizations had cropped up around the world independently of one another. The isolationist theory has remained the dominant one, and Heyerdahl's work did not disprove it. Still, as writer Thomas Morrow noted in U.S. News & World Report, Heyerdahl "has turned up a surprising amount of convincing evidence suggesting sea contacts among remote ancient cultures, for which he gets little credit."

As a proponent of a single global prehistorical culture, Heyerdahl also became, through his work and notoriety around the globe, a symbol of multiculturalism. He learned to speak fluent Spanish, English, French, German, and Italian as well as his native Norwegian.

In 1969, Heyerdahl organized a new expedition. In Egypt, he and a multinational six-man crew built a papyrus reed boat which they named Ra, after the Egyptian sun god. Under the flag of the United Nations, they sailed across the Atlantic, a voyage of 2, 700 miles, but the boat broke apart 600 miles short of Barbados. The next year, Heyerdahl tried again, sailing the Ra II all the way from Morocco to Barbados in 57 days. His account of these expeditions is found in his 1970 book The Ra Expeditions. It is also documented in a 1971 Swedish Broadcasting Corporation film. To Heyerdahl, the voyages were evidence that Egyptians or other sailors could have crossed to the Americas several thousand years before Columbus.

His voyages led Heyerdahl to become active internationally in fighting pollution of the oceans. In Green was the Earth on the Seventh Day, Heyerdahl wrote about how his voyage on the Kon-Tiki had increased his awareness of threats to the environment: "My childhood fear of the ocean had left me on the balsa raft. My fear was now instead that man should destroy the ocean. A dead ocean meant a dead planet." He wrote eloquently about the poisoning of ocean plankton and its effects on the food chain: "What the farmers and the housewives spray out of plastic bottles, the fishermen and the middlemen serve us on our own plates."

New Challenges

In 1977, at the age of 62, Heyerdahl took up another challenge. He went to Iraq and with a crew of 11 men and built a reed ship, the Tigris. They sailed it down the Tigris River, through the Persian Gulf and across the Indian Ocean to the mouth of the Indus River in Pakistan, then westward to Djibouti at the mouth of the Red Sea on the eastern African coast. This 4, 200-mile, five-month-long voyage was an attempt to show that the ancient civilizations of Egypt, the Indus Valley, and Mesopotamia could have sprung from a single source. Ironically, Heyerdahl's Tigris trip ended in political turmoil in the Gulf of Aden region, and Heyerdahl burned the ship in protest. In a message to the United Nations Secretary General, Heyerdahl wrote: "There is a desperate need for intelligent co-operation if we are to save ourselves and our common civilization from what we are turning into a sinking ship." The Tigris expedition became a BBC documentary film in 1979.

In 1982, Heyerdahl and several archaeologists undertook an expedition to the remote Maldive islands off the coast of India. There, Heyerdahl was fascinated by stone statues which bore a striking resemblance to the monoliths of Easter Island. His discoveries led him to conclude that the Maldives also had been involved in prehistoric ocean trading and migration. Heyerdahl's 1986 book, The Maldive Mystery, was hailed by some as a great detective story. It, too, was made into a film, as had been his expeditions to the Galapagos and Easter Island.

In 1988, Heyerdahl returned to Peru to explore 26 pre-Incan pyramids at ruins named Tucume. In 1990, Ralling wrote a biography, Kon-Tiki Man, which quotes extensively from Heyerdahl's previous accounts of his travels. A reviewer in Publishers Weekly called the book "a stimulating chronicle of curiosity and wanderlust." A television series was made to accompany the book.

In Green Was the Earth on the Seventh Day, Heyerdahl wrote movingly of the mysteries which fascinated him all his life. "Sailing on a raft in a black night through an explosion of blinking stars and plankton, our horizons widen, " he wrote, referring to the Kon-Tiki voyage. "We live in a fairy tale world and carry heaven and hell within us." Writing about his opposition to nuclear arms and advanced technology, Heyerdahl noted: "At a time when we plunge into the technological era with fairy-tale visions of a manmade environment, science itself begins to see that nature is totally superior to man in its incredible composition of the world's ecosystem. Destroy it, and no brain and no money in the world can put it together again."

In the same book, Heyerdahl composed an eloquent testament for his children and their generation: "You are now to take over this planet; take good care of it. We did not, when we borrowed it before you…. Forgive us for the forests we have depleted. For the waters we have polluted. For the horrible arms we have in store…. Forgive us for the holes we have torn in the ozone layer…. We have narrowed our horizons by hiding ourselves behind walls and blinded the heavenly bodies with neon lights. We have worshiped dead things…. Help to heal the system we have wounded…. All that walk and crawl and swim and fly are members of our extended family."

In one interview, Heyerdahl told Brock of People: "We have the egoistic idea that we in the 20th century are the civilized ones. That people living 1, 000 years ago, not to mention 5, 000 years ago, were greatly inferior to us. I am opposed to that. The people back then were physically and mentally our equal-if not in many ways better…. We couldn't survive using our brains, as ancient people did. But they would certainly have been capable of watching a television."

Further Reading

Contemporary Authors, New Revision Series, Volume 22, Gale, 1988.

Heyerdahl, Thor, Green Was the Earth on the Seventh Day, Random House, 1996.

Heyerdahl, Thor, with Christopher Ralling, Kon-Tiki Man, Chronicle Books, 1990.

Atlantic, December 1989.

Booklist, March 1, 1996.

Modern Maturity, February-March 1992.

People, December 11, 1989.

Publishers Weekly, September 6, 1991.

U.S. News & World Report, April 2, 1990.

Thor Heyerdahl

Born: October 6, 1914
Larvik, Norway
Died: April 18, 2002
Colla Michari, Italy
Norwegian anthropologist, author, and explorer

Norwegian anthropologist (scientist of human beings—their culture, numbers, characteristics, and relationships) Thor Heyerdahl popularized ideas about common links among ancient cultures worldwide. He was well known for his ocean journeys on primitive rafts and boats that were recorded in books, films, and television programs.

Early love of nature

Thor Heyerdahl was born into an upper-class family in the coastal village of Larvik, Norway, in 1914. His father, Thor, was president of a brewery and a mineral water plant, and his mother, Alison Lyng Heyerdahl, was chairman of the Larvik Museum. His mother studied zoology (the branch of biology that studies animals), folk art, and primitive cultures. She influenced her son greatly. His father was an enthusiastic outdoorsman. By age seven young Thor had started his own animal museum, filled with specimens of seashells, butterflies, bats, lemmings, and hedgehogs. The collection was housed in an old outhouse at his father's brewery.

Heyerdahl and his parents spent summer holidays at a log cabin in the wilderness, where Thor made friends with a hermit (person choosing to live alone and away from society) and learned much about nature. By sled and ski he also went on many winter camping trips to remote locations with his schoolmates. Throughout his early life Heyerdahl was determined to live in a more primitive setting.

In 1933 Heyerdahl entered the University of Oslo, in Oslo, Norway, and specialized in zoology and geography. In Oslo he spent a lot of time at the home of a family friend, who had a huge library of Polynesian artifacts. With his girlfriend, Heyerdahl decided to quit college and make an expedition (a trip made for a specific reason) to the South Seas. His father agreed to finance the trip. Heyerdahl was married on Christmas Eve in 1936, and the next day the couple set out for the Marquesas Islands. Here Heyerdahl discovered evidence that Peruvian (from Peru) aboriginal (the original citizens of an area) voyagers had visited the islands. The inhabitants told him stories of Kon-tiki, a bearded, white sun king who arrived over the sea.

Daring raft voyage

In 1938 the Heyerdahls returned to Norway and settled in a mountain wilderness near Lillehammer. Then Heyerdahl did research among American Indian tribes in British Columbia (Canada) in 1939 and 1940, trying to support his theory that two waves of migration (moving from one area to another) from the Americas—one from the northern hemisphere (half of the earth divided by the equator) and one from the south—had settled Polynesia.

Heyerdahl found little acceptance of his ideas in academic circles. He planned a dramatic experiment to convince his critics that a voyage by ancient peoples from Peru to Polynesia was possible. In 1947 he and a crew traveled to Peru on a balsa raft, which they named the Kon-Tiki. Heyerdahl detailed the journey in The Kon-Tiki Expedition. The book was translated into dozens of languages and sold more than twenty million copies. Heyerdahl's documentary (having to do with recording real events as they happen) movie of the voyage won him an Academy Award in 1951. But while the Kon-Tiki voyage captured public attention, it was not met with any scientific respect.

Heyerdahl was among a group of scientists who believed that ancient cultures had come from a common source through land and sea migrations. The opposing scientists thought that civilizations had cropped up around the world independently of one another. The second theory has remained the popular one. Still, as writer Thomas Morrow noted in U.S. News & World Report, Heyerdahl "has turned up a surprising amount of convincing evidence suggesting sea contacts among remote [distant] ancient cultures, for which he gets little credit."

Explorations worldwide

In 1953 Heyerdahl went to the Galapagos Islands, off the South American coast. There he and his companions found evidence that original people of South America had visited the islands long before the Incan Empire. In 1955 Heyerdahl led an expedition to Easter Island, the remote Polynesian island where enormous stone statues of unknown origin had been discovered in 1722. His team found a carving of a reed ship at the base of one of the statues and much other evidence that at least three migrations from South America had populated the island, the earliest in the fourth century.

In 1969 Heyerdahl organized a new expedition. In Egypt he and his crew built a papyrus (a tall grass that grows near the Nile River) reed boat that they named Ra, after the Egyptian sun god. They sailed across the Atlantic, a voyage of 2,700 miles, but the boat broke apart 600 miles short of Barbados. The next year Heyerdahl sailed the Ra II all the way from Morocco to Barbados in fifty-seven days. His account of these expeditions is found in his book The Ra Expeditions. To Heyerdahl the voyages were evidence that Egyptians or other sailors could have crossed to the Americas several thousand years before Christopher Columbus (1451–1506).

Later challenges

In 1977, at the age of sixty-two, Heyerdahl took up another challenge. He went to Iraq with a crew of eleven men and built a reed ship, the Tigris. They sailed it down the Tigris River, through the Persian Gulf, and across the Indian Ocean to the mouth of the Indus River in Pakistan, then westward to Djibouti at the mouth of the Red Sea on the eastern African coast. This 4,200-mile, five-month-long voyage was an attempt to show that the ancient civilizations of Egypt, the Indus Valley, and Mesopotamia could have sprung from a single source. Political instability in the region brought an early end to this expedition.

In 1982 Heyerdahl and several archaeologists undertook an expedition to the remote Maldive islands off the coast of India. There Heyerdahl was fascinated by stone statues that bore a striking resemblance to the monoliths (huge stone structures) of Easter Island. His discoveries led him to conclude that the Maldives also had been involved in prehistoric ocean trading and migration. Heyerdahl's 1986 book, The Maldive Mystery, was hailed by some as a great detective story. It, too, was made into a film, as had his expeditions to the Galapagos and Easter Island.

Heyerdahl's voyages led him to become active internationally in fighting pollution of the oceans. In Green was the Earth on the Seventh Day, Heyerdahl wrote about how his voyage on the Kon-Tiki had increased his awareness of threats to the environment.

Thor Heyerdahl died in Colla Michari, Italy, on April 18, 2002. He is remembered as one of the best-known explorer-adventurers of modern times.

For More Information

Blassingame, Wyatt. Thor Heyerdahl, Viking Scientist. New York: Elsevier/Nelson Books, 1979.

Heyerdahl, Thor. Green Was the Earth on the Seventh Day. New York: Random House, 1996.

Heyerdahl, Thor, and Christopher Ralling. Kon-Tiki Man. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1991.

Heyerdahl, Thor (1914–2002), controversial Norwegian scientist and adventurer, who was born at Larvik. While at Oslo University he became fascinated by the study of early civilizations and movements of oceanic peoples. In 1937 he went to the Marquesas Islands in the Pacific to continue his research at first hand. While there, he first began to suspect that the Polynesian civilization might have had its roots in an earlier migration of South American Indians; though it seemed impossible to conceive how the long ocean voyage could have been made without ships, unknown in the Pacific at that time, and with no knowledge of navigation and ocean currents.

Heyerdahl decided that if his theories were correct, it could have happened by drifting across the ocean on rafts, and in 1947 he set about testing his theory. Using only such fastenings as would have been available to the Indians at the time of their supposed migration, he built a raft from the trunks of the indigenous Ochroma lagopus tree (also known as ‘balsa’), and with five companions set off to drift and sail across the Pacific from Callao, Peru. The raft, named Kon-Tiki after the legendary sun king of the South American Indians, was 13.7 metres (45 ft) long with a beam of 5.5 metres (18 ft), and was rigged with a short mast and single square sail.

Aided by the Humboldt current, and using plankton and fish as part of their diet, the six men covered 6,880 kilometres (4,300 mls.) in 101 days before beaching on Raroia Reef, in the Tuamoto Islands. This proved that his theory about the colonization of the Polynesian islands was a physical possibility, and that it could have come from the east, and not from the west as was the current academic thinking. It is now accepted that there was indeed early contact between South America and Polynesia. However, anthropologists, aided by modern genetics, have found no evidence that intermarriage occurred on a scale to support Heyerdahl's theory of colonization, and it seems more probable that early sailing rafts first sailed eastwards not westwards.

After mounting expeditions to the Galapagos and Easter Islands in pursuit of his theory, Heyerdahl turned his attention to very early Egyptian voyages. His interest in these had been sparked, not just by ancient accounts, but by the small reed boats he had found on Lake Titicaca, and the discovery on the Galapagos of what he believed to be the images of triple-masted boats made of reed. This led him to speculate on the possibility that ancient Egyptians may have crossed the Atlantic in boats made of papyrus reed, and he determined, with the aid of companions, to attempt an ocean passage in such a boat. He constructed the 15-metre (49-ft) Ra, and when this disintegrated in heavy seas close to the West Indies, he built the slightly shorter Ra II, on which, in 1970, he crossed the Atlantic from Safi, Morocco, to Bridgetown, Barbados. In covering 3,300 nautical miles (6,578 km) in 57 days, he demonstrated that oceanic voyages by the ancient Egyptians were at least a possibility. Then in 1978 he built another 15-metre (49-ft) reed boat, called Tigris, and, with a crew of eleven, sailed it down the River Tigris to the Indian Ocean, again seeking to prove a possible communication between different early civilizations.

Heyerdahl wrote two best-selling books about his adventures: The Kon-Tiki Expedition (1948) and Aku-Aku: The Secret of Easter Island (1958), and published a number of others. He made several documentary films—his one on the Kon-Tiki won an Oscar in 1951—and lectured extensively. As one of his obituarists pointed out, he encouraged conservation and environmental awareness, and in the field of Polynesian studies contributed, among other enduring ideas, the notion that the sea was a connector, not a barrier.

Thor Heyerdahl , 1914–2002, Norwegian explorer and anthropologist, b. Larvik. He carried out research in the Marquesas Islands in 1937–38 and studied the indigenous peoples of British Columbia in 1939–40. To support his thesis that the first settlers of Polynesia were of South American origin, in 1947 he and five companions made the crossing from Peru to the Tuamotu Archipelago on a primitive log raft. This voyage is described in the international bestseller Kon Tiki (tr. 1950). In 1970, Heyerdahl sailed, in a papyrus boat, from Morocco to Barbados, in an attempt to prove that ancient Mediterranean civilizations could have sailed in reed boats to America. This adventure is described in The Ra Expeditions (tr. 1971). In 1977, he sailed from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea, following a route he believed was once used by the Sumerians; this trip is detailed in The Tigris Expedition (1979). Heyerdahl was an exponent of the diffusionist school of cultural anthropology, now largely discounted, and today most academics regard his theories as speculative and unproven. His other writings include American Indians in the Pacific (1952), Aku-Aku (tr. 1958), Sea Routes to Polynesia (1968), and Easter Island: The Mystery Solved (1989).

Bibliography: See biography by A. Jacoby (1967).

Heyerdahl, Thor (1914–2002) Norwegian ethnologist who, with five companions, drifted on the balsa raft Kon Tiki c.8000km (5000mi) across the Pacific Ocean from Peru to Polynesia (1947) in an attempt to prove the Polynesians came from South America and not from Southeast Asia. He also sailed (1970) from Africa to the West Indies in a papyrus boat Ra II, and travelled (1977) from Iraq to Djibouti in a reed boat, Tigris.

http://www.greatdreams.com/thor.htm