Thor Heyerdahl

And I met lots of different people, but I r- I was, I've always been a big reader, even then, and I read a book called The Ra Expeditions.

I don't know if you ever heard of that, but that was a guy, Thor Heyerdahl, tried to sail across the Atlantic Ocean in a papyrus raft, uh, to prove that the people from Egypt-

Uh-huh

... um, could have done that, you know, in a raft made out of natural materials-

Whether the Inca Viracocha was a direct survival, a reinterpretation, or a later identification remains disputed.

The name Kontiki, connected in some accounts to a creator figure, acquired modern fame in 1947 when Thor Heyerdahl used it for the raft with which he sailed from South America toward Polynesia.

His experiment demonstrated that such a voyage was physically possible with a craft built along traditional lines.

It did not, by itself, establish the origin of Polynesian settlement or verify the proposed identity of Kontiki with any particular image from Tiwanaku.

Don't throw it away yet.

All right, Pete, Thor Heyerdahl, anthropologist, explorer, took a manmade wooden raft from Peru to Polynesia.

[laughs]

That's 3,400 nautical miles, by the way.

Thor Heyerdahl in Domecoming.

[laughs]

Uh, I will say he is deceased.

[laughs]

And you're right.

And again, I may not even use this as a question, but when was Thor Heyerdahl? When did he recreate? Do you know when he did his thing? Was it in this era?

Yeah, I'm not sure about that.

I'm just kind

of curious, because I remember in grade school, the big adventure that I remember that stuck with me was Thor Heyerdahl, and he recreated the...

Contiki expedition.

Contiki, yeah.

And, you know, obviously that was an expedition that was...

Thor Heyerdahl had conceived of because of this huge tradition of these incredible ancient mariners from Peru and South America.

A lot of that knowledge, I think it was generational and I think sadly lost, but just the amazing ability to pinpoint islands on the Pacific from such a huge distance, it's really quite astonishing.

I think we definitely regretted not having kind of even just a fundamental knowledge of kind of celestial navigation in so much that we could kind of appreciate it, we probably would have still used the charts and that sort of thing.

There were others that said the islands were settled from the east, from the east, from South America, for example.

Thor Heyerdahl was a, a great proponent of, um, these islands being settled from, from the east.

So Nainoa Thompson and the Polynesian Voyaging Society, they built this canoe, 62-foot canoe.

And the building of the canoe was one thing, but you had to find the way to navigate and had to, had to sail, and that's where I think the real magic came.

A number of researchers have pointed out that At the place called Rano Raraku Quarry in Easter Island, you have a number of these giant figures that are buried up to their necks in earth.

But back in the 1980s, Thor Heyerdahl, who I had the privilege of knowing, excavated several of those figures, expecting them only to go down a few feet beneath the earth.

But they actually do go down a full 30 to 40 feet under the earth.

And indeed, once you get to the bottom, you expose the same thing of the hands joining beneath the belly in exactly the same pattern as at gobekli tepe and what a number of researchers i don't claim credit for this discovery myself what a number of researchers have pointed out is that those figures are covered by accumulated sediment and on a tiny island like easter island you cannot accumulate 30 or 40 feet of sediment in just a few hundred years Archaeologists claim these figures are only a few hundred years old, but you need thousands of years to accumulate 30 or 40 feet of sediment that will bury them almost up to their necks.

Mm.

Yes, Thor Hey- Thor Heyerdahl, yes, on all his Kon-Tiki stuff and, and all of that.

And you know, the things like the cocaine mummies, you know, that, that, um, our dear friend Gary Evans talks about, um, for example.

Um, yes, you know, the cocaine mummies, uh, found in Egypt with cocaine from, from South America.

Archaeologists have acknowledged the resemblance between Vanapu and Indian stonework for more than a century.

Thor Heyerdahl made the comparison an important part of his argument for ancient contact between Easter Island and South America.

The construction is not structurally identical to the Indian walls, but visually and technically, the resemblance is real enough that archaeologists themselves have repeatedly discussed it.

And Vanapu is not the only wall on Easter Island where we see this interesting megalithic construction.

I encountered additional walls along the remote western coast, and there is at least one buried megalithic wall previously excavated by Thor Heyerdahl, which has since been reburied.

How many more lie underneath the constantly shifting soils of the island? The Moai themselves also lend themselves to some interesting global comparisons.

As we start comparing them with ancient sculpture around the world, one feature keeps showing up, the rigid frontal body, the arms running down the sides, and the hands meeting across the abdomen or navel.