Thor Heyerdahl

Thor Heyerdahl (1914 to 2002) was a Norwegian explorer, ethnographer and writer, born in Larvik, who trained in zoology and geography at the University of Oslo. He is best known for the 1947 Kon-Tiki expedition, in which he and a small crew drifted about 8,000 kilometres across the Pacific on a hand-built balsa raft from South America to the Tuamotu Islands, to argue that Polynesia could have been settled from the Americas. His account of the voyage was translated into some 70 languages, and he directed the documentary film Kon-Tiki, released in 1950, which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for 1951. He later made other demonstration voyages, notably the Ra II crossing from Morocco to Barbados in a papyrus boat in 1970, which was also recorded in a film. His diffusionist theories were widely rejected by scientists, but his expeditions drew a large public audience to ancient history and anthropology, and his archives were added to UNESCO's Memory of the World Register in 2011.