Thor Heyerdahl

Norwegian archaeologist and explorer

• Born: October 6, 1914
• Birthplace: Larvik, Norway
• Died: April 18, 2002
• Place of death: Colla Micheri, Italy

Heyerdahl made several successful sea voyages using primitive craft to demonstrate that early humans were skilled in navigation on ocean currents and thus, by transpacific and transatlantic crossings, were able to migrate. Heyerdahl wrote numerous books, both popular and scientific, about his voyages and diffusionist theories.

Early Life

Thor Heyerdahl (thor HI-ur-dahl) was born in Larvik, Norway. He had numerous siblings by his mother’s two previous marriages and his father’s previous wife, but as the children left home early, Heyerdahl was reared like an only child. His father had inherited money because of the rather early death of his own father and thus was able to establish a successful brewery business. Heyerdahl’s mother sheltered his life so that he was allowed few playmates in his early years. In 1933, Heyerdahl entered the University of Oslo to study zoology, and his mother took an apartment there. Concurrently, he studied Polynesian culture and history in his private library, which contained the largest collection anywhere of books and papers on the Polynesians.

Heyerdahl married Liv Coucheron Torp on Christmas Eve, 1936. She had agreed to live with him in the Marquesas Islands, where Heyerdahl was about to embark on a new venture. His father agreed to finance the venture, a project that was part of his university studies and approved by his zoology professors. Leaving Norway in January, 1937, the new couple went to live on Fatu Hiva but developed medical problems and eventually problems with the indigenous peoples of the area. In March, 1938, they returned to Norway. In September their son, Thor, was born.

Heyerdahl’s interest now shifted to so-called primitive peoples. With his family, he traveled to the coast of British Columbia, Canada, to study the Bella Coola Indians, who in many ways resembled the Polynesians on Fatu Hiva. Heyerdahl’s early book P† jakt efter paradiset (1938; searching for paradise) provided the finances for this expedition. Unable to leave British Columbia for home because of the German invasion of Norway, and with funds exhausted, Heyerdahl had to work as a manual laborer to support his family, now with a second son, Björn. In 1942, Heyerdahl volunteered as a guerrilla fighter with the Free Norwegian Forces and became a lieutenant. He was assigned to train in Nova Scotia and then in Scotland. He did not reach active duty in northern Norway until very shortly before the end of the European front of World War II in May, 1945.

Life’s Work

Early peoples, their possible use of ocean currents for navigation, and their possible migrations and cultural contacts were the focus of Heyerdahl’s scientific work. His historic voyage from the coast of Peru to eastern Polynesia made him world famous. Subsequently, he sailed from the west coast of Morocco to the West Indies and then from the foot of Iraq through the Persian Gulf, to Asia, and on to Africa, where he was blocked by political turmoil. These voyages involved the use of replicas of prehistoric vessels. Heyerdahl’s concern was to demonstrate that early peoples using such primitive craft could so migrate. The navigation out of the Persian Gulf indicated that the ancient Sumerians could thus have had contact with numerous other early civilizations.

With the end of World War II, Heyerdahl returned to civilian life. He formulated theories about the origins of the peoples of the Pacific Islands in contrast to the standard perspective that their ancestors had come directly from southeastern Asia. Heyerdahl noted that when Europeans first came to the Pacific Islands, they found some indigenous people with white skins, beards, red or blond hair, and almost Semitic faces; they were said to be descended from the first chiefs of the islands. The ruling family of the Incas also had fair skin, beards, and (for some) red hair. Their ancestors had been there before the Incas became rulers. According to indigenous tradition, in a battle at Lake Titicaca in the high AndesMountains, the fair race was massacred, but the leader and some others escaped to the Ecuadoran coast and vanished into the Pacific Ocean.

When Heyerdahl’s theories were ignored in academic circles, he decided to sail on a fabricated prehistoric raft to establish the feasibility of the journey. Locating financial backers and a crew of fellow Norwegians (only one of whom was a trained seaman), he built the raft and set sail on April 28, 1947. Based on drawings by Spaniards in Inca-era Peru, the vessel was constructed of balsa logs, which were lashed together, allowing the mountainous seas that poured onto it simply to run through the cracks. A cabin on top was built like a jungle dwelling and thus offered a psychological sense of security. A large sail and prehistoric navigational equipment enabled the Kon-Tiki, as the vessel was named, to move in the desired direction, primarily propelled by the powerful ocean currents. The only modern conveniences were a radio and military-style rations.

Narrow escapes resulting from uncanny good judgment, courage, confidence, and self-sacrifice led to the sighting, on July 30, of land, an island in the Tuamotu group of the South Sea Islands, but the raft drifted past. Eventually, the crew was shipwrecked on the reef of an uninhabited island after a voyage of 4,300 miles (7,000 kilometers); no lives were lost, and the raft was soon salvaged with the help of local islanders. By radio, a schooner was summoned to bring them to Papeete in Tahiti. There, a large Norwegian steamer took them and the Kon-Tiki back to the Western world. The Kon-Tiki is now in a museum in Oslo, as is the Ra II from a subsequent voyage.

Heyerdahl wrote about the Kon-Tiki voyage in the book Kon-Tiki ekspedisjonen(1948; Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific by Raft , 1950). The English translation was on best-seller lists in the United States for months. By 1969, it had been reprinted in sixty different languages, thirty million people had seen an Academy Award-winning documentary of the voyage in theaters (1950), and 500 million had seen the film on television. (In 2006, Heyerdahl’s grandson, Olav Heyerdahl, would reprise the voyage with a five-member crew, demonstrating, as others had done as well, that the success of the original Kon-Tiki was not a fluke.)

Shortly after Heyerdahl’s return home from Tahiti, he and his wife decided to separate. In the early summer of 1949 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he was doing research on North American Indians, he was married to Yvonne Dedekam-Simonsen, who had spent her early years in Oslo. They had three daughters, Anette, Marian, and Elisabeth.

In 1952, Heyerdahl published American Indians in the Pacific: The Theory Behind the Kon-Tiki Expedition . He noted that fishhooks of the Polynesians were almost identical to those of ancient civilizations of North and South America. However, there was opposition from other scholars, who espoused an isolationist, nondiffusionist viewpoint. Heyerdahl argued that from the mainland of Southeast Asia there was an ocean current that ran via the extreme North Pacific via Northwest America to Hawaii.

In 1953, Heyerdahl visited the Galápagos Islands off the west coast of South America and found four habitation sites predating the European period. A book about this appeared in 1956. In 1954, Heyerdahl visited Lake Titicaca in the Andes and formulated the theory that indigenous peoples from this area were the founders of the Easter Island culture. In 1955, Heyerdahl, his wife, two-year-old Anette, and five archaeologists spent substantial time on Easter Island. His book Aku-Aku: P†ske yes Hemmelighet (1957; Aku-Aku: The Secret of Easter Island , 1958), a popular narrative, discusses their work and argues that the island was originally settled by two races, the “long-ears” and the “short-ears”: The long-ears left their center near Lake Titicaca and landed on Easter Island. Heyerdahl had located archaeological evidence of occupation that had occurred one thousand years earlier than scientists had previously assumed. The scientific account, Archaeology of Easter Island, was published in 1961.

In 1958, in Norway, Heyerdahl suffered influenza with inflammation of the brain. Subsequently, he renovated a home on the Italian Riviera near the mountains. His scientific reputation had been rising for many years. On the 150th anniversary of Oslo University in 1961, he was given an honorary doctorate by the university.

Heyerdahl made a sea voyage in 1969 to investigate whether reed boats, used by several ancient cultures, were seaworthy and could have crossed the Atlantic Ocean. An ancient-style, papyrus-reed boat was built on the model of those used in ancient Egypt. As with the Kon-Tiki, it also was named in honor of a sun god, in this case the Egyptian Ra. With an international crew of seven, the craft sailed 2,700 miles in eight weeks but began to collapse about 600 miles from Barbados in the West Indies. The following year, a new vessel, the Ra II, sailed from the Atlantic coast of Morocco and reached Barbados safely. On the way the crew tested the ocean waters for pollution and reported their findings to the United Nations. The book Ra, detailing these adventures, was published in 1970, as was the English translation The Ra Expeditions .

Heyerdahl undertook a third major voyage in 1977 to study the ancient Sumerian people of the third millennium b.c.e. The Sumerians had developed an outstanding civilization. Before the voyager, Heyerdahl employed Iraqi marsh Arabs aided by Indians from Lake Titicaca to construct a vessel, dubbed Tigris, from the Mesopotamian reed called berdi, and with a crew of eleven sailed down the Tigris River through the dangerous Persian Gulf to Oman, to Pakistan, and then over the Indian Ocean to Djibouti at the opening of the Red Sea. Heyerdahl then burned the vessel to protest the wars convulsing the region. The voyage demonstrated that the ancient Sumerians could have made similar voyages and thus benefited from extensive cultural contacts in developing their extraordinary civilization.

In 1982-1983, Heyerdahl organized and led two archaeological expeditions to the Maldive Islands in the Indian Ocean to investigate the prehistoric Maldives regarding possible global trade. The ruins he found there, oriented to the sun, and the statues with elongated earlobes accorded with his theory of racial dispersion by sea. Specifically, he proposed that a seafaring culture arose in ancient Sri Lanka and colonized the Maldives, perhaps moving on to Polynesia and even South America. Similarly, in 1991 he examined stone pyramids at Güimar on the island of Tenerife in the Canary Islands, off the coast of Africa. He concluded that the pyramids served an astronomical function and proposed that the Canaries had once been a shipping depot between the Americas and the Mediterranean.

Heyerdahl’s last project involved ruins near Azov, northeast of the Black Sea in modern Russia. He hoped to unearth evidence to support the claim in Snorri Sturluson’s Ynglinga saga (c. 1225) that a chief named Odin brought his tribe, the Æsir, from there to Scandinavia, where the tribe entered Norse mythology as one of two families of gods. He proposed that the Udi population of Azerbaijan descended from these Æsir. Historians rejected Heyerdahl’s conclusions and, as often occurred, harshly criticized his handling of evidence, both linguistic and material.

Heyerdahl authored or coauthored more than sixty-five articles and books, both popular and scholarly. He also produced five documentary films. He was a frequent lecturer at universities and made radio and television appearances to support his campaign to end pollution of the oceans by oil tankers and oil wells. In 1992 he cofounded the Foundation for Exploration and Research on Cultural Origins, which provides scholars with grants to study the connections among ancient peoples and cultures. At the same time he enjoyed worldwide celebrity, courted by young explorers who wanted the cachet of his approval for their projects. In 1994, with actor Liv Ullmann, he cohosted the opening and closing ceremonies of the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway.

During his long career Heyerdahl received dozens of awards, decorations, and honors, including the Retzius Medal from the Royal Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography (1950), the Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society (1964), Egypt’s Order of Merit (1971), the Order of the Golden Ark from the Netherlands (1980), and honorary doctorates from the U.S.S.R.’s Academy of Sciences (1980), the University of San Martín in Lima, Peru (1991), the University of Havana, Cuba (1992), and the University of Kiev, Ukraine (1993).

Heyerdahl died of a brain tumor on April 18, 2002, in Colla Micheri, Italy. He was survived by his third wife, actor Jacqueline Beer, whom he had married in 1991.

Significance

Heyerdahl’s significance lies, first, in his practical demonstration using prehistoric vessels that various early peoples could have successfully navigated sea routes of hundreds and thousands of miles. Second, on the basis of these voyages and on archaeological evidence, Heyerdahl argued for various diffusionist theories. He believed that Polynesians did not come directly from the Asian mainland but that some followed the North Pacific current and landed along the Pacific coast of British Columbia; of this group some moved via Hawaii to other Pacific islands. For Heyerdahl, a different group of migrants left the Peruvian coast and eventually reached Easter Island and Polynesia.

Heyerdahl also demonstrated the feasibility of early crossings of the Atlantic Ocean to the West Indies, again by using the prevailing ocean currents. He argued that these sea-crossing migrants might have contributed to the development of the great American civilizations of the Aztecs and the Incas. Anthropologists largely reject the theory, pointing out that both linguistic and genetic evidence suggest the migration to Polynesia started on the Asian mainland. Heyerdahl remained undaunted, however, and some evidence, such as the widespread importance of the sweet potato in Polynesian diets, does in fact point to a South American influence of some sort.

Further, Heyerdahl studied the Sumerians, the brilliant developers of the first great civilization of early Mesopotamia, on which Western biblical culture is based. Heyerdahl argued that the Sumerian culture was not an isolated one but one that, because of its capable sailing vessels, could have traveled as far as Egypt as well as to the important Indus River civilization. Thus, the Sumerian civilization could have grown in part because of these cultural contacts.

Heyerdahl brought to popular attention the important role that sea voyages could have played in the diffusion of early peoples and the development of their cultures. This aspect of ethnography had not received much prominence prior to Heyerdahl’s work. He stirred the imagination of a generation of readers, helping to make anthropology and experimental archaeology into respected sciences and showing how prehistoric cultures lived in harmony with nature.

Bibliography

Emory, Kenneth P. “Easter Island’s Position in the Prehistory of Polynesia.” Journal of the Polynesian Society 81 (March, 1972): 57-69. This article presents arguments against Heyerdahl’s theories. Emory claims that early Polynesians had the maritime capability to reach Easter Island and to build the giant statues. Also, he believes that the Easter Islanders are descendants of an early offshoot of the Polynesians.

Golson, Jack. “Thor Heyerdahl and the Prehistory of Easter Island.” Oceania 36 (Summer, 1965): 38-93. Golson challenges some of Heyerdahl’s hypotheses, using data provided by the Heyerdahl expedition. He argues that the Easter Island script is equally likely to be post-European.

Heyerdahl, Thor. “Feasible Ocean Routes to and from the Americas in Pre-Columbian Times.” American Antiquity 28 (April, 1963): 482-488. This article discusses three possible routes of aboriginal overseas arrivals to the New World and two of departure. Also, studies of plant life demonstrate that some form of transoceanic contact occurred. Includes a bibliography.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Green Was the Earth on the Seventh Day. New York: Random House, 1996. This memoir, accompanied by many photos, tells of the youthful first expedition Heyerdahl made with his wife Liv to the South Seas islands. In the course of writing arose an embryonic form of his later theory about early migrations of peoples. He also argues vigorously for the protection of the oceans from pollution.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. In the Footsteps of Adam: A Memoir. Lynchberg, Va.: Warwick House, 2002. A retrospective on Heyerdahl’s life, philosophy, and deep respect for nature and simplicity. He also discusses the difficulties he faced in getting scientists to accept his replica voyages as genuine research.

Jacoby, Arnold. Señor Kon-Tiki: The Biography of Thor Heyerdahl. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1967. This clearly written, lengthy, and sympathetic biography by a close friend of Heyerdahl covers Heyerdahl’s life from a discussion of his early family background until the mid-1960’s. It fills in the gaps between Heyerdahl’s own accounts.

Schumacher, William. “On the Linguistic Aspects of Thor Heyerdahl’s Theory: The So-Called Non-Polynesian Number Names from Easter Island.” Anthropos 71 (May/June, 1976): 806-847. This article discusses linguistic factors in relation to Heyerdahl’s theory about the migrations from the Americas to Polynesia. Includes an extensive bibliography.