![]() ![]() He was convinced that Polynesia's first settlers had come from South America, and not from Asia by way of the western Pacific islands, as nearly all scholars thought. ![]() Heyerdahl's satisfaction that his theory could be fact. The 101-day, 4,300-mile drifting voyage on the 40-square-foot raft, a replica of pre-Inca vessels, took them safely from Peru to Raroia, a coral island near Tahiti. A tall, lean man in an appropriately Viking mold, he and five others crossed a broad stretch of the Pacific in the balsa-log raft Kon-Tiki, seeking to prove that the Polynesian islands could have been settled by prehistoric South American people. He had lived in recent years in Güímar, Tenerife, in the Canary Islands.įame came to Mr. Heyerdahl died of cancer in Italy, where he had been vacationing, his family said. Thor Heyerdahl, the Norwegian anthropologist and adventurer whose imagination and vigor brought him acclaim navigating the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Oceans to advance his controversial theories of ancient seafaring migrations, died yesterday. ![]()
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