Kon-Tiki
"'Am going to cross Pacific on wooden raft to support a theory that the South Sea islands were peopled from Peru. Will you come?...Reply at once.' That is how six courageous and inquisitive adventurers came to seek a dangerous path in order to test a hypothetical theory. On a primitive raft made of forty-foot balsa logs, named 'Kon-Tiki' in honor of a legendary sun king, Thor Heyerdahl and his five comrades set out, risking their lives to prove that ancient Peruvians could have made the 4,300-mile voyage to the Polynesian islands on a raft similar to theirs. Every page of Kon-Tiki--from the building of the raft and the dangerous adventures at sea, to a spectacular crash landing and the dances of the native islanders--chronicles of a true-life, spellbinding escape from the twenty-first century"--Cover, p. 4.
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What Hacker News says
- Kon-Tiki by Thor Heyerdahl, a explorer/anthropologist. He and a group of other volunteers sailed across the pacific on a raft built using ancient methods to prove that the pacific isles were settled by south americans (this turned out to be wrong based on population genetics). Great read!
- Thor Heyerdahl, author of that piece, is well known for his diffusion hypothesis. His work with Ra and Kon-Tiki shows that migration was possible with even early technology. It doesn't mean it happened, or that the hypothesis has any truth to it. (FWIW, I enjoyed his books about the two journeys, and his book on Easter Island.)
The idea of an Egyptian/Aztec connection is often categorized as "hyperdiffusion", and has the unfortunate tendency to highlight similarities, without estimating if there were independent origins, or investigating differences. See http://scienceblogs.com/aardvarchaeology/2010/11/04/thor-hey... for a more modern commentary on Heyerdahl.
Hyperdiffusion is nearly abandoned by academic research, for lack of evidence.
- If you haven't read the book by Thor Heyerdahl you should. It's an amazing and well told adventure that can only command serious respect.
http://www.amazon.com/Kon-Tiki-Across-Pacific-Thor-Heyerdahl...
Here's a link to the heavy water sabotage in Norway during the second world war that Hauglund was a part of. Amazing stuff.
- This entire article reminded me of reading the introduction to Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card (it's in the 25th anniversary edition).
He mentions reading Kon-Tiki by Thor Heyerdahl and finding archaeology, as described by Thor, to be incredibly fascinating and exciting (which I agree with having read Kon-Tiki as well).
Card goes on to say that when he tried ACTUAL archaeology he found it incredibly boring. e.g. it was mostly sitting out in the hot sun dusting off rocks hoping to find some bones.
It's a reminder of two facts:
1. EVERY activity has exciting and boring pars
2. A good writer can make even dull and boring activities comes alive
- I remember reading Kon-Tiki and I, when I was a kid.
I think the journey (which was remarkable) was pretty much written off, in those days as "a bunch of proto-hippies, doing something," but these days, it would be a viral sensation.
- Wasn’t that whole Kon Tiki book/movie about this discussion. That Vikings somehow made it all the way to the Pacific Islands via the Americas?
