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Kon tiki 19475/26/2023 “If the wind, the current and the waves come from the east, then the people must have come from that direction as well.” He confidently stated and this soon became his life’s purpose: he wanted to prove that the first Polynesians arrived from South America. So as such, they should have come from the west, but the more Thor looked to the east, the more he thought that maybe the anthropologists had got it wrong. However, the commonly held theory at the time was that the Polynesians migrated from Asia. He listened to the old men telling stories about the god Tiki, who came from the sea, ‘where the sun rises’. He could not help but notice that the wind and waves were coming, relentlessly, from the east. In one of his books he describes how he sat for days on its eastern shore watching the waves crashing onto the cliffs. He travelled frequently to the South Pacific and even lived for a while on the Marquesan island of Fatu Hiva. The mastermind behind this famous undertaking was Thor Heyerdahl, a Norwegian anthropologist who took a great interest in Polynesia and its origins. One of the greatest of these is surely the story of the raft Kon-Tiki. The history of the sea is peppered with many stories of great seamanship and inspired journeys.
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