In 1947, Norwegian adventurer Thor Heyerdahl completed a 101-day, 4,300-mile journey across the Pacific Ocean from Peru to French Polynesia on a homemade raft built only with balsa logs and hemp rope — proving that ancient peoples could have made the same voyage
Posted by kooneecheewah@reddit | sailing | View on Reddit | 37 comments
Useless_or_inept@reddit
It's great as an adventure story, and I loved it when I was little, but it fits squarely in the pop-anthropology genre where the writer takes a nuanced topic and makes the reader feel clever that they've discovered a special key which explains whole swathes of human history and behaviour - and sometimes accuracy is a casualty.
See also: Jared Diamond, David Graeber, Norman Davies, even Malcolm Gladwell
hilomania@reddit
Don't forget the Lamarckians of the Stoned Ape Theory.
Useless_or_inept@reddit
To be honest, all the social sciences have this problem. There's an entire community of Serious Scientists doing Serious Science and devoting their lives to untangling complex, nuanced evidence fron a thousand different contexts, but the public never listen to them, and instead there's a youtube video with 150 million views where some 25-year-old with a journalism degree says "Well, yes, but [inhales] what if, like, what if there wasn't any violence before [exhales] what if [inhales] no, the Aztecs were successful, it was the Conquistadors who brought violence and slavery, like".
dmills_00@reddit
Tim Severin as well, doing the same kind of thing in the 60s and 70s, Irish Monks making it to Canada in the 1400s?
light24bulbs@reddit
Oh definitely, the dude might be wrong. But the sailing and adventure was right. Really right. Go read Kon Tiki folks, awesome book
builder137@reddit
The guy is super wrong, and added a bunch of nonsense to popular discourse that distracted people from the impressive sailing and navigation that Polynesian people actually did to populate their islands.
Darkwaxellence@reddit
He knew Polynesians were great seafarers. But did south American natives have anywhere near the same knowledge?
KrustyKrab_Pizza@reddit
I feel like Graeber's whole point is that people have structured their societies thousands of different ways and so you can't make gross generalizations about human nature like the other authors you mention. Do you disagree?
reflect-the-sun@reddit
You need to give your post it's own thread.
pcbman_blu@reddit
I got an old book for free at a swap meet a little while ago written by some fellow who made a similar raft and attempted a similar voyage out of San Francisco Bay in the 50s. I had to put it down a few chapters in when he started writing about how the prominent noses of certain Pacific Islanders prove they were actually some lost tribe of Israelites that made a similar trip on a raft thousands of years ago, and confirms that the book of Mormon is true. The author was a total loon.
It also didn't help that the guy was also a completely incompetent mariner and had to get rescued several times.
Useless_or_inept@reddit
* There are reed boats on the Nile
* There are reed boats in Latin America
* So we built a reed boat and tried sailing across the Atlantic, big adventure, but it sank. So we built another reed boat and tried another dramatic voyage and needed to be rescued again, but eventually we reached Barbados.
* We have conclusively proved that those grand ruined civilisations in Latin America were built by clever Egyptians, not those stupid local savages
sailorsail@reddit
This motivated James Wharram to prove that the Polynesian double canoe was how the pacific islands where settled and not via raft from the americas.
hilomania@reddit
And he also didn't "prove" that, but he made some remarkable boats in the meantime.
space_ape_x@reddit
Highly Recommend visiting both the Kon Tiki museum and the Viking Ship museum in Oslo
gentleman_bronco@reddit
Next door to the Fram museum as well. Excellent little setup for museums.
Rickreation@reddit
The movie was amazing.
blueberrybannock@reddit
Go read Kon Tiki, it’s great
OtherwiseBed4222@reddit
Take me back to second grade in the library when I found this thing. Which would have to be about 52 years ago.
Tough-Feature-5704@reddit
It is a much more compelling read than I expected. The expedition to gather materials to construct the raft is almost as amazing as the voyage itself.
Lint_baby_uvulla@reddit
This. Out of all the great explorers, Cook, Humboldt and Heyerdahl’s discoveries always stick with me for some reason.
Oh and of course Zwier Albertus ‘Alby’ Mangels, and the amazing Russell Coight.
SteelBandicoot@reddit
Norwegians are lunatics that can sail anything.
Stick a dragons head on it and go to America, bundle some sticks together and sail the pacific. Glorious lunacy.
REDDITSHITLORD@reddit
What an era that must have been. People just taking off without a care in the world.
TheElectricScheme@reddit
The Norwegians really prove when what can be achieved when you explore and adventure outwith the class system the British had. Let them learn and adopt ideas from indigenous people in melding of culture.
Sir John Rae was Scottish explorer from Orkney that was famed for adopting indigenous technology and ideas and he was great. Orkney & Shetland are the closest you’ll get to being Norwegian in the British isles.
This_Is_The_End@reddit
Thor Heyerdal blamed his whole live sciences to think in categories of nations, which didn't existed at time of the migrations, which was the reason he could push develop theories. Later he came with the theory a migrating group from the Black Sea area was so cultural influential they became gods in Scandinavia. The issue with all of his theories was, they were build on thin ice, thus he had not enough evidence.
But his work is a warning to us, historians and archeologists working with nationalistic categories are fraudsters.
M37841@reddit
The thing I love about this story was that it was predicated on the hypothesis that Pacific Islanders were likely descendants of South Americans, based on the similarities in their architecture and rituals. No one believed him because the journey was surely impossible. He proved them wrong.
Decades later they were finally able to do DNA tests which proved he was …. wrong. And quite possibly the only person ever to have rafted across the Pacific. Legend.
tcrex2525@reddit
Yes, he proved ancient peoples COULD have made that voyage, but turns out ancient people were much smarter than this guy because they knew there was no reason to.
milroben@reddit
well, not entirely wrong
M37841@reddit
Oh wow perhaps he was right after all!
Whole-Quick@reddit
That's a great read from Smithsonian Magazine. Thanks for sharing!
antarcticacitizen1@reddit
A Norwegian named Thor...how was he not going to make it. Dude is a legend.
If you want another awesome book to read on a similar topic "The Brendan Voyage" by Tim Severin. He historically recreated St. Brendan's ox hide leather boat and sailed it from Ireland to Canada.
Whole-Quick@reddit
Seconding the recommendation for "The Brendan Voyage".
Habsin7@reddit
If ancient people had the ability to make rope and sails and cut wood and fish,and…..isn’t it reasonable that they would have used something more than a raft - a boat maybe?
canadiansrsoft@reddit
The underwater UFO part is pretty wild.
builder137@reddit
There is a much better new book called Sea Peoples about what we actually learned using history, anthropology, and science about the settlement of Polynesia. Kon Tiki is an embarrassing distraction.
InternationalBall746@reddit
It’s actually "Sea People", by Christina Thompson. Excellent book.
RuViking@reddit
Remember watching him sailing the Egyptian reed boat on TV when I was a kid.
Fingers_of_fury@reddit
It’s an awesome story, I visited the crash site on Raroia, Tuamotus on my boat a couple months ago. His grandson recreated the expedition a few years ago as well.