Who is kon tiki

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The team set sail on April 28 th , initially being towed by the Peruvian navy to avoid traffic close to the coast. They then rode the Humboldt Current and the trade winds, roughly due West.

On July 30 th the team caught first sight of land — the atoll of Puka-Puka. Two days later, on August 7 th , the raft struck a reef and eventually beached on an uninhabited islet off the coast of Raroia atoll. After a few days, washed up flotsam from the raft alerted villagers nearby who then arrived on canoes to rescue the voyagers. They were taken to the nearby island and welcomed with traditional feasts and dances. Like all sailors, especially ones with a point to prove, Thor made copious notes and logs along the journey.

Most importantly, the crew had a single 16mm video camera, which they used to document the expedition. The combination of this film, with stills and diagrams explaining the process of building the raft, forms the basis of the documentary Kon-Tiki. Released in in Norway and later in the US, the feature won best Documentary for in the at the 24 th Academy Awards.

In , a dramatization of the events was made into a film of the same name. Read more : The Best Museums in Oslo. The Oscar-winning documentary of the voyage plays throughout the day. It did, however, do nothing to prove that it was! It requires enormous knowledge of the night sky and how it changes both with latitude and throughout the year.

With that knowledge, the rising and setting of stars form a compass, a clock, and a means to calibrate latitude. The story of how these skills have been lost, and then rediscovered, and practiced once again, has been made fraught by European notions of racial superiority.

Captain James Cook had spent a lot of time in the South Pacific before he crossed the equator and came across the hitherto unknown Hawaiian Islands in Surprisingly, Tupaia was able to converse with these new islanders in their mutually intelligible languages. The linguistic connection proved beyond a doubt that the peoples of this region were all connected. The initial and obvious correct conclusion was that the Polynesians had once been great navigators, but that posed a problem for the European colonizers of the 19th century, who saw themselves as superior.

Macmillan Brown in New Zealand, built the case at the end of the 19th century using the emerging science of linguistics to trace Polynesian languages back to Sanskrit and to European languages. Professor A. This was a handy argument for British colonists in New Zealand, living side-by-side with the subjugated Maori Polynesian population. Buck set about tracing oral traditions of voyaging throughout the Pacific, and presented his evidence in his work entitled Vikings of the Sunrise.

He documented a step-by-step migration eastward from Southeast Asia, a theory that came very close to the truth. But skeptics remained, the most famous—but by no means the only—was Thor Heyerdahl. Not only did he reject the voyaging tradition, but he rejected the West-to-East migration as well. Heyerdahl argued that the Pacific had been settled by accidental drift voyaging from the Americas.

His argument was based largely on the wind and current patterns in the Pacific, which flow predominantly from East to West.