heyerdahl

Just because Thor Heyerdahl sailed from South America to Polynesia on a balsa tree raft doesn't mean that's how Polynesia was populated.

Of course, that was skepticism was pretty much how Heyerdahl was received before he made the Kon-Tiki voyages, no?

So, no, Heyerdahl's hypothesis is completely wrong, and the new evidence we have more strongly support older hypotheses by others, which Heyerdahl disagreed with.

Or bundles of papyrus reeds or balsawood rafts, as Thor Heyerdahl demonstrated.

Thor Heyerdahl famously believed that America was colonized from the east.

An example of this is Thor heyerdahl of kon-tiki fame, a popular person to discuss whose views ultimately stem directly from 19th century hyperdiffusionist thought.

Hyperdiffusionism doesn't have any adherents today because there wasn't enough evidence to sustain it, and inside the confines of the scientific method Heyerdahl was not a scientist.

Thor Heyerdahl of kon-tiki fame is a prominent example that you may have heard of, but this was a thing that permeates a lot of old archaeology/anthropology.

I think modern genetic analysis has proven Thor Heyerdahl wrong.

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).

A few books I read this year (or perhaps late last year), and wholeheartedly recommend: - Typee: A peep at Polynesian Life by Herman Melville - Fatu-Hiva, Back to Nature by Thor Heyerdahl - The lost world: being an account of the recent amazing adventures of Professor E.

The irony of writers like Rundkvist lumping Heyerdahl in with frauds like Von Daniken is that Von Daniken's theories were predicated on the assumption that "primitive" peoples didn't have the ability to accomplish such achievements, and critics of Heyerdahl predicated their criticism on the same assumption.

Was Thor Heyerdahl was "playing a 'Tiki person'" in his famous raft voyage, when that culture doesn't exist, or was he trying to demonstrate that the raft hypothesis for human migration could not simply be rejected as impossible?

I believe Diamond (or maybe it was Heyerdahl) claims the settlers chopped down the forest in order to make rolling logs for transporting statues, but we now know that statues were transported by "walking" them using ropes [2].

> Heyerdahl's hypothesis was part of early Eurocentric hyperdiffusionism and the westerner disbelief that (non-white) "stone-age" peoples with "no math" could colonize islands separated by vast distances of ocean water, even against prevailing winds and currents.

From the linked article: > Heyerdahl's hypothesis of Polynesian origins is overwhelmingly rejected by scientists today.

Nor is it right to attribute the idea of a possible connection to Heyerdahl.

Heyerdahl didn't believe that was possible, and it must have been the other way.