thor heyerdahl: visionary, nitwit or LEGENDARY NORSE GOD?!?!

(haha blimey "pipecleaners" = word from a dead cold planet all by itself...)

Anyway, Heyerdahl is all of the above.

what proportion of pipecleaners bought are actually used for cleaning pipes?!

andy

watching the film right now

it really brings home how totally nuts they were to try it: heyerdahl couldn't swim and only *one* of the six had any experience at sea (and obviously not in a tiny balsa-wood raft)

also hullo 14-years-ago me

all the crew are dead now, knaugland died aged 90 in 2009 :(

92 in fact

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DDrnF4BXkAAqmMA.jpg

^^^more hesselberg

Heyerdahl was crazy, courageous, charismatic and probably 100% wrong in his theories, despite his surviving the voyage.

less than 100% (acc.wikipedia, citing this): polynesians do apparently have a partly south american genetic heritage, from around the time the islands were first settled

Genetic material could be shared because Polynesians sailed east and then returned, which, given the impressive navigational abilities of the Polynesians, would make more sense to me than Native Americans drifting west on balsa rafts and accidentally making landfall on a place like RapaNui, the most isolated piece of inhabited land on earth.

in which case he was not 100% wrong

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DDrTvSvWsAAgffr.jpg

70th anniversary of the arrival at Raroia atoll.

thor heyerdal proved correct (jared diamond wrong wrong wrong)

https://www.science.org/content/article/famed-polynesian-island-did-not-succumb-ecological-suicide-new-evidence-reveals

"In a bonus from the work, the team found that Native American DNA comprised up to 12% of the ancient people’s genomes. That finding supports earlier hints that Polynesian Rapanui mixed with Native Americans from South America some 600 to 800 years ago, perhaps by making round-trip voyages to the South American coast"

(aimless also wrong)

I saw somebody convincingly stating that the "used all the trees" theory was discredited recently, I'm sure it's still going to be repeated by people who repeat that kind of thing for years to come tho sadly

If Heyerdahl's hypothesis was that Polynesians sailed their very sophisticated outrigger crafts to South America and back, how does building a crude balsa raft based on South American designs and materials and starting out from SA prove that?

that wasn't his hypothesis lol

Has everyone forgotten about the even more bonkers Ra!?!?

right. which is why proof of contact between polynesia and south america does not prove heyerdahl's hypothesis was right, but that he got it backwards. the origins of the contact was not from SA into polynesia, but from polynesia to SA.

heyerdahl proving that sun ra did come from saturn by flying in the opposite direction in a spaceship made of papyrus leaves

I was super into that Ra book when I was a kid, my parents had it

I always assumed the southern pacific ocean was already well navigated/travelled (back & forth) long before we gave them credit for... and of course that old rumor that pharoahs in Egypt had cocaine in their tissue! Coke only comes from S America