If the world and its mysteries were left only to the academics to explain, the result would be not only dry but in many cases horribly inaccurate. Thank goodness for people, like Thor Heyerdahl, who have the courage and the curiosity to venture out and shake things up a bit.
Heyerdahl, who died this week at 87, proved beyond reasonable doubt that it was possible for ancient people to travel across the ocean, even against the wind. He did not, as anthropologists often are quick to note, prove that they, indeed, did so. But after Heyerdahl, the feisty Norwegian who refused to let research and theories be the final word, a scientist must at least acknowledge the possibilities and explain why they feel such migrations didn't happen.
The spirit of adventure, after all, is innate among humans. That hardly needs to be proved. History books are filled with the adventures of ancient people who wanted to examine the other side of the mountain, the ends of the ocean, or, for that matter, the moon. Why should ancient people have been any different?
Heyerdahl didn't come from a long line of sailors. His father owned a brewery and his mother was head of a museum. It was this ignorance, he said, that gave him the courage to venture out. Had he been a sailor, he likely would have thought such voyages were impossible.
Thank goodness for ignorance.
In 1947, he covered 4,300 miles from Callao, Peru, to the Raroia Reef in the South Pacific on a small raft made of balsa logs and christened the Kon-Tiki. His quest was to show that ancient South Americans could have migrated to the Pacific islands. Later, he organized expeditions across the Atlantic and the Indian oceans, as well, using boats made from materials that would have been available to ancient people and based on research of how those people constructed smaller vessels.
Heyerdahl's underlying theory to all of this was that the similarities found in different parts of the world, such as an ancient pyramidlike structure recently unearthed in Samoa, and others in different parts of the world, all of which are similar to the ones in Egypt, were not merely spontaneous coincidences. People traveled and migrated great distances.
Unfortunately, his work has been virtually ignored by the scientists, who use linguistic and genetic research as "proof" that he is wrong. They are left at a loss, however, to explain the cultural similarities among different people, other than to rely on odd coincidences.
Perhaps they feel humans are predisposed to build in certain ways or to adopt certain traits — kind of like the way they are predisposed to venture out and explore.
Heyerdahl, a true embodiment of that human spirit of adventure, has left a legacy that can, indeed, be ignored. But it can't easily be explained away.