The extraordinary story of two Pacific voyages of discovery a thousand years apart...
Once in a while you find yourself in an odd situation. You get into it by degrees and in the most natural way but, when you are right in the midst of it, you are suddenly astonished and ask yourself how in the world it all came about. — Thor Heyerdahl
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Retiring to bed later that night, hearing the rush of those waves hitting the beach, Heyerdahl’s imagination was alight. Tiki came from the rising sun, Tetua had said, the direction of Peru. Of course, in the legend of the Incas, there was a Tiki too: Kon-Tiki, also called Viracocha, was the Incan creator deity. Could it be that these were the same god? What if, against the odds and against the consensus of the experts, these islands were first not settled from Asia, but by voyagers from the New World? Unable to contain his excitement, he turned to Liv and whispered, “Have you noticed that the huge stone figures of Tiki in the jungle are remarkably like the monoliths left by extinct civilizations in South America?”
As he later told the story in Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific by Raft, he was brushed off by many in the scientific establishment — and so went to extraordinary lengths to prove the theory’s plausibility, reconstructing the ancient journey by sailing across the sea on a wooden raft in 1947. This spectacular feat captured the imagination of the world, and researchers, skeptical as they might have been, have ever since debated what really had happened in prehistoric times between South America and Polynesia (the group of Pacific islands stretching from New Zealand to Hawaii). Most scientists never accepted the amateur anthropology in which Heyerdahl couched his theory, but the mystery of an ancient trans-Pacific journey was a live one. All sorts of evidence would be marshalled, sometimes seeming to affirm Heyerdahl in part, sometimes seeming to show him entirely wrong.
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The question Heyerdahl had thrust into the spotlight with some forty feet of balsa wood and a handful of sunburnt Scandinavians — namely, whether an ancient journey really had been made between South America and Polynesia — would take seven decades of anthropology, botany, linguistics, archaeology, genetic analysis, and computer science to answer. The story of the world’s argument over an amateur scientist’s hunch came to its stunning conclusion last summer, when Alex Ioannidis, a computational geneticist at Stanford, led a team of researchers on the first truly definitive study of Polynesian–South American admixture. It is a story of a scientific endeavor as complex and abundant as the world it sought to study, born out of the most deeply human desires.
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