The real tiki

This is the original “Kon-Tiki” documentary from 1950. It was released in the United States in 1951, and won an Academy Award the same year. Most of the documentary is shot onboard the Kon-Tiki itself, and I have to say that the quality of the footage is surprisingly good, considering that it was made under somewhat unusual circumstances over 70 years ago!

It was in 1947 that Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl and a small Norwegian-Swedish crew built a primitive raft, called Kon-Tiki after the Peruvian sun god Kon-Tiki Viracocha, and set sail from Peru with the goal of reaching Polynesia within 100 days. The raft traversed an enormous distance at open sea until finally running aground a reef at the Polynesian atoll of Raroia. The purpose of this daring, perhaps foolhardy, journey was to prove Heyerdahl´s speculations that Polynesia had been settled from South America rather than from lands to its west. Later, Heyerdahl would carry out similar spectacular journeys across the Atlantic and Indian oceans with the hope of demonstrating that ancient civilizations used the sea more often than mainstream archeology would allow for. A controversial aspect of Heyerdahl´s speculations was the idea that Kon-Tiki, the Peruvian sun god, was a real historical person…and that he had been a White European king. What a White man was doing in ancient Peru long before the Spanish conquista is, of course, an interesting question.

Personally, I consider Heyerdahl´s experiments inconclusive. However, I don´t think the matter of South American-Pacific contacts have been completely settled yet. For instance, Australian Aboriginal DNA was recently found in samples taken from a South American Native tribe. And what about those famed Peruvian mummies, which contained traces of a resin from New Guinea? There are also claims that Japanese Jomon pottery has been found in Ecuador. Note, however, that the trans-pacific contact in these cases must have gone in the *other* direction than the one postulated by Heyerdahl! The matter of trans-atlantic contact between the Old and the New Worlds probably haven´t been settled either (despite constant claims to the contrary by the All-Knowing Skeptics) and then there´s the entire Atlantis-Lemuria problem complex, reopened recently by the sensational finds at Göbekli Tepe in Turkey. Heyerdahl may have been wrong about a White sun-god braving whale sharks and coral reefs to get to hula-hula dancers at Tahiti, but I think our prehistory really isn´t as well known as some people like to imagine…