On 6 October 1914, exactly 107 years ago, Thor Heyerdahl - anthropologist, explorer, writer and director - was born in Norway. Let's retrace the main stages of his life, starting with the Kon-Tiki expedition with which he crossed the Pacific on a balsa raft built in the manner of the ancients, in order to demonstrate to academics the possibility of transoceanic travel in antiquity.
di Samuel Baricchi
Cover: Thor Heyerdahl and his crew on the Kon-Tiki
The atrocities of World War II just ended when Thor Heyerdahl, perhaps one of the most famous anthropologists and archaeologists of the last century, set off on an undertaking that would make him famous all over the planet. Speaking several times with the indigenous people of the Polynesian islands, the scholar had come to the conclusion, based on the study of ocean currents and on the indigenous cult that concerned the worship of the sun, that the ancestors of the latter came not from the West, but from the East. Everything came from the east, the sun, the wind, everything, for this reason the indigenous Polynesians worshiped the sun and the east.
In Polynesia he heard legends from an old native about the mythological ancestor of the aforementioned people, who were said to have come from the east, not the west.. There is no scientific evidence of this myth, on the contrary, it disproves Heyerdahl's theory, the mitochondrial DNA of the indigenous people has parallels with Australia, India, Southeast Asia, so one would think that it is more likely that the Polynesia was inhabited by people who moved east. Yet Heyerdahl relied on a rather simple but brilliant intuition. Indeed, how could they sail against the current? How can there be statues and archaeological finds such as artifacts and representations of various types that are very similar to each other both in Polynesia and in Colombia? Heyerdahl thought that the ancestral ancestors of the Polynesians were Amerindians.
Heyerdahl questioned more than anything else the theory in vogue in the first half of the twentieth century according to which oceans and rivers were an obstacle for ancient peoples. Today we have a much more open mind about it and his transoceanic journeys can provide inspiration for new speculations. Not so much for the factual truthfulness, but for the application of the method: each undertaking of the Norwegian biologist and anthropologist had a highly pragmatic value. His contemporary scholars considered ocean navigation impossible since in ancient times the populations who sailed did so on boats similar to rafts, built with rushes, balsa wood, or papyrus, as far as the area of ββNorth Africa is concerned.
He decided to try himself the journey that the mythical ancestors of the Polynesians had made, building the Kon-Tiki, a balsa-wood boat built with the help of local workers., following step by step every advice for the construction of a boat as similar as possible to those of the natives in the pre-Columbian era, without the use of materials modern. On April 28, 1947 she sailed from Callao carried by the Humboldt Current. On July 30 of the same year the crew sighted the island of Puka Puka, in the archipelago of tuamotu, and after another week he reached the atoll of Rareia.
This expedition demonstrated the pragmatic and purely technical possibility that the inhabitants of Polynesia were the descendants of South American colonizers, who simply by following the ocean currents with rafts and balsa wood boats could have reached the islands in the middle of the Pacific. With this expedition Heyerdahl proved that the GalΓ‘pagos had been a landing point for navigators from the Americas in pre-Columbian times. He identified the island as a possible landing place for pre-Inca prehistoric rafts, a discovery of pre-Columbian dwellings with the remains of hundreds of ceramic vases from Ecuador and northern Peru. The islands could have been a migratory stopover from South America to Polynesia.
In my opinion, both theories are valid, both that of the Norwegian anthropologist's detractors, and those brought by Heyerdahl and demonstrated by himself with his expeditions. It should be noted that no one had done anything like the Kon-Tiki journey before. Heyerdahl never used modern materials: he built each vessel according to the most traditional methods, and he considered this a fundamental point in his research work. The footage of the expedition, edited in the form of a documentary, also allowed the scholar to win an Oscar.
Thor Heyerdahl has been compared in spirit to the first space explorers, all men who had experienced the atrocities that man is capable of and perhaps, more or less consciously, desired a ransom, a redemption, and clearly perceived that that feeling of salvation could only come from, descend from a sense of absolute freedom, which often coincides with the risk of proposing plausible theories, with the will to demonstrate them, and in his case pushing himself to adventure in the true sense of the term, but always with the desire to study everything that has to do with the beauty of creation and life. In the first half of the twentieth century the most brilliant minds found themselves wondering how to renew war and war systems: after having seen too much ferocity, scholars like Heyerdahl felt it was time to push their energies towards creation, not destruction anymore., towards a world that can be united, and which perhaps, in pre-Columbian times, was much more so than is thought.
We know in fact that some children of Scandinavia, the Vikings, arrived in North America long before Columbus and that archaeological finds have been found all over the world whose mutual similarity can hardly be traced back to pure and simple chance. Heyerdahl hypothesized that the oceans, seas, and especially rivers were also seen by ancient man as paths in the middle of a forest, or in the middle of a desert.. The pragmatic approach of ancient civilizations and the need to move due to famine or adverse conditions that today with modern technology can be faced differently would have made them very intelligent from a practical point of view, allowing them to use materials unsuitable for intended navigation. in a modern sense, but perfect for the type of navigation they needed, essentially based on the procurement of fish food.
Many peoples are still studied today as regards the sphere of ancient boats, including the Vikings themselves, who with their long ships were able to push themselves and trade and to have contacts with a large part of the then known world. There are examples all over the planet of light fishing boats that are very useful for the type of supply needed by an indigenous population of a given territory, but which have no use in the global market and in large commercial exchanges.. But an intellectualistic and purely rational reasoning does not prompt you to undertake a journey along the Pacific on a raft built of balsa wood, with the whole scientific world claiming that it is a deliberate suicide. What drives you, in that case, in my opinion, is the pure desire for knowledge and to experience creation, with all its facets, as well as the urgent desire to demonstrate a theory from a practical point of view.
He later organized and led other expeditions. "The Ra Expeditions" is the name of the two expeditions on a papyrus boat that he himself named Ra, after the Egyptian god. In 1969 she left the Phoenician city of Safi, in Morocco, with a boat built by workers of the Lake Chad. The project was based on documentation of typical ancient Egyptian papyrus boats, excessive to navigate only on the Nile. After 56 days, they were forced to abandon the vessel about a week's sailing from their destination. The Italian documentary explorer and mountaineer was part of the reduced crew, also for the subsequent crossing of the RA II Charles Mauri. In 1970, again from North Africa, he left with a boat built by Amerindians aymara of the Titicaca lake, traveled 57 miles in 3270 days, reaching the island of Barbados. With this expedition he demonstrated the technical feasibility, even in antiquity, of travel from the old to the new world, thus suggesting that the cultural similarity between the pre-Columbian peoples and the Assyrian-Babylonian peoples, may not be due to chance.
According to Heyerdahl, at a certain point, or in several moments, in ancient history there was a great migration and looking at the map of ocean currents it is plausible to think that from North Africa the currents brought migrants first near the Caribbean, then in the America of the South, to then go further towards the Galapagos Islands and subsequently Polynesia. All this, of course, not in a single voyage, and not necessarily performed by the same crew (it would be absurd!) But in the course of ancient history older populations of the Phoenicians could have sailed through the centuries and across the ocean waves migrating every time when it was necessary through the use of boats which, technically, as the scholar demonstrated, could actually make long journeys even across the ocean, following the right currents.
Heyerdahl was also involved in archaeological excavations on Easter Island. Established a Rapa Nui for a year, in 1955, Heyerdahl scientifically analyzed the possible techniques of construction and transport of the moai, the very famous statues of the island. He showed that many of them were buried inside the hill and only the head of these statuary representations appeared, and that they originally wore a sort of red stone headdress on the head.. Aided by professional archaeologists, he carried out a stratigraphic analysis on the colonization of the island, dating back to at least 380 AD Through the analysis of pollen in the stratifications in a marshy lake, he definitively demonstrated that a few centuries before the arrival of the Europeans, the island was covered by dense tree vegetation.
The theories related to the impossibility for a "primitive" people to sculpt and erect statues of that size and material without advanced technology were refuted with an effective practical experiment.. Regarding this theme, still today many are wondering about the nature of the construction of the Pyramids or precisely of the movement of huge blocks of stone in ancient or prehistoric times, referring promptly to the experiments on magnetism of Nicola Tesla. Heyerdahl's approach was very pragmatic, as he usually did with him. During the experiment, with an indigenous technique and rudimentary tools, six men managed in just three days to completely sculpt a twelve-ton statue in volcanic tuff and transport it using 180 men, equipped with ropes and a huge wooden sled.. Another statue weighing thirty tons, which had remained on the ground for centuries, was hoisted on a high masonry platform, by means of a special stone base.
Heyerdahl then organized an expedition in 1977, always on a boat built with reeds and reeds according to the ancient tradition of the inhabitants of Lake Titicaca, through the cradle of human civilization. He traveled 6800 kilometers, first along the Tigris River to the Persian Gulf, then in the Indian Ocean to the Indus Valley in Pakistan, to reach the mouth of the Red Sea in the west.. The intent was always to demonstrate the possibility of intense commercial and cultural exchanges between the Mesopotamian peoples and the peoples of West Africa. He worked in the field in the Maldives, where he found archaeological finds that showed that the archipelago was an important landing place and point of passage for travelers heading to India from from the mainland already 2000 years before Christ. He did further studies on Easter Island, showing how a team of just fifteen men could carry one of the island's famous statues. He went again to Peru, where he studied the pyramids of Tucumè, and to the Canary Islands, where he demonstrated that the pyramids of Guimar are not random masses of stones, but the work of man.
In 2002 he was in Azov in Russia, looking for the origins of the Scandinavian peoples, but the excavations were interrupted by the deterioration of his health conditions. The same year, in his villa in Liguria at Colla Micheri, he left this world. He was looking for what was symbolically identified by the ancient Norsemen as Asaheimr, the mythical land in which, at the tip of the cosmic Yggdrasill tree, live the Aesir, the deities of the Scandinavian cults.. There are many theories that assert that the Vikings transposed places that really existed into myth and legend: Jotunheimr could have been Iceland, or the islands north of Norway. So in the same way Asaheimr, the land of the gods, could be a place where a population of a certain type lived, which gave rise to the first Norse settlements. Heyerdahl always applied an empirical interpretation of mythology and a very practical approach to the research and study of ancient peoples.
At the beginning of his career as an adventurer, in what was the expedition that made him famous globally, with the raft Kon-Tiki, was a biologist, specializing in the study of the populations of the Pacific Ocean and Polynesia. After a lifetime of studies and research, especially carried out by being in contact with the indigenous people and with the places that were the object of speculation by him, he obtained many honors and from a simple biologist he became Commander of the Norwegian Royal Order of Saint Olav, in 1950, after the expedition of Kon-Tiki, to then get several and important recognitions all over the world, from Egypt, where it became Knight of the Order of Merit, to Italy, where in 1965 on the initiative of the President of the Republic he was awarded the title of Grand Officer of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic.
Heyerdahl was therefore also a flagship of Italy, but we could easily affirm the whole world, even if he chose the villa in Micheri glue as an object of restoration and as a holiday resort, in the atmosphere of Liguria at sunset overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. He made the villa almost a place of spiritual retreat, a locus amoenus where to get lost in his thoughts and speculations, where to study, deepen, compare, try to understand the nature of the antiquity of man and his epochs more distant from us, understanding, sensing that knowing the past is equivalent to knowing oneself.