Thor Heyerdahl

THOR HEYERDAHL d2002. Norwegian adventurer and ethnographer with a background in zoology, botany and geography. He is notable for his Kon-Tiki expedition in 1947, in which he sailed 8,000 km across the Pacific Ocean in a hand-built raft from South America to the Tuamotu Islands. The expedition was designed to demonstrate that ancient people could have made long sea voyages, creating contacts between societies.He made other voyages to demonstrate the possibility of contact between widely separated ancient peoples (notably the Ra II expedition of 1970) when he sailed from the west coast of Africa to Barbados in a papyrus reed boat. He died on 18th April 2002 aged 87 in Italy