6'4" (193cm) Family. Be on the lookout for your Britannica newsletter to get trusted stories delivered right to your inbox. Heyerdahl landed most of his roles due to his height of 6ft 4ins (1.93kg). Another famous expedition of Heyerdahl was the Ra II expedition of 1970, which tried to prove the possibility of contact of the ancient people. Today we burn our proud ship ... to protest against inhuman elements in the world of 1978 ... Now we are forced to stop at the entrance to the Red Sea. In 1969 and 1970, Heyerdahl built two boats from papyrus and attempted to cross the Atlantic Ocean from Morocco in Africa. Thor Heyerdahl Upper Secondary School in Larvik, the town of his birth, is also named after him. Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login). The Kon-Tiki expedition was inspired by old reports and drawings made by the Spanish Conquistadors of Inca rafts, and by native legends and archaeological evidence suggesting contact between South America and Polynesia. Physical characteristics. In the years that followed, Heyerdahl was often outspoken on issues of international peace and the environment. Gosport More recently, some researchers published research confirming a wider impact on genetic and cultural elements in Polynesia due to South American contacts. In 1991 he studied the Pyramids of Güímar on Tenerife and declared that they were not random stone heaps but pyramids. Based on this and other published documentation, Heyerdahl proposed that Azerbaijan was the site of an ancient advanced civilisation. [8], In 1991, Heyerdahl married Jacqueline Beer (born 1932) as his third wife. [31], However, more recent work[when?] As of 2017[update], Heyerdahl's Odin hypothesis has yet to be validated by any historian, archaeologist or linguist. Again, the voyage was described by Heyerdahl in The Ra Expeditions (1971) and was the subject of a documentary film.

Heyerdahl notes the oral tradition of an uprising of "Short Ears" against the ruling "Long Ears". Physical characteristics. Thor Heyerdahl Net Worth 2020, Age, Height, Relationships, Married, Dating, Family, Wiki Biography . According to Heyerdahl, something happened between Admiral Roggeveen's discovery of the island in 1722 and James Cook's visit in 1774; while Roggeveen encountered white, Indian, and Polynesian people living in relative harmony and prosperity, Cook encountered a much smaller population consisting mainly of Polynesians and living in privation. [21] Heyerdahl had attempted to counter the linguistic argument with the analogy that he would prefer to believe that African-Americans came from Africa, judging from their skin colour, and not from England, judging from their speech. $13 Million. Heyerdahl's popular book on the subject, Aku-Aku was another international best-seller.[34]. For the most part, Heyerdahl’s theories have not been accepted by anthropologists. Thor Heyerdahl Net Worth, Age, Height, Weight, Body Measurements, Dating, Marriage, Relationship Stats, Family, Career, Wiki. They built enormous stone statues carved in the image of human beings on Pitcairn, the Marquesas, and Easter Island that resembled those in Peru. However, Kon-Tiki and his closest companions managed to escape and later arrived on the Pacific coast. Charles House The controversy surrounding the Search for Odin project was in many ways typical of the relationship between Heyerdahl and the academic community. Thor Heyerdahl was a Norwegian adventurer and ethnographer with a background in zoology, botany, and geography, He became notable for his Kon-Tiki expedition in 1947, in which he sailed 8,000 km (5,000 mi) 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 separate cultures, This was linked to a diffusionist model of cultural development, Heyerdahl subsequently made other voyages designed to demonstrate the possibility of contact between widely separated ancient people, In May 2011, the Thor Heyerdahl Archives were added to UNESCO's "Memory of the World" Register, At the time, this list included 238 collections from all over the world, The Heyerdahl Archives span the years 1937 to 2002 and include his photographic collection, diaries, private letters, expedition plans, articles, newspaper clippings, original book, and article manuscripts, The Heyerdahl Archives are administered by the Kon-Tiki Museum and the National Library of Norway in Oslo. Announcing our NEW encyclopedia for Kids! Heyerdahl’s other books include Aku-Aku: The Secret of Easter Island (1958); Fatu-Hiva: Back to Nature (1974); and Early Man and the Ocean: A Search for the Beginnings of Navigation and Seaborne Civilizations (1979), in which he synthesized the findings of earlier expeditions and provided additional evidence for his theory of cultural diffusion. indicates that the South American component of Easter Island people's genomes pre-dates European contact: a team including Anna-Sapfo Malaspinas (from the Natural History Museum of Denmark) analysed the genomes of 27 native Rapanui people and found that their DNA was on average 76 per cent Polynesian, 8 per cent Native American and 16 per cent European. Christopher Heyerdahl appears in New Moon and both Breaking Dawn movies as Marcus. Height: 29 m: Draft: 2.90 m (formerly 2.55 m) Propulsion: 400 PS Deutz-Diesel, 6 cylinders, * 1951, 400/min max. The Kon-Tiki smashed into the reef at Raroia in the Tuamotus on 7 August 1947 after a 101-day, 4,300-nautical-mile (5,000-mile or 8,000 km)[11] journey across the Pacific Ocean. [29][30] Some critics suggest, however, that Thorsby's research is inconclusive because his data may have been influenced by recent population contact. Both expeditions were intended to prove the possibility of ancient transoceanic contacts between distant civilizations and cultures.