EFFORTPOST [Historical Drama] In Which The Entire Field of Anthropology Is Bussy Blasted By A Chad With a Raft: Kon-Tiki Vindicated By DNA Evidence

The discovery of the stone city of Nan Madol built in the 1100s, the megalithic stone statues of Easter Island (aka Rapa Nui) and other evidence of an ancient sophisticated Polynesian civilization stoked the public's imagination in the early 20th century. For context, some people believed that the South Pacific could have been colonized by a lost tribe of Israel :chadjew: (a popular but unscientific hypothesis for any impressive monument deemed too difficult for the natives to have built) while others had even more outlandish theories centered around lost continents in the South Pacific like Lemuria or Mu :marseyschizowall: . We now know that the origins of Polynesians are much older than Bible stories but it was the 1900s, so such theories were at least somewhat entertained.

Early in his career in 1937, Thor travelled to the island of Fatu Hiva in the South Pacific and lived among the locals doing important scientific work categorizing the flora and fauna of the island and interacting with natives. During his time there he developed his own theory of a possible link between the cultures of the South Pacific archipelago and South America through a race of seafaring stonemason mayoids he called the Tiki that stretched from Hawaii to Samoa to Easter Island.

Thor had previously studied the culture and history of Easter Island and became aware of indigenous legends claiming that the island had initially been inhabited by a race of taller, fair skinned people called the hanau epe that had arrived from a far away land until they came into conflict with newcomers from Polynesia and were exterminated in a brutal struggle. The natives claimed that this ancient race had invented the famous moai statues, gigantic multi-ton megalithic stone heads that dotted the landscape and had puzzled and fascinated western anthropologists since their discovery.

To Thor, it was clear that there had to be some connection between the stone monument building cultures of South America and the moai builders of Easter Island, but the immense 5000 mile distance between South America and Easter Island cast doubt on this hypothesis among mainstream anthropologists who believed primitive pre-Incan style rafts made of literal balsa wood (Fun Fact: Balsa means 'raft' in Spanish) were not capable of making such long distance oceanic voyages.

The Kon-Tiki Expedition

After his country was liberated from Nazi control in 1945, Thor Heyerdahl began planning the most significant example of experimental archaeology of the 20th century. He brought together a crew of experts, built a pre-Incan style raft named the Kon-Tiki made entirely from wood and bamboo and set sail from Callo Peru on April 28, 1947. The rest... is history.

I won't write anything about the voyage itself because it's already extensively documented. Go read Thor's book for more information or watch the documentary.

Anyways, the Kon-Tiki landed safely on Tuamotu and Thor conclusively proved it was actually not really that hard to sail across the Pacific with primitive technology and navigation.

What Thor Really Believed

Thor Heyerdahl was a proponent of not only South Pacific diffusion from South America but also Pre-Columbian contact between the Old World and America. He subscribed to a overarching theory of what is known today as Eurocentric-diffusionism, that some time in the distant past, an ancient race of intelligent Mayoid (Indo-European Aryan) speedrunners had sailed across the Earth building monuments and introducing technology to natives. For context, in the early 1900s, theories like this were entertained by the mainstream because the Mayoid race was searching for scientific reasons why they were so much better than everyone else.

Obviously, the Eurocentric-diffusion hypothesis was enthusiastically championed by Mayoid racists and denied by mainstream anthropologists and historians. As anthropology matured as a field, Eurocentric origin theories gained a stigma as Nazi pseudoscience.

Despite being the epitome of an Aryan Lad and literally being named Thor, Thor himself was not a Nazi, having fought against them as part of the Norwegian resistance during WW2. Thor was a humanist, egalitarian and basically a hippie that respected all cultures and actually took their silly oral traditions seriously. The beliefs he had about Indo-European diffusion came from connecting the dots from what was known at the time to be true. He never claimed that one race was superior to another or that only Mayoids were capable of building civilization. Thor was also more rigorous scientist than many in academia and his research is generally considered to be of high quality. Long after Kon-Tiki, Thor would update and revise his beliefs as new discoveries came to light but he continued to believe in what was then considered fringe theories like pre-Columbian contact.

Kon-Tiki Deboonked

When Thor returned to the west, he was congratulated by experts of the field for his incredible feat and bravery and was awarded honors around the world. However, his South American origin theory was rejected by the scientific community. The main reason was that there was already strong linguistic, cultural and genetic evidence that Polynesia was settled from the east. Thor did not deny this and stated that while Polynesians today are clearly from Austronesia, it does not invalidate the possibility of South American influence. Anthropologists refused to entertain this possibility though, and Thor's theories were labelled as fringe science at best and racist dogwhistles at worst.

Seethe Collection

1960:

>Anthropologist Robert Carl Suggs included a chapter titled "The Kon-Tiki Myth" in his 1960 book on Polynesia, concluding that "The Kon-Tiki theory is about as plausible as the tales of Atlantis, Mu, and 'Children of the Sun.' Like most such theories, it makes exciting light reading, but as an example of scientific method it fares quite poorly."

1973:

>A team of computer scientists claim that Easter Island could not have been settled by unsteered rafts because of... winds and shit (despite multiple people since Kon-Tiki recreating the voyage and South American fishermen routinely getting swept away and landing in Polynesia)

1994:

>Paul Theoroux panned Thor Heyerdahl's books, claimed that Heyerdahl was clinging to discredited pseudoscience

1998:

>DNA shows how Thor Heyerdahl got it wrong

>From The Independent

>In The Voyage of the `Kon-Tiki', the Norwegian archaeologist Thor Heyerdahl famously proved that early humans could have used the trade winds to sail from Peru to Easter Island - and thus be its first settlers. But although the tale of his replica raft and the voyage westward across the Pacific in August 1947 makes a stirring tale, his idea has now been proved to be wrong. Sorry, Thor: DNA analysis of the remains of the original settlers of islands all around the Pacific, including Easter Island, demonstrates that they actually came from South-East Asia.

2009:

>Anthropologist and National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Wade Davis also criticized Heyerdahl's theory in his 2009 book The Wayfinders, which explores the history of Polynesia. Davis says that Heyerdahl "ignored the overwhelming body of linguistic, ethnographic, and ethnobotanical evidence, augmented today by genetic and archaeological data, indicating that he was patently wrong."

2016:

>Abstract of White-Skinned Gods: Thor Heyerdahl, the Kon-Tiki Museum, and the Racial Theory of Polynesian Origins:

>Thor Heyerdahl’s 1947 performative experiment, to sail a raft from Peru to Polynesia, was lauded as a feat of ingenuity and endurance. Largely undertreated is the racially motivated theory undergirding Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki project—that the first settlers in Polynesia were a race of bearded, white-skinned supermen who remained deities in both South American and Polynesian mythology. Contemporary commemorations, however, emphasize feel-good stories of human achievement over Heyerdahl’s racist performance."

2020:

>KON-TIKI: A WHITE MAN’S JOURNEY

>To this day Heyerdahl’s theorie is not accepted in scientific circles as there is overwhelming evidence that the settlers came from the west – the Southeast Asian Islands. But this is not the only problem with his theory. Other people have pointed out the racist implications of Heyerdahl’s theory. How come that Heyerdahl, the global citizen that advocated for peace and freedom all over the world, is seen as a racist? His theory, explained in his book The Kon-Tiki Expedition: By Raft Across the South Seas and scientific papers thereafter, states that a ‘race’ of white men travelled around the world to teach other races about agriculture and architecture. This ‘race’ had, according to Heyerdahl, light skin, blond or red hair and blue eyes. This ‘race’ travelled from Peru, where they educated the indigenous population, to the Polynesian Islands. The implications of this theory being, that only the ‘white race’ is capable of culture and knowledge.

In fact, almost every paper written about Thor Heyerdahl has made sure to mention the purportedly racist origins of his theories and attacked the validity of his work, rejecting South American contact as a whole. Many academics emphasized that Thor was a self taught amateur incapable of science because he held fringe theories. In his 1998 autobiography, Thor recounted his struggle against academia and elitist attitudes towards outsider research.

>Although not a single scholar believed it would work, Heyerdahl became one of the first archaeologists to test his own theory – and successfully so. He was told the raft would sink due to the porous nature of the balsawood, and no one had attempted this journey in several hundred years. “The story of Thor Heyerdahl and Kon-Tiki is in many ways the story of David and Goliath,” says head of communication at the Kon-Tiki Museum, Ulrikke Thea Berg.

From the initial genetic testing of Polynesians in 1997 showing no evidence of South American ancestry to 2020, Thor Heyerdahl's reputation suffered further as his anthropological work was characterized as backwards psedoscience from a racist era. His South American theory was lumped up with the likes of Lemuria, Atlantis and Mu and the language of his work was criticized for being cuturally chauvinistic despite being perfectly acceptable in the 1950s. Basically, people were picking apart his writing clutching pearls because he used now outdated terms like "primitive" and "mongoloid".

So What Happened in 2020?

In 2020, a genetic analysis of Polynesians and South Americans was published revealing that several eastern Polynesian populations had South American ancestors. The initial admixture between Native South Americans and Polynesians took place in the 1100s vindicating Thor Heyerdahl's hypothesis of South American contact and deboonking the previous 1998 deboonk which only tested the population of Tahiti. This was a groundbreaking and bussyblasting discovery in Polynesian anthropology and shed light many unexplained connections between South America and Polynesia such as the diffusion of potato and other crops.

Mainstream anthropology blown the frick out by actual science

https://sciencenorway.no/archaeology-history-society-and-culture/new-research-supports-thor-heyerdahls-theory-on-south-americans-in-the-pacific/1711624

https://www.downtoearth.org.in/interviews/environment/-future-studies-could-validate-more-of-thor-heyerdahl-s-hypotheses-on-the-pacific--72279

Citations:

None. Frick you. I plagiarized it all from the internet.

Bonus:

Redditor does not Trust The Science and continues to spout outdated information a year after DNA evidence was discovered:

https://old.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/oll9k9/til_norwegian_adventurer_thor_heyerdahl_set_out/h5ggms3/