Norwegian ethnographer Thor Heyerdahl was an academic in the Indiana Jones mold. He's most famous for his 1947 Kon-Tiki expedition, in which he sailed an impressive 4,287 miles from Peru to French Polynesia on a traditional Peruvian balsa wood raft. Heyerdahl believed that similarities between the two cultures implied long-forgotten contact, and he wanted to prove that ancient South Americans could have made the journey across the Pacific, using the vessels they had at their disposal.
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