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April
19, 2002 8:45 a.m.
Credit
Due
Thor
Heyerdahl, R.I.P.
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May issue of Vanity Fair features a gallery of photos on "10
of the greatest living explorers" — people like Sir Edmund Hillary,
the conqueror of Mount Everest, and Robert Ballard, the deep-sea detective
who discovered the location of the Titanic. Among them is Thor
Heyerdahl, the experimental anthropologist best known for his Kon-Tiki
expedition in 1947. The Norwegian native died Thursday of cancer, at the
age of 87. He will receive a state funeral in Oslo.
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The scientific establishment
never smiled upon the indomitable Heyerdahl's pet theories. The Kon
Tiki voyage, after all, was meant to prove that South Americans sailing
westward might have been responsible for setting Polynesia, rather than
Asians sailing eastward. To prove his thesis, Heyerdahl built a primitive
balsa raft, fixed a sail to it, and launched the boat from Peruvian waters.
"Our intention was to test the performance and quality of the Inca
raft, its seaworthiness and loading capacity, and to ascertain whether
the elements would really propel it across the sea to Polynesia with its
crew still on board," he wrote in Kon-Tiki,
a book that has sold 20 million copies.
Critics said the
Kon-Tiki's balsa logs weren't watertight, and that the raft would
sink. Instead it traveled some 4,300 miles. Heyerdahl and five companions
made land by smashing into a reef at Raroia, in the Tuamoto Islands, 101
days after setting out.
There remains the
question of what Heyerdahl proved. Every bit of genetic and linguistic
evidence continues to suggest that Polynesia was, in fact, settled from
the west rather than the east. Indeed, Heyerdahl's contribution is often
regarded as an unhelpful stunt that miseducated the public. (Today's New
York Times obituary, for example, quotes Paul Bahn to the effect
that Heyerdahl's enthusiasms have hurt the serious study of Easter Island.)
This is unfair. Heyerdahl
may have gone to his grave believing in a migration that never happened,
but he nevertheless provided a useful and inspiring reminder that prehistoric
people were much more clever and inventive than we moderns give them credit
for being. Just because few sailors today would lose sight of land without
having a GPS satellite linkup doesn't mean our ancient ancestors were
timid halfwits who thought they would fall off the edge of the world if
they tried something daring. Their capabilities — and especially their
sea-going capabilities — were much greater than we generally allow. It
is a mistake to underestimate them.
The Kon-Tiki
voyage was hardly Heyerdahl's last. Twenty years later, he captained the
Ra II, a reed boat modeled on those used by ancient Egyptians,
from Africa to Barbados.
Yet his legacy will
lie primarily with the Kon-Tiki. "The expedition single-handedly
opened the world's waterways to experiments — both eminently rational and
exceedingly bizarre — testing all sorts of ideas about prehistoric human
expansion around the globe," writes Penn State archaeologist P. J.
Capelotti in his recent book Sea
Drift. "Heyerdahl ... transformed the world's oceans into
a global archaeological laboratory."
He did more than
that, too: He showed us that ordinary people can accomplish extraordinary
things — a few thousand years ago, and still today.
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