Kon-Tiki Expedition

The Kon-Tiki expedition of 1947, led by the Norwegian Thor Heyerdahl (1914-2002), successfully crossed 8,000 km (5,000 miles) of the Pacific Ocean from Peru to the Tuamotu Islands on a balsa-wood raft. The aim of the expedition was to demonstrate that ancient peoples could have crossed the Pacific from east to west using ocean currents and so possibly populated Polynesia. The consensus of modern scientists, however, is that Polynesia was first populated from the west.