Kon-Tiki Expedition

Record summary

Thor Heyerdahl’s 1947 raft voyage attempted to show that people from pre-Columbian South America could have reached Polynesia using balsa technology. The expedition successfully drifted across the Pacific, making transoceanic contact physically plausible, but it did not demonstrate that South Americans populated Polynesia or created its cultures. The voyage became a major reference point in debates over Polynesian origins, navigation, and diffusionism. Later linguistic, genetic, archaeological, and voyaging research supports complex interaction but generally rejects Heyerdahl’s one-way replacement model.