August 7 - "Kon-Tiki" lands in Polynesia

On August 7, 1947, the Norwegian anthropologist Thor Heyerdahl and his crew landed their raft �Kon-Tiki� on the Tuamotu Islands, French Polynesia.

Heyerdahl had wanted to proof that it had been technologically possible for Pre-Columbian Native Americans to establish contact with cultures in the South Pacific. �Kon-Tiki� was mainly constructed of Balsa wood, and build with further materials, tools and techniques that would have been available to Native Americans. Heyerdahl had started off in Peru and had sailed for 101 days and 7000 km before landing in Tuamoto.
Although it captured the imagination of the world at the time, �Kon-Tiki�s� adventure did not establish for certain that there were contacts, or even exchange of population, between Polynesia and the South America, and the anthropologic and archaeological academic establishment remains very skeptical of Heyerdahl�s theories.



Kon-Tiki

After his great popular success in 1947, Heyerdahl embarked on a new adventure in 1970. Heyerdahl constructed a papyrus boat to prove that it would have been possible for the Egyptians to have sailed across the Atlantic to Central America, and thus for cross-cultural relationships between the two continents. Starting off from Morocco, his first boat �RA I� sunk on the journey, and only in the second attempt he could navigate the boat �RA II� to the Americas.

Heyerdahl is one of the earliest and still most popular protagonists of �experimental archaeology� that tries to recreate ancient artefacts with the methods and materials available to ancient cultures, and here probably lie his merits, and not so much in the validity of his migrationist theories.


What else happened on this day?

1961 The Soviet Premier Krushchev declares that in the near future the Soviet economy will surpass the US-American�s, (and allows foreign hair cuts in Russia again)

1998 The US-American embassies in Nairobi (Kenya) and Dar-es-salaam (Tanzania) are destroyed by bombs, 224 people killed and more than 4.000 wounded.
Al-Qaeda is being blamed and it was the first time that the name Osama bin Laden appeared all over the World�s press. (If I were cynical, which I�m not, I would quote the words spoken somewhere else in Africa 40 years earlier: �This is the beginning of a beautiful friendship�.)

Full list:

Wikipedia



Edited by Komnenos