Kon-Tiki
by Thor Heyerdahl · first published 1953
16mentions
3recommended by
15HN commenters
2009–2025first – last mentioned
20% recommend80% neutral
"'Am going to cross Pacific on wooden raft to support a theory that the South Sea islands were peopled from Peru. Will you come?...Reply at once.' That is how six courageous and inquisitive adventurers came to seek a dangerous path in order to test a hypothetical theory. On a primitive raft made of forty-foot balsa logs, named 'Kon-Tiki' in honor of a legendary sun king, Thor Heyerdahl and his five comrades set out, risking their lives to prove that ancient Peruvians could have made the 4,300-mile voyage to the Polynesian islands on a raft similar to theirs. Every page of Kon-Tiki--from the bu
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If you haven't read the book by Thor Heyerdahl you should. It's an amazing and well told adventure that can only command serious respect. http://www.amazon.com/Kon-Tiki-Across-Pacific-Thor-Heyerdahl... Here's a link to the heavy water sabotage in Norway during the second world war that Hauglund was a part of. Amazing stuff. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_heavy_water_sabotage
on “Knut Haugland, Sailor on Kon-Tiki, Dies at 92” ↗Thor Heyerdahl, author of that piece, is well known for his diffusion hypothesis. His work with Ra and Kon-Tiki shows that migration was possible with even early technology. It doesn't mean it happened, or that the hypothesis has any truth to it. (FWIW, I enjoyed his books about the two journeys, and his book on…
on “The Bearded Gods Speak (1971)” ↗Kon-Tiki by Thor Heyerdahl, a explorer/anthropologist. He and a group of other volunteers sailed across the pacific on a raft built using ancient methods to prove that the pacific isles were settled by south americans…
on “Ask HN: Books about people who did hard things” ↗…a new page for every single title: 1. Auntie Mame by Patrick Dennis 2. Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach 3. Chicken Soup for the Soul by Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen 4. Kon-Tiki by Thor Heyerdahl 5. The Peter Principle by Laurence Peter 6. Dubliners by James Joyce 7. Lorna Doone by Richard Doddridge Blackmore 8. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert…
on “14 Best-Selling Books Repeatedly Rejected by Publishers” ↗Kon-Tiki was interesting, but I can't handle the implication of Heyerdahl's beliefs - that the Polynesian people, supreme sailors and navigators who travelled huge distances across the open ocean while Europeans…
on “First South Americans Were Australian Aborigines (1999)” ↗I have not read much of Heyerdahl's work, but I did read Kon-Tiki several times. The article may be right to dismiss Heyerdahl as wrong, but its depiction of his approach is not in line with what he wrote himself in Kon-Tiki. The article says: > He made his bias…
on “The Voyage of the Kon-Tiki Misled the World About Navigating the Pacific (2014)” ↗This is similar to the Kon-Tiki theory that Thor Heyerdahl popularized, but has since been heavily criticized. Largely it implies that these people weren’t capable or skilled enough to make these voyages, that it happened by accident,…
on “Native American gene flow into Polynesia predating Easter Island settlement” ↗…BC) stone masons. As a non-geochemist, I can say nothing about it one way or the other, and I know that I can be easily swayed by good sounding but wrong statements. Perhaps it's like Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki. He showed that it was possible to go by balsa wood raft to Polynesia. That doesn't mean his diffusionist model of cultural development was what happened. That the Egyptians could have used geopolymer…
on “Volcanic sand has been credited with the longevity of Rome’s ancient monuments” ↗…says that a British sailor created a reconstruction of that type of ship and sailed in it from Indonesia via Madagascar, and then around the Cape of Good Hope to Ghana. Reminded me of Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki voyage :), which I had read about in a National Geographic article about the voyage some years ago.
on “Most archaeologists think the first Americans arrived by boat” ↗There was a part in Kon-Tiki where Heyerdahl says that after a month or so out in the ocean, they realized that it was easy to navigate between islands. First sail north or south to the latitude of your destination. Then sail east…
on “The Voyage of the Kon-Tiki Misled the World About Navigating the Pacific (2014)” ↗This entire article reminded me of reading the introduction to Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card (it's in the 25th anniversary edition). He mentions reading Kon-Tiki by Thor Heyerdahl and finding archaeology, as described by Thor, to be incredibly fascinating and exciting (which I agree with having read Kon-Tiki as well). Card goes on to say that when he tried ACTUAL…
on “I should have loved biology too” ↗…have a lot of practice, but extremely useful to at least understand some of the strategies to memorizing strings Understanding Weatherfax - for an attempted (and failed) circumnavigation Sail Power Kon Tiki Shogun Art of the Sailor Business Adventures Metamorphoses (by Ovid, not Kafka) Guns, Germs, Steel Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time - this book had so many rave reviews. it has a tremendous…
on “Ask HN: Books you read in 2015?” ↗Wasn’t that whole Kon Tiki book/movie about this discussion. That Vikings somehow made it all the way to the Pacific Islands via the Americas?
on “How far into the Americas did the Vikings travel?” ↗I remember reading Kon-Tiki and I, when I was a kid. I think the journey (which was remarkable) was pretty much written off, in those days as "a bunch of proto-hippies, doing something," but these days, it would be a viral sensation.
on “The extraordinary story of two Pacific voyages of discovery a 1000 years apart” ↗It "feels" so compelling; a thought provoking read nonetheless. You are right though, just finished the Kon-Tiki works and dove into some of the other related stuff like this and no one seems to bother much with Hyperdiffusion. Of course, that was skepticism was pretty much how Heyerdahl was received before he…
on “The Bearded Gods Speak (1971)” ↗