Thor Heyerdahl, a Norwegian ethnographer, had a radical idea. What if the Polynesian islands were settled by South Americans who’d sailed 5,000 miles west across the Pacific in hand-built rafts thousands of years ago rather than by nearby Asians?
In 1947 he put his theory to the test, building a primitive raft out of balsa wood and rope and enlisting five men to set sail with him from Peru bound for the Polynesia.
The perilous voyage, dependent only on wind power and the current, was a success and Heyerdahl, who died in 2002 at age 87, became world famous.