The Kon-Tiki Raft Crossed the Pacific on Balsa Logs

On August 7, 1947, a raft of nine balsa logs named Kon-Tiki crashed onto the Raroia reef in the Tuamotu Archipelago, ending a 101-day drift across the Pacific. Norwegian ethnographer Thor Heyerdahl and five companions had sailed roughly 4,300 miles (about 8,000 km) from Callao, Peru, carried by wind and the Humboldt Current.

Heyerdahl built the raft using only materials and techniques available to ancient South Americans, lashing the logs with rope and raising a single square sail. His goal was to challenge the map of human migration: if a primitive raft could reach Polynesia from the east, then pre-Columbian peoples might have settled those islands from the Americas, not only from Asia.

The ocean, Heyerdahl argued, was a highway rather than a wall.

The voyage made Heyerdahl world-famous and his book a bestseller. Yet most anthropologists rejected his theory, and later DNA evidence pointed to Polynesians arriving chiefly from the west. The crossing proved the journey was possible, not that it happened.