I feel that I am a typical Norwegian. I feel that I have the same love for nature, the mountains, the forests, the fjords, as all my fellow Norwegians, the same sense for adventure and the same feeling for brotherhood among different people. I cannot see that I am very different from most of my countrymen.

Norwegian ethnologist and adventurer Thor Heyerdahl, born this day in 1914, organized and led transoceanic expeditions in the hope of proving the possibility of ancient contacts between distant civilizations.