Early Man and the Ocean: A Search for the Beginning of Navigation and Seaborn Civilizations

Thor Heyerdahl's book, Early Man and the Ocean: A Search for the Beginnings of Navigation and Seaborne Civilizations, synthesizes his findings from expeditions aimed at proving the possibility of ancient transoceanic contacts between distant civilizations. His famous Kon-Tiki expedition in 1947 saw him and five companions sail a balsa log raft from South America to Tahiti, demonstrating that ancient peoples could have colonized Polynesia. Another expedition used a replica of an ancient Egyptian reed boat, the Ra, to cross the Atlantic from Morocco, suggesting potential influence from Egyptian civilization on pre-Columbian cultures. These expeditions, while influential, have not been widely accepted by anthropologists.12