New Delhi: Commemorating ethnographer Thor Heyerdahl's 100th birthday, Google has posted a doodle on its homepage. Born on October 6, 1914, Thor Heyerdahl, the Norwegian adventurer, became notable for crossing the Pacific on a balsa log raft. He later detailed his harrowing 101-day voyage in the book Kon-Tiki.
Experts scoffed at Heyerdahl when he set off to cross the Pacific aboard a balsa raft in 1947, saying it would get water logged and sink within days. After 101 days and 4,900 miles, he proved them wrong by reaching Polynesia from Peru in a bid to prove his theories of human migration.
After Heyerdahl's 1947 voyage, conventional anthropologists dismissed the college dropout's theories, saying they were only the work of a gifted amateur. But the adventurer gained worldwide fame with the voyage. His book about that trip sold tens of millions of copies and his 1951 movie about the Kon-Tiki voyage won an Academy Award for best documentary.
He followed that trip with expeditions on reed rafts seeking to show that ancient people could have sailed from the Old World to the New.
His later studies focused on ancient step pyramids - including those in Peru and on the island of Tenerife off Africa - which he believed could be evidence of maritime links between ancient civilizations.
Before Heyerdahl made his voyage on the Kon-Tiki, he had to overcome a major obstacle: He was deathly afraid of water. He had nearly drowned twice as a child in Larvik, Norway, and overcame his fear only at age 22, when he fell into a raging river in Tahiti and swam to safety.
His later expeditions included voyages aboard the reed rafts Ra, Ra II and Tigris. His wide-ranging archaeological studies were often controversial and challenged accepted views.
Until his illness, Heyerdahl had maintained a daunting pace of research, lectures and public debate over his unconventional theories on human migration.
Heyerdahl died on April 18, 2002. He was 87. Relatives said he died in his sleep at a hospital near at Colla Michari, Italy, where he was spending the Easter holiday when he became ill.
Heyerdahl had stopped taking food, water or medication in early April after being diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor.
He spent his final days surrounded by family at Colla Michari, a Roman-era Italian village he bought and restored in the 1950s. His permanent home since 1990 was on the Spanish island Tenerife in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Morocco.
Though he lived and worked abroad for decades, Heyerdahl was a national hero in his homeland, where one newspaper crowned him Norwegian of the Century in a millennium reader poll.
(With inputs from AP)
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