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The Kon-Tiki expedition was a 1947 journey by raft across the Pacific Ocean from South America to the Polynesian islands, led by Norwegian explorer and writer Thor Heyerdahl. The raft was named Kon-Tiki after the Inca god Viracocha , for whom "Kon-Tiki" was said to be an old name.
The Polynesian triangle. Between about 3000 and 1000 BC speakers of Austronesian languages spread through the islands of Southeast Asia – most likely starting out from Taiwan, [9] as tribes whose natives were thought to have previously arrived from mainland South China about 8000 years ago – into the edges of western Micronesia and on into Melanesia, through the Philippines and Indonesia.
The film is the dramatized story of Thor Heyerdahl and his Kon-Tiki expedition of 1947.. While the prevailing theories of the time held that Polynesia had been settled by peoples originating from Asia, Heyerdahl, an experimental ethnographer and adventurer, sets out to prove his theory that people from South America settled the islands in pre-Columbian times.
Heyerdahl was born in Larvik, [8] Norway, the son of master brewer Thor Heyerdahl (1869–1957) and his wife, Alison Lyng (1873–1965). As a young child, Heyerdahl showed a strong interest in zoology, inspired by his mother, who had a strong interest in Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.
The Pacific Islands then experienced military action, massive troop movements, and limited resource extraction and building projects as the Allies pushed the Japanese back to their home islands. [5] The juxtaposition of all these cultures led to a new understanding among the indigenous Pacific Islanders of their relationship with the colonial ...
A platoon of Australian commandos from the 1st Independent Company was located at Buka Airfield when the Japanese landed but did not contest the invasion. The Japanese invaded in order to construct naval and air bases to provide security for their major base at Rabaul , New Britain and to support strategic operations in the Solomon Islands .
The first European known to have sighted the island was Captain James Cook, in 1774, on his second voyage to the South Pacific on HMS Resolution. He named it after the Duchess of Norfolk (c. 1712 – 1773). The Duchess was dead at the time of the island's sighting by Cook, but Cook had set out from England in 1772 and could not have known of ...
The history of the Pitcairn Islands begins with the colonization of the islands by Polynesians in the 11th century. Polynesian people established a culture that flourished for four centuries and then vanished. They lived on Pitcairn and Henderson Islands, and on Mangareva Island 540 kilometres (340 mi) to the northwest, for about 400 years.