Whilst in Oslo, we went to the Thor Heyerdahl Kon-Tiki museum. Heyerdahl, for those who (like me) only vaguely remember him from his appearances on Blue Peter in the 1970s, was an [strike]absolute nutter[/strike] adventurer who set out from Peru on a balsa wood raft to prove that it was possible for people from there to have sailed to - and populated - the Polynesian islands, something consistent with local myth and legend, and carvings of ships with sails on ancient Easter Island statues.
100 days and a potentially fatal grounding onto a coral atoll later, Heyerdahl and his crew had proved that the Pacific oceanic currents would, indeed, have allowed anyone with the wherewithall to survive for 100 days on a raft to have achieved the trip. It offered proof of other oceanic journeys undertaken by cultures previously only speculated about - that Madagascar, for example, was populated from South East Asia, not from Africa, or that North Africans (or other Europeans) might have reached South America - the "white gods" of Inca legend.
All fascinating stuff. And anthropological studies do, it seems, back up some of the theories about how cultures spread across the globe. What troubles me, though, is the lack of motive. When Heyerdahl - or indeed Columbus, before him - set out to sail across an ocean, they knew there was something to aim for (okay, Columbus thought it was China, but he still expected to find it). The first people setting out on some of those journeys could not have known they would ever find any land, or ever be able to get home again. They must have taken their families (or at least female sailors) with them, as well, if they established colonies on the islands they eventually populated. I wonder what the motivation was behind the urge to propel yourself off across a potentially unending ocean? Were these people fleeing, as refugees? Exiled, for some crime or other? Genuine "there must be something over that horizon" explorers? Or, less of a leap of conjecture, did some groups of ancient people simply prefer being out on the expanse of the ocean, living off the sea, to being on land (a bit like Kevin Costner in Waterworld) and did they even really care if they found any?
100 days and a potentially fatal grounding onto a coral atoll later, Heyerdahl and his crew had proved that the Pacific oceanic currents would, indeed, have allowed anyone with the wherewithall to survive for 100 days on a raft to have achieved the trip. It offered proof of other oceanic journeys undertaken by cultures previously only speculated about - that Madagascar, for example, was populated from South East Asia, not from Africa, or that North Africans (or other Europeans) might have reached South America - the "white gods" of Inca legend.
All fascinating stuff. And anthropological studies do, it seems, back up some of the theories about how cultures spread across the globe. What troubles me, though, is the lack of motive. When Heyerdahl - or indeed Columbus, before him - set out to sail across an ocean, they knew there was something to aim for (okay, Columbus thought it was China, but he still expected to find it). The first people setting out on some of those journeys could not have known they would ever find any land, or ever be able to get home again. They must have taken their families (or at least female sailors) with them, as well, if they established colonies on the islands they eventually populated. I wonder what the motivation was behind the urge to propel yourself off across a potentially unending ocean? Were these people fleeing, as refugees? Exiled, for some crime or other? Genuine "there must be something over that horizon" explorers? Or, less of a leap of conjecture, did some groups of ancient people simply prefer being out on the expanse of the ocean, living off the sea, to being on land (a bit like Kevin Costner in Waterworld) and did they even really care if they found any?
Comment