page_title: Kon-Tiki expedition
section_title: Anthropology
hierarchical_section_title: Kon-Tiki expedition / Anthropology
caption_attribution_description: English: The only kneeling Moai at Easter Island.
context_page_description: 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. Kon-Tiki is also the name of Heyerdahl's book, the Academy Award-winning 1950 documentary film chronicling his adventures, and the 2012 dramatized feature film nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
  Heyerdahl believed that people from South America could have reached Polynesia during pre-Columbian times. His aim in mounting the Kon-Tiki expedition was to show, by using only the materials and technologies available to those people at the time, that there were no technical reasons to prevent them from having done so. Although the expedition carried some modern equipment, such as a radio, watches, charts, sextant, and metal knives, Heyerdahl argued they were incidental to the purpose of proving that the raft itself could make the journey.
  The Kon-Tiki expedition was funded by private loans, along with donations of equipment from the United States Army.
context_section_description: Heyerdahl believed that the original inhabitants of Easter Island were migrants from Peru. He argued that the monumental statues known as moai resembled sculptures more typical of pre-Columbian Peru than any Polynesian designs. He believed that the Easter Island myth of a power struggle between two peoples called the Hanau epe and Hanau momoko was a memory of conflicts between the original inhabitants of the island and a later wave of Native Americans from the Northwest coast, eventually leading to the annihilation of the Hanau epe and the destruction of the island's culture and once-prosperous economy.
  Most historians consider that the Polynesians from the west were the original inhabitants and that the story of the Hanau epe is either pure myth, or a memory of internal tribal or class conflicts. In 2011, Professor Erik Thorsby of the University of Oslo presented DNA evidence to the Royal Society which, whilst agreeing with the west origin, also identified a distinctive but smaller genetic contribution from South America. 
  This result was questioned in 2012 because of the possibility of contamination by South Americans after European contact with the islands. In 2014, further work by a team including Anna-Sapfo Malaspinas (from the Natural History Museum of Denmark) analysed the genomes of 27 native Rapa Nui people and found that their DNA was on average 76 percent Polynesian, 8 percent Native American and 16 percent European. Analysis showed that "although the European lineage could be explained by contact with white Europeans after the island was 'discovered' in 1722 by Dutch sailors, the South American component was much older, dating to between about 1280 and 1495, soon after the island was first colonised by Polynesians in around 1200." 
  Genetic analysis of Polynesians and Native South Americans, published in Nature in July 2020, has revealed that several eastern Polynesian populations have signs of an ancient genetic signature that originated from Native South American people. An initial admixture event between Native South Americans and Polynesians, discovered by statistical analysis, took place around AD 1150–1230.
caption: A moai
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