Heyerdahl's Theories Draw Renewed Attention
Ancient seafarers spread civilizations, he said
[AP} - Thor Heyerdahl's theories concerning the spread of civilization by ancient seafarers were initially ridiculed by scientists, but a younger generation is studying his ideas from five decades ago as the basis for new theories on early cultural exchanges.
Robson Bonnichsen, who studies how the Americas became populated, calls Heyerdahl a visionary.
Bonnichsen, director of the Center for the Study of the First Americans at Oregon State University, said many experts give serious consideration to the idea that people sailed along the Pacific Rim many centuries ago.
"Our perception of the peopling of the Americas is changing" and encompasses more than one colonization, including an early population from Southeast Asia, he said.
"A lot of new ideas are on the table, and Thor Heyerdahl led the way years ago," he said.
The new theories suggest that settlement of the Americas was much more complex than first thought and that migrants arrived more than once and from different parts of the world.
Dennis Stanford, an anthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, has suggested some American ancestors could have come from Spain during the Ice Age, arriving in Maine after skirting the ice of the North Atlantic.
Walter Neves of the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil is gathering evidence suggesting that early South Americans originated in Australia or South Asia and possibly crossed the Pacific.
Erika Hagelberg, a geneticist at the University of Oslo in Norway, says the study of DNA in the Pacific has not proved Heyerdahl's theories right or wrong. "There is definitely a genetic connection between Polynesians and Native Americans, but it probably traces back to a common origin in Asia," she said.
Hagelberg, who has received financial support from the Kon-Tiki Museum in Oslo, says no genetic information indicates a strong South America influence in Polynesia. But she said that "does not rule out a connection, as there are many reasons why South American genes might not be detected in Polynesia today."
She said it will probably take scholars from various sciences to thoroughly examine Heyerdahl's work, and she lauded him for crossing boundaries between scientific disciplines.
In his 1997 memoir, In the Footsteps of Adam, Heyerdahl criticized academic specialists.
"The more I do and the more I see, the more I realize the shocking extent of ignorance that exists among the scholarly circles that call themselves authorities and pretend to have a monopoly of all knowledge," he wrote.
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Baltimore Sun / MD - April 14.02
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