Free Republic

OSLO, Norway, Apr 18, 2002 (AP Online via COMTEX) -- Thor Heyerdahl, the Norwegian adventurer who crossed the Pacific on a balsa log raft and detailed his harrowing 101-day voyage in the book "Kon-Tiki," died Thursday night. He was 87. Heyerdahl stopped taking food, water or medication in early April after being diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor. "Norway has lost an original and spectacular researcher, explorer and adventurer," Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik said. Experts scoffed at Heyerdahl when he set off to cross the Pacific aboard a balsa raft in 1947, saying it would get water logged...

One of the greatest adventure stories of all time is about to end with the death of a controversial Norwegian explorer. Thor Heyerdahl, skipper of the famous raft Kon-Tiki. Thor Heyerdahl, 87, who won worldwide acclaim in 1947 for his daring Kon-Tiki expedition, is greeting his demise with all the eccentricity with which he lived his life. Heyerdahl lapsed into a coma on Tuesday, a week after he started refusing food, water and medical treatment. The scientist and adventurer had been taken to the Santa Conora hospital on the Italian Riviera over Easter after becoming ill during a family gathering...

Some time in December, Ben Hooper will step on to a beach in Dakar, Senegal, and plunge into the warm blue waters of the Atlantic. He will not stop swimming until he hits Natal in Brazil. The distance is 1,763 miles. But that’s only if he goes in a straight line. And swimming across the Atlantic in a straight line is a bad idea: “The currents in the centre are so strong, I’d never get there. It’s an absolute car wreck in the centre. Great for rowers, great for sailors, horrible for swimmers,” he says. Instead he will go in...

Known to its Polynesian inhabitants as Rapa Nui, Easter Island is thought to have been colonised around the 13th Century and is famed for its mysterious large stone statues or moai. Otago Anatomy PhD student Monica Tromp and Idaho State University’s Dr John Dudgeon have just published new research clearing up their previous puzzling finding that suggested palm may have been a staple plant food for Rapa Nui’s population over several centuries. However, no other line of archaeological or ethnohistoric evidence supports palm having a dietary role on Easter Island; in fact evidence points to the palm becoming extinct soon...

Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of visitors to the island have been astonished to see that, indeed, Easter Island statues have bodies

A group of astronomers are now on the mysterious Easter Island, one of the few solid places to stand on Earth where a total solar eclipse will be visible on July 11, 2010. The majority of the eclipse's path is over the ocean, so this will be one of the least observed eclipses ever. "This is one of the most interesting things that is possible for anyone on Earth to see in one of the most interesting places on the Earth that people can go," said Jay Pasachoff from Williams College, who is the Chair of the International Astronomical Union's...

Will Dunham October 23, 2014 They lived on a remote dot of land in the middle of the Pacific, 2,300 miles (3,700 km) west of South America and 1,100 miles (1,770 km) from the closest island, erecting huge stone figures that still stare enigmatically from the hillsides. But the ancient Polynesian people who populated Easter Island, or Rapa Nui, were not as isolated as long believed. Scientists who conducted a genetic study, published on Thursday in the journal Current Biology, found these ancient people had significant contact with Native American populations hundreds of years before the first Westerners reached the...

Ancient vessel retraces voyages of the past By Stefanos Evripidou IT LOOKS like a tree house stuck on a bamboo banana. In reality it's the incarnation of a pre-Pharaonic reed boat, designed and built to unravel the mysteries of prehistoric navigation. The Abora II drifted in to Larnaca marina yesterday. Weighing in at six- tonnes, the vessel is a totra-reed boat. It is 11.5 metres long, 3.5 metres wide and 1.5 metres deep. The man responsible for building the huge boat is Dominique Goerlitz, a biology teacher at a school in Germany. As a student, Goerlitz was fascinated by the...

Madoc In AmericaNative American Histories in the USA Is truth stranger than fiction? Of course it is; it always has been One subject that has been debated for the last four hundred years was whether or not a Khumric-Welsh Prince called Madoc discovered America. Queen Elizabeth I was persuaded by her advisors that this was so and the Khumric-Welsh discovery was put forward as somehow giving England a prior claim in the political wrangles over first rights in the New World of the Americas. No one ever thought to investigate the British records. Caradoc of Llancarfan wrote about it circa...

Bishop Museum's Dr. Mulrooney conducted 6-year study on Rapa Nui Bishop Museum's assistant anthropologist, Dr. Mara Mulrooney, conducted a six-year study on Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island, about the island's theoretical civilization collapse. Results from her groundbreaking doctoral dissertation entitled "Continuity or Collapse? Diachronic Settlement and Land Use in Hanga Ho'onu, Rapa Nui (Easter Island)" are outlined in an article published in the December issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science. This new evidence debunks previous theories that the islanders "self-destructed" before Europeans first visited in 1722. As popularized in Jared Diamond's 2005 book Collapse, Rapa Nui is...

Chemical analyses of teeth from 41 human skeletons excavated on Easter Island revealed the inhabitants ate rats rather than seafood; Here, Moai statues at Ahu Tongariki on the south-eastern part of the island, where 26 of the skeletons were found. The inhabitants of Easter Island consumed a diet that was lacking in seafood and was, literally, quite ratty. The island, also called Rapa Nui, first settled around A.D. 1200, is famous for its more than 1,000 "walking" Moai statues, most of which originally faced inland. Located in the South Pacific, Rapa Nui is the most isolated inhabited landmass on Earth;...

   Summer 2000 (8.2) Scandinavian AncestryTracing Roots to Azerbaijan by Thor HeyerdahlAbove: Thor Heyerdahl with Peruvian children who still construct traditional boats made of reeds, the principle material that enabled early migrations on trans-oceanic voyages. Courtesy: Thor Heyerdahl.Archeologist and historian Thor Heyerdahl, 85, has visited Azerbaijan on several occasions during the past two decades. Each time, he garners more evidence to prove his tantalizing theory - that Scandinavian ancestry can be traced to the region now known as Azerbaijan.Heyerdahl first began forming this hypothesis after visiting Gobustan, an ancient cave dwelling found 30 miles west of Baku, which is ...

Europeans raced across oceans and continents during the Age of Exploration in search of territory and riches. But when they reached the South Pacific, they found they had been beaten there by a more humble traveler: the sweet potato. Now, a new study suggests that the plant's genetics may be the key to unraveling another great age of exploration, one that predated European expansion by several hundred years and remains an anthropological enigma. Humans domesticated the sweet potato in the Peruvian highlands about 8000 years ago, and previous generations of scholars believed that Spanish and Portuguese explorers introduced the crop...

ISLE OF WIGHT, England - A 100-year-old wooden paddle used in Polynesian dance ceremonies before becoming a household ornament fetched nearly $340,000 at a British auction. Bidders in London and Brussels quickly upped the price on the paddle after bidding started at just $4,629, The Times of London reported. The ceremonial paddle, known as a rapa, originated on Easter Island in the southeastern Pacific, where performers used the paddles to accentuate movements in dances and ceremonies. Tim Smith of Isle of Wight auctioneers Island Auction Rooms in Shanklin set a guide price of $15,341. "When the money started going up,...

Easter Island is branded into popular consciousness as the home of the mysterious and towering moai statues, but these are not the only curiosity the South Pacific island holds. Where the moai are fascinating for their unknown purpose and mysterious craftsmen, the island's lost language of Rongorongo is equally perplexing. The unique written language seems to have appeared suddenly in the 1700s, but within just two centuries it was exiled to obscurity. Known as Rapa Nui to the island's inhabitants, Rongorongo is a writing system comprised of pictographs. It has been found carved into many oblong wooden tablets and other...

A team of British archaeologists has solved the mystery of how the famous statues dotting the landscape of Easter Island acquired their distinctive red hats. Dr Sue Hamilton from University College London and Dr Colin Richards from the University of Manchester believe the hats were constructed in a hidden quarry and then rolled down from the slopes of an ancient volcano. They are the first archaeologists ever to have excavated the Puna Pau quarry on the tiny Pacific island. The team have discovered the mystery behind the red hats worn by the Easter Island statues Around 70 intact giant red...

Archaeologists have solved an ancient mystery surrounding the famous Easter Island statues. At 2,500 miles off the coast of Chile, the island is the world's most remote place inhabited by people. Up to 1,000 years ago, the islanders started putting giant red hats on the statues. The research team, from the University of Manchester and University College London, think the hats were rolled down from an ancient volcano. Dr Colin Richards and Dr Sue Hamilton are the first British archaeologists to work on the island since 1914. They pieced together a series of clues to discover how the statues got...

The oldest dates were only about 800 years old, implying that occupation began around 1200 A.D. The dates from layers closer to the surface were progressively younger, which is inconsistent with the possibility that somehow our samples were contaminated with modern carbon. There was really no way to explain these numbers, at least not within the conventional model of Rapa Nui's development... Lipo and I took a closer look at the evidence for earlier human settlement. We evaluated 45 previously published radiocarbon dates indicating human presence more than 750 years ago using a "chronometric hygiene" protocol. We rejected dates measured...

Did humans devastate Easter Island on arrival? 19:00 09 March 2006 Bob Holmes Early settlers to the remote Easter Island stripped the island’s natural resources to erect towering stone statues (Image: Terry L Hunt)Related Articles What caused the collapse of Easter Island civilisation? 25 September 2004 Last of the great migrations 24 April 2004 Histories: Carteret's South Sea trouble 11 February 2006 The first humans may have arrived on Easter Island several centuries later than previously supposed, suggests a new study. If so, these Polynesian settlers must have begun destroying the island's forests almost immediately after their arrival. Easter Island...

Did humans decimate Easter Island on arrival? 19:00 09 March 2006 NewScientist.com news service Bob Holmes Early settlers to the remote Easter Island stripped the island’s natural resources to erect towering stone statues (Image: Terry L Hunt)The first humans may have arrived on Easter Island several centuries later than previously supposed, suggests a new study. If so, these Polynesian settlers must have begun destroying the island's forests almost immediately after their arrival. Easter Island has often been cited as the classic example of a human-induced ecological catastrophe. The island – one of the most remote places on Earth – was...