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Heyerdahl Hero's Journey

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The spirit of travel and adventure are perhaps two of the most deeply rooted emotions in the human species. From the time the ancestors left the plains and savannahs of Africa to venture forth into the unknown, the human species have steadily spread all over the world and even beyond it towards the stars.

But closer to modern times, it came to a point where only a select few dared to travel, explore and try new and exciting things. One such person was Thor Heyerdahl. It can be said that he was filled with the spirit of travel and adventure, but he did not take the voyages he took in order to discover an uncharted new part of the world, instead he did what he did in order to understand more about how ancestors traveled in the past and to put …show more content…

In 1953, an archeological expedition was led by the Norwegian towards the Galapagos Islands. Other such expeditions were also undertaken within the next few years when he also led one of the earliest scientific explorations of Easter Island. During these two expeditions, Heyerdahl was able to find more intriguing clues that seemed to link these Pacific Islands to early Ecuadorian and Peruvian Indian cultures. The later trip to Easter Island became the subject of another book that he published called “The Secret of Easter Island”.

Another sea voyage by Heyerdahl in 1969 was an attempt to show that ancient Egyptians and their reed boats could have sailed to the Americas. His first attempt with a papyrus reed boat named Ra-the Egyptian sun god-failed but a year later on the Ra II, Heyerdahl was able to sail from Morocco and arrived in the Bahamas. Towards the 1980s and 1990, he focused primarily on the excavation of the Tacume pyramid complex as well as the Chacona pyramid complex respectively.

By the end of his life, Heyerdahl still kept the spirit of adventure which was a large part of his being. His later project was a search for proof that the Norse god Odin was an actual ancient ruler. He published another book on this theory called “The Hunt for

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