Biography

His father ran a successful brewing company. After school, Heyerdahl began studying zoology at the University of Oslo in 1933. At the end of 1936 he married Liv Coucheron Torp, with whom he lived temporarily on the Marquesa Islands in Polynesia. In the spring of 1938 the couple returned to Norway, where their son Thor was born in September. The second son Björn followed later. Heyerdahl next turned to studying the Bella Coola Indians in British Columbia, Canada. During the Second World War, the family initially stayed in Canada, then Heyerdahl worked as a lieutenant in the Norwegian resistance against the German occupation.

Heyerdahl's anthropological research related to the possibilities of migration and cultural exchange between early human populations, which he sought to investigate and prove through elaborate expeditions in replica historical ships. The anthropologist became world famous for his breathtaking three-month crossing from Peru to Eastern Polynesia, which he documented in the 1948 book "Kon-Tiki ekspedisjonen", which quickly received numerous translations. Heyerdahl then sailed from the Moroccan west coast to the West Indies. From Iraq he sailed through the Persian Gulf to Asia and back to Africa, proving that the ancient Sumerians could have had contact with other early cultures in this way.

In the summer of 1949, after separating from his first wife, Heyerdahl married Yvonne Dedekam-Simonsen, with whom he had three daughters. In 1952, Heyerdahl published the book "American Indians in the Pacific: The Theory Behind the Kon-Tiki Expedition," in which he documented ancient migration movements between the American mainland and Polynesia. The researcher discovered similar migration movements between the South American Andes and Easter Island in the second half of the 1950s. Heyerdahl attracted worldwide attention with the two expeditions he carried out in 1969 and 1970 on the contemporary-style ships "Ra" and "Ra II" to cross the Atlantic from Egypt and Morocco, respectively.

A third larger expedition took Heyerdahl in 1977 from Iraq over the Tigris through the Persian Gulf to Oman and Pakistan and then across the Indian Ocean to Djibouti. In 1982/83, Heyerdahl led two expeditions to the Maldives to research the trade movements of prehistoric populations there. Heyerdahl made further expeditions to Easter Island in 1986, 1987 and 1988. He led an archaeological project in Tucúme/Peru from 1988 to 1993. Most recently, from 1990 to 2002, he was committed to researching and preserving the pyramids of Güimar/Tenerife.

Thor Heyerdahl died on April 18, 2002 of a brain tumor in Colla Micheri, northern Italy.