Google Doodle celebrates explorer who headed the Kon-Tiki expedition

Google has used its latest animated home page doodle to celebrate the life of Norwegian ethnographer explorer Thor Heyerdahl, best known for leading the Kon-Tiki expedition of 1947, who was born on this day in 1914.

In the expedition, Heyerdahl and his crew of five sailed a balsa wood raft 5,000 miles westwards from Peru towards French Polynesia in an attempt to prove his hypothesis that the islands were colonised from the Americas, rather than from the Asian mainland, as had previously been thought.

The point of the journey was to travel on a raft built using materials and technology that would have been available to pre-Colombian Americans, i.e. those living on the continent before the arrival of Europeans, headed by Christopher Columbus, in 1492.

People found it hard to believe that such distances could be covered using such basic vessels. The journey was successful, with the Kon-Tiki making landfall in the Tuamoto Islands on 7 August 1947, 101 days after setting sail.