Thor Heyerdahl

I wrote the other day about Dick Proenneke who I admire greatly for his skills and tenacity in retiring to the Alaskan wilderness and building a beautiful cabin. But after my recent post on Good, Better and Best I thought I would put up something about another of my heroes; A Norwegian Anthropologist named Thor Hyerdhal.

By Kon-Tiki Museet - link [CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

I remember being read an account of his Kon Tikki expedition as a child and being amazed and enthralled by the skill it must have taken to adopt primitive skills, which at the time he had no experience of, and building and subsequently sailing a balsa wood raft across the pacific ocean. This is an example of a better or best use of bushcraft skills. Not only did he and his team develop exceptional skills themselves but they used those skills to contribute to man kinds understanding of their history.

He went on to do many other projects replicating primitive and ancient skills to demonstrate the possibility of various migration theories and also the quality of ancient building skills and seamanship. 

The Kon-Tiki raft in the Kon-Tiki Museum Oslo; By Daderot (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Bibliography

• The Kon-Tiki Expedition (1950) By Thor Heyerdahl 
• American Indians in the Pacific (1952) By Thor Heyerdahl
• The Ra Expeditions (1972 revised ed.) By Thor Heyerdahl 
• The Tigris Expedition (1980) By Thor Heyerdahl 
• The Kon-Tiki Man (1990) By Christopher Ralling