Gonzalo Figueroa Garcia Huidobro is) widely accepted, but from South America. In 1947, Heyerdahl successfully sailed the balsa-wood raft "Kon-Tiki" from Peru to the Tuamotu Islands in an effort to prove it could be done. The subsequent Rapa Nui expedition was meant to be less of an adventurous experiment and more of a true scientific expedition. Figueroa was a twenty-four-year-old graduate student in archaeology at the University of Chile and working at Santiago's natural history museum when he joined Heyerdahl's expedition as the official representative of Chile and liaison officer, or, as Edwin Ferndon referred to him, "a 'watchdog' representative." He was also to
Kon-Tiki (2012 film) The film was also nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film at the 70th Golden Globe Awards. It is the first time a Norwegian film has been nominated for both an Oscar and a Golden Globe. The film is the dramatized story of Thor Heyerdahl and his Kon-Tiki expedition of 1947. While the prevailing theories of the time held that Polynesia had been settled by peoples migrating from the west, Heyerdahl, an experimental ethnographer and adventurer, sets out to prove his theory that people from South America settled the islands in pre-Columbian times. Noting similarities between