Thor Heyerdahl Easter Island". Heyerdahl proposed that Tiki's neolithic people colonized the then uninhabited Polynesian islands as far north as Hawaii, as far south as New Zealand, as far east as Easter Island, and as far west as Samoa and Tonga around 500 AD. They supposedly sailed from Peru to the Polynesian islands on "pae-paes"—large rafts built from balsa logs, complete with sails and each with a small cottage. They built enormous stone statues carved in the image of human beings on Pitcairn, the Marquesas, and Easter Island that resembled those in Peru. They also built huge pyramids on Tahiti and Samoa
Thor Heyerdahl after him, as are HNoMS "Thor Heyerdahl", a Norwegian Nansen class frigate, along with "MS Thor Heyerdahl" (now renamed "MS Vana Tallinn") and "Thor Heyerdahl", a German three-masted sail training vessel originally owned by a participant of the Tigris expedition. Thor Heyerdahl Upper Secondary School in Larvik, the town of his birth, is also named after him. Heyerdahl's numerous awards and honours include the following: Thor Heyerdahl Thor Heyerdahl (; October 6, 1914 – April 18, 2002) was a Norwegian adventurer and ethnographer with a background in zoology, botany, and geography. He became notable for his "Kon-Tiki" expedition in 1947,