The Viracocha expedition first reed boats built? Were ancient mariners able to cover large distances in reed rafts? Did ancient cultures utilize the ocean currents and winds as highways rather than barriers in search of new lands? Were the ancient navigators able to find their way across endless miles of ocean? These are questions the scientific world has debated for centuries. The expeditions of explorer/anthropologist Thor Heyerdahl captured the imagination of the world with the Kon-Tiki balsa log raft voyage on the Pacific in 1947, his Ra Expedition, a reed raft journey across the Atlantic in 1970 and his Tigris reed boat voyage
Mau Piailug prevent debate among scholars. Before the "Hōkūle‘a" voyage in 1976, academic debate about the settlement of Polynesia was divided between several schools of thought. Norwegian ethnographer Thor Heyerdahl hypothesized that the Pacific was settled by voyages from South America and set out to prove that with his "Kon-Tiki" expedition. Scholars did not take Heyerdahl's hypothesis seriously. New Zealander Andrew Sharp proposed the accidental voyaging hypothesis in 1957, which (erroneously) argued that Oceania was too vast to have been settled by intentional voyaging so migrations must have happened by accidental drift voyages. Sharp granted that Polynesians likely settled the Pacific from