Hawaiki via Spirits Bay, Cape Reinga and the Three Kings Islands at the extreme north of the North Island of New Zealand — giving a possible pointer as to the direction in which Hawaiki may lie. Until , many anthropologists had doubts that the canoe-legends described a deliberate migration, tending to believe that the migration occurred accidentally when seafarers became lost and drifted to uninhabited shores. In 1947 Thor Heyerdahl sailed the "Kon-Tiki", a balsa-wood raft, from South America into the Pacific in an attempt to show that humans could have settled Polynesia from the eastern shores of the Pacific Ocean,
Kon-Tiki (2012 film) One significant inaccuracy is absence of indigenous Polynesians from the cast. The scenes depicting Heyerdahl's experiences on Fatu Hiva were shot in Thailand with Thai extras who do not resemble native Polynesians, and who are shown holding compound spears not typical of the Marquesas Islands, and weaving rattan baskets, of which neither the technique nor the plant material are native to French Polynesia. The film focuses on Heyerdahl's theory that Polynesia was first populated with humans from Peru, but it ignores the Norwegian's more ethnocentric speculations that the original Kon-Tiki voyage was undertaken by a race of tall white bearded