Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki expedition, as depicted in a film of 2013, established the principle that crossing the Pacific with prehistoric technology was possibleIn 1947 a crazy Norwegian with a crazier idea sailed west from South America on a raft. For three months he and the crew of the Kon-Tiki drifted on 7,000km of endless Pacific sea. On the 101st day they crashed into a reef, on an island belonging to a different continent, and proved Thor Heyerdahl’s theory that Native Americans could have crossed the ocean to Polynesia. Now a study has shown not only that they could have, but that they did. Hidden in the genomes of the modern residents of those islands is a little Native American DNA, and so uniform is the signal that it could only have come from a mixed-race child born long before Europeans arrived, most probably 800 years ago.

Source: The Times July 09, 2020 23:09 UTC