Post #67896 by emspace on Tue, Jan 6, 2004 10:37 AM

Heyerdahl bugs me for the same reason Erich von Daniken does: he doesn't think "primitive" people could possibly have created their own megalithic sculpture/architecture etc - it must have been the Incas (or extraterrestrials f'chrissakes) who helped them.

Very patronizing, but hey, he was an academic - publish or perish. He was one of the lucky ones whose theories get read by the general public, but really it is not unknown for an academic to publish the most ludicrous, whacked-out bullshit imaginable. The nice thing about this kind of history: nobody ever gets to DISprove their theories (although I didn't know about the DNA studies, interesting). Fact is, we'll never really know. But for me, I am perfectly satisfied to think that the Polynesians came up with their own megaliths. Nan Madol has no resemblance to anything on the South American mainland. As for the British Columbian native peoples, their totem carving started, I think, quite a bit later than the Polynesian stuff. The carving most people identify as their style is pure 19th-century in fact.

emski