Post #783670 by Prikli Pear on Mon, Feb 5, 2018 8:34 PM

The great thing about science is that fact will eventually win out. When theory is accepted broadly enough, long enough, it becomes dogma and ossifies. Evidence to the contrary is resisted. Given enough time and persistence, however, the preponderance of evidence wins out. There's a human tendency to want everything to fit into neat boxes. It's out evolutionary predisposition toward pattern recognition at work. But history and culture aren't neat and linear. The Clovis culture was long accepted as the oldest homo sapiens presence in North America, and is still taught as such in many textbooks. But the Gault site less than 90 miles away from me is turning up artifacts far older and pushing human habitation of the New World back tens of thousands of years. And there are other sites scattered around the continent with a similar impact. It'll be decades or longer before this new knowledge supplants the Clovis narrative. But it will happen.

The Kontiki expedition was hardly rigorous research in the academic sense, but Thor's efforts, although unorthodox, generated valuable data points. I expect that someday he'll be acknowledged for "proof of concept" if nothing else.