Kon-TikiArticle Free Pass Kon-Tiki, raft in which the Norwegian
scientist Thor Heyerdahl and five companions sailed in 1947 from
the western coast of South America to the islands east of
Tahiti. Heyerdahl was interested in demonstrating the
possibility that ancient people from the Americas could have
colonized Polynesia; to do so, he constructed Kon-Tiki (named
for a legendary Inca god) from locally available balsa logs at
Callao, Peru, and in three and a half months traversed some
4,300 miles (6,900 km) of ocean. The Kon-Tiki has been preserved
in a museum in Oslo, Nor. What made you want to look up "Kon-
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