# Fame.am profile — machine-readable export
# Canonical URL: https://fame.am/person/thor-heyerdahl
# Generated: 2026-08-31T17:36:37.651Z

schema: https://schema.org/Person
url: "https://fame.am/person/thor-heyerdahl"
name: "Thor Heyerdahl"
slug: "thor-heyerdahl"
description: "He built a raft from balsa logs and rope, then drifted 5,000 miles across the Pacific to prove ancient South Americans could have reached Polynesia first. The scientific community rejected the theory before he even set sail."
tagline: "Norwegian anthropologist and adventurer (1914-2002)"
image: "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:FilePath/ThorHeyerdahl.jpg?width=1200"
gender: "male"
country:
  name: "Norway"
  isoCode: "NO"
category:
  name: "Academics"
  slug: "academics"
profileType:
  name: "Academic"
  slug: "academic"
  entityType: "https://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q39631"
birthDate: "1914-10-06"
deathDate: "2002-04-18"
livingStatus: "DECEASED"
scores:
  popularity:           65.32
  momentum:             3.776579352850539
  historical:           25.05066
  currentAttention:     27.66635483160907
  sourceConfidence:     65
  profileCompleteness:  75
  trendDirection:       "STABLE"
ranks:
  global:   null
  country:  70
  category: null
tags:
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    slug: "scientist"
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  - name: "Norway"
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platforms:
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# bio (long form, separated for readability)
bio: |
  Thor Heyerdahl was a Norwegian ethnographer trained in zoology, botany, and geography who turned fieldwork into spectacle. In 1947 he launched the Kon-Tiki expedition — a hand-built primitive raft that carried him 8,000 kilometers from South America to the Tuamotu Islands, attempting to demonstrate that legendary "Tiki people" had colonized Polynesia before the Polynesians themselves. His hyperdiffusionist ideas about ancient cultures were widely dismissed by scientists even before he left shore. Undeterred, he continued mounting voyages to test contact between separated civilizations, including the 1970 Ra II expedition in which he sailed a papyrus reed boat from West Africa to Barbados. Norway appointed him a government scholar in 1984 and gave him a state funeral in Oslo Cathedral when he died in Italy in 2002. His archives — photographs, diaries, expedition plans, private letters spanning 1937 to 2002 — were added to UNESCO's Memory of the World Register in 2011.