Easter Island - The Kon-Tiki explorerer Thor Heyerdal was right!

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Now Professor Erik Thorsby of the University of Oslo in Norway has found clear evidence to support elements of Heyerdahl's hypothesis.

In 1971 and 2008 he collected blood samples from Easter Islanders whose ancestors had not interbred with Europeans and other visitors to the island.

The Norwegian adventurer Thor Heyerdahl believed that cultural similarities exist between Easter Island and South American Indian cultures which he suggested might have resulted from some settlers arriving from the continent.

On his , his balsa wood raft Kon-Tiki, for 4,300 miles to show that Polynesia could have been colonised from South America rather than Asia as commonly thought.

But despite achieving his goal – sustaining his 101 day voyage with sharks caught with his bare hands – the Norwegian failed to convince the scientific community.

Now – 64 years later- new research has finally proved the adventurer was at least partly right after all.

According to local legends, a group of long-eared[12] people called hanau epe arrived on the island sometime after the original inhabitants, introducing the stone carving technology and attempting to enslave the population. The fact that the sweet potato, a staple of the pre-contact Polynesian diet, is of South American origin, and that there is no evidence that its seed could spread by floating across the ocean, indicates that there must have been some contact between the two cultures

Geneticist Erik Thorsby and colleagues have published two studies in the peer-reviewed journal Tissue Antigens that present evidence for an Amerindian genetic contribution to the Eastern Island population, which was probably introduced prior to the European discovery of the island.

Stein Morten Lund, 4th September 2011

Additional information Wikipedia: Telegraph: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/8582150/Kon-Tiki-explorer-was-partly-right-Polynesians-had-South-American-roots.html