Customer Reviews

Early Man and the Ocean: A Search for the Beginnings of Navigation and Seaborne Civilizations

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Early Man and the Ocean is another in Thor Heyerdahl's rewriting of the ancient history of the Americas and Polynesia. Published in 1978, it contains a number of chapters on information not covered in his earlier books, including his proposed timeline for the peopling of Polynesia by not one, but two different peoples. Indeed, what makes this book different is that here the author ties together his findings from many different lands, into a logical whole.

If you liked Kon-Tiki and Aku-Aku, then this book is for you. My only complaint against this book is that I dearly wish that it would be updated and reissued.

Although I do not agree with all of Heyerdahl's perspectives or theories (some of which are being tested in the negative with new DNA tracing techniques) this book is still worth reading in part because of one of the most acute studies of the isolationist-diffusionist controversy, especially with respect to the Atlantic side of the debate, where the riddle of the Olmecs and the New World civilizations get consistently incorrect histories. Hopefully this side of the author's legacy after judicious sifting and updating won't be lost. For various reasons, among them the insistence, due to incorrect Darwinian views, on independent cultural evolution, and the speculations of crank theorists, the fairly simple facts of the case are rarely presented.
There are very few historians willing to consider the issues here, Cyrus Gordon in Before Columbus, being one. This is one of those areas where establshed scholarship is determined to not get it right, and the careful arguments in the book are classic and pretty well ignored.