Customer Reviews

Thor Heyerdahl: Explorer & Scientist [VHS]

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This hour-long documentary does a nice job of showing a brief overview of Thor Heyerdahl's career which spanned over 60 years, beginning with his student days when he and his young wife spent about a year living on an isolated island in the Marquesas group. On that island he found vegetation native to South America and stone statues that resembled ancient statues of the Americas, and thus began his life-long quest to explain these similarities and how ancient civilizations crossed oceans long before Columbus. For anyone unfamiliar with Thor Heyerdahl, this documentary is a good, general introduction, touching only briefly on his expeditions to Pacific islands and other sea voyages in vessels that these ancient peoples may have used. It is very condensed, but necessary if you want to fit a 60-year career into less than 60 minutes, and it is facilitated by the lack of any narration, only exerpts of interviews with Heyerdahl himself and a few other scientists. This might seem unusual, but I found it quite refreshing because photos and film footage nicely summarize each expedition, a map shows the place, and you don't feel that you are hearing a lecture of which you have to pay strict attention to every word. This makes it an enjoyable and easy documentary to watch, although unfortunately I found the sound on this tape not the very best, so you still have to pay attention when someone does speak.

The documentary is almost up-to-date, being made several years before his death, and showing Heyerdahl's last home on the Canary Islands where he had found yet more pyramid ruins, and one of his latest projects in Tucume, Peru, where major archaeological digs unearthed many more interesting artefacts, some giving more weight to the theories of an ancient connection between South America and Easter Island in particular. There is also a brief mention of Heyerdahl's continuous battle with scientists who oppose him, which has flooded over into negative publicity about him such as ridicule, calling him an attention-seeker only, and in particular the constant omission of the fact that Heyerdahl had a PhD in Anthropology and was therefore completely qualified to say, do and write what he did. For the serious student and anyone interested in these scientific debates, I can recommend Heyerdahl's scientific work, "American Indians in the Pacific", 1952 - written for other scientists but readable by the layman. But for a general overview, whether you like history, travel, adventure or just something different, this documentary covers it all.