What Nationality is Tor Heyerdahl?

Answer 1

Thor Heyerdahl was a Norwegian ethnographer and adventurer with a scientific background in zoology and geography. Heyerdahl became famous for his Kon-Tiki expedition, in which he sailed 4,300 miles (8,000 km) by raft from South America to the Tuamotu Islands. As a young child, Thor Heyerdahl established a strong interest in zoology. He created a small museum in his childhood home, with a Vipera berus as the main attraction. He studied Zoology and Geography at Oslo University. At the same time he studied privately Polynesian culture and history, consulting the then world's largest private collection of books and papers on Polynesia, owned by Bjarne Kroepelin, a wealthy wine merchant in Oslo. This collection was later purchased by the Oslo University Library from Kroepelin's heirs and was attached to the Kon-Tiki Museum research department. After seven terms and consultations with experts in Berlin, a project was developed and sponsored by his zoology professors, Kristine Bonnevie and Hjalmar Broch. He was to visit some isolated Pacific island groups and study how the local animals had found their way there. Just before sailing together to the Marquesas Islands in 1936, he married his first wife, Liv, whom he had met shortly before enrolling at the University, and who had studied economics there.