Thor Heyerdahl
Thor Heyerdahl (1914 - April 18, 2002) b. Larvik, Norway.
Thor Heyerdahl is an anthropologist who became famous for his Kon-Tiki Expedition in 1947. This expedition demonstrated there were no technical reasons to prevent people from South America from settling the Polynesian Islands. Nevertheless most anthropologists now believe based on physical and genetic evidence that Polynesia was settled from west to east starting from the Asian mainland. In that expedition, he and a small team went to South America where they used trees and other native materials to construct a raft, which they then sailed across the Pacific Ocean to Polynesia. The only modern equipment they had was communications equipment. For food, they lived off the fruit of the ocean. The documentary of the expedition won an Academy Award in 1952.
See also: Kon-Tiki, his book describing the voyage