Voyaging Distance and Voyaging Time in Pacific Migration

Abstract

IN the last issue of the Journal x Professor Heine-Geldern defends the hypo? thesis of a west-to-eas migration of aboriginal peoples straight across the Pacific from south-east Asia to South America. This he does, partly by allowing the Kon-Tiki expedition to have lent practical support to the feasibility of such long transoceanic voyages in primitive craft, partly by a criticism of some of the culture traits listed by the present writer2 in support of a movement in the opposite direction. As it seems to have become a choice of theory whether an aggregation of mutual culture traits in geographically separated areas is to be deemed to indicate diffusion, or merely independent evolution along parallel lines, it is relevant to consider first the deductions he makes from the results of the Kon-Tiki expedition. Heine-Geldern^ confidence in the mobility of aboriginal man is entirely shared by the present writer, who has for years followed with interest his attempt to establish the diffusionist view that no span is too wide to justify the assertion that it cannot have been crossed by early craft, in one direction or another. But comparative anthropology calls for a practical approach to the problem, a critical analysis and sober definition of how and where, and especially in what direction, the prehistoric transfer could have taken place. On this essential detail Heine-Geldern seems to have very fluid conceptions; I cannot share his implied view of the almost unlimited feasibility of voyages across unsheltered and uncharted oceans in prehistoric craft, and this is indeed the only point on which the Kon-Tiki voyage, as such, can contribute new evidence with direct bearing on South American and Oceanic ethnology. It is to go too far to deduce, as he does, that our westward drift from Peru to Polynesia on a balsa raft establishes that a canoe must accordingly be able to travel eastward from Polynesia to Peru with the same ease, and thence return to Polynesia again. Our expedition was organized to distinguish fact from theory in the anthropological consequences of a geo? graphical and nautical problem where too many workers had already resorted to theoretical assumptions, and some even to purely speculative and wishful arguments. Our experience with a replica of the amazing South American balsa raft, and our verification of the strong and natural ocean escalator which rolls perpetually from Peru to Polynesia, neither proves nor even indicates that a journey in the opposite direction and in a different craft would have been as readily achieved. On the contrary, our success in crossing the was emphatically due to the geographical location of our starting-point and to that specific type of craft.