In 1938, the Heyerdahls returned to Norway and settled in a log cabin in a mountain wilderness near Lillehammer. Heyerdahl's stay on Fatu Hiva is recounted in his 1996 book, Green Was the Earth on the Seventh Day. The inhabitants told him stories of Kon-tiki, a bearded, white sun king who arrived over the sea. On the island Heyerdahl discovered evidence that Peruvian aboriginal voyagers had visited the islands. Heyerdahl and Torp were married on Christmas Eve in 1936, and the next day they set out for Fatu Hiva in the Marquesas Islands, their hand-picked Garden of Eden. With his girlfriend Liv Torp, Heyerdahl decided to quit college and make an expedition to the South Seas. In Oslo, he spent a lot of time in the home of a wealthy wine merchant and family friend who had a huge library of Polynesian artifacts. In 1933, Heyerdahl entered the University of Oslo and specialized in zoology and geography. Civilization might be compared with a house full of people who had never been outside the building." Throughout his early life, Heyerdahl was determined to go "outside the building" and live in a more primitive setting. Primitive man, on the other hand, was an extrovert and alert, with keen instincts and all his senses alive…. According to his school friend Arnold Jacoby, in his book Senor Kon-Tiki, "Thor was convinced that modern man had … an over-loaded brain and reduced powers of observation. He also made many winter camping trips by sled and ski to remote locations with his schoolmates. Heyerdahl and his parents spent summer holidays at a log cabin in the wilderness, where Thor made friends with a hermit and learned much about nature. It was housed in an old outhouse at his father's brewery. By age seven, young Thor had started his own zoological museum, filled with specimens of sea shells, butterflies, bats, lemmings, and hedgehogs. His mother, an ardent atheist, studied zoology, folk art, and primitive cultures, and influenced her son greatly. His father, Thor, was president of a brewery and a mineral water plant, and his mother, Alison Lyng Heyerdahl, was chairman of the Larvik Museum. Heyerdahl was born into an upper-class family in the coastal village of Larvik, Norway, in 1914. But while he has gained more popular attention than any contemporary anthropologist, the scientific community largely has rejected his controversial theories. Heyerdahl's work has included several documentary films and hundreds of articles for journals and magazines. More than a dozen books about his adventures have sold tens of millions of copies worldwide. His expeditions to sites of ancient stone statues in the Pacific Ocean and pyramids in Peru have also attracted great interest. He has made four oceanic trips in primitive vessels to demonstrate his theories that ancient civilizations may have spread from a common source through sea voyages. Since his voyage across the Pacific on the Kon-Tikiin 1947, Thor Heyerdahl has been the modern world's most renowned explorer-adventurer. Through his oceanic expeditions on primitive rafts and boats, documented in books, films, and television programs, Norwegian anthropologist Thor Heyerdahl (born 1914) has popularized ideas about common links among ancient cultures worldwide.
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