After the announcement today that Thor Heyerdahl had passed away, Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik issued the following obituary on behalf of the Norwegian Government:

”When Thor Heyerdahl has now passed away at the age of 87, Norway has lost an original and spectacular researcher, discoverer and adventurer. After studies in ethnography and zoology, he creatively journeyed out into the field in order to put to test his ideas about prehistoric cultural interaction and the spread of different cultures.

In 1947 Heyerdahl, with his balsa fleet Kon Tiki, sought to prove that the Polynesian Islands could have been populated by people from South America. Setting out with his reed boats Ra I and Ra II in 1969 and 1970 he sought to demonstrate early cultural contacts between North Africa and America. And with his papyrus boat Tigris he in 1977 and 1978 tried to show the possibility of early migration of cultures in the inner waters of the Indian Ocean.

The Maldives, Peru and the Canary Islands are other locations where Heyerdahl conducted archaeological and cultural research. In the last few years he also worked on what he saw as possible links between the Norse culture and what is now Azerbaijan.

In Thor Heyerdahl we have lost a countryman who for more than fifty years was one of the most well known Norwegians around the world. He was the happy boy from Larvik who conquered the world without ever forgetting where he came from.

I had the pleasure of meeting Heyerdahl myself on several occasions, among them at the Bjørnson Festival in Molde last summer.

On behalf of the Government I pray that peace may rest with Thor Heyerdahl’s memory.