It was a hot summer in my middle school. I was getting bored to death. My father summoned me to the family books shelf and said: "Did I ever tell you about Kon-Tiki? It's a book that belonged to your grandfather and that I read when I was a kid. Here. Read it.".
He handed me this little book, bound with an old but resistant bordeaux cover; on the back and on the front there was a tribal face, like an aboriginal mask (for Crash Bandicoot lovers, it could remember Aku Aku). I immediately started leafing through it with curiosity. Pages were yellowed by time and glue did its best to prevent them from peeling off.
It was a singular book, with written pages and frequent captioned photos. Very peculiar.
I looked at my father with a question mark above my head and he tried to answer me without answering me; at the time the concept of "spoiler" did not yet exist, but today I can say that he wanted to avoid it to me: "It's a true story. The story of an incredible expedition made by an incredible man: Thor Heyerdahl". I knew something about it as much as I did before, but I knew enough to be intrigued.
So I decided to give that book a chance and maybe it is one of the most beautiful experiences that I carry in my heart. I do not know if it is for the emotional context or because I have got really passionate about what I was reading, but this is a read that I recommend to everyone, for better or for worse.
I don't want to talk about the book though, rather I want to talk about Heyerdahl's deeds.
A scholar, an anthropologist, who has not limited himself to researching, studying and theorising. He went further. He decided to verify his theories in first person, putting himself on the line and also risking the Norwegian skin!
Dr. Heyerdahl was an important scholar in the anthropology field who did not much like mainstream theories regarding the diffusion of various peoples by sea. He had his own theories on how humanity had colonized certain world areas by sea and on how certain peoples descended/were related to others.

The first important one, from which Kon-Tiki's adventure began, sees Polynesia colonized in pre-Columbian times by peoples of South America: according to Thor Heyerdahl there are too many points of contact and common traits between South American cultures and Polynesian cultures.

<<Yes, Thor has come to twist history hahaha c'mon Thor. That's all very interesting, too bad there is no tangible evidence of this colonization and, probably, populations of that time did not even have means to navigate across Pacific Ocean towards Polynesia. Ok Thor, it was nice to go out for a beer, but now I have to go home...>>
<<Guys, no problem: I'll take care of it.>>

And he really did it. He did some detailed research about tools and materials available to the pre-Columbian populations, gathered a team of five other people (four Norwegians and one Swede) and built a raft: nine 14-meter-long balsa wood logs, placed one next to the other and held together by other timber and stems, with a mast and a sail, all assembled using only manual techniques without the aid of modern tools.
The expedition could leave. The only modern things they brought with them: three waterproof radio transmitters to be able to communicate with the mainland and give updates, some experimental field rations offered by the US army and a camera to document moments of daily life during navigation.
Everything else was non-modern products and tools: bamboo rainwater tanks, coconut, sweet potatoes, various fruits, rods and rudimentary fishing gear.
On April 28, 1947, from the port of Callao in Peru, six northern European men on a raft began a crossing of 101 days and 6890 km, ended in the Raroia atoll, Tuamotu Islands, when the boat, pushed by sea, shipwrecked on the coral reef. They had made it. With a not perfect ending, but they had arrived in Polynesia. What was impossible three months earlier had suddenly become possible, plausible, and probable: our South American ancestors may have colonized the islands of Polynesia. Thor had transformed personally his theory into practice.

And if this expedition wasn't enough to make you understand who was Thor Heyerdahl, about twenty years later he was the protagonist of another expedition. Among the many ideas, he also theorized that the cultural similarity between the pre-Columbian peoples and the Assyrian-Babylonian-Egyptian populations is not due to chance, so he arranged a new journey similar to the previous one: this time however he would travel from North Africa to America.
With a crew of seven men of different nationalities, he sailed from Morocco to the Caribbean in a hand-assembled reed boat (based on documentation about ancient Egyptian boats too large for only Nile navigation) named Ra, like the Egyptian sun god.
Unfortunately Ra had been badly built and had had serious problems with the rudder which broke. The expedition was interrupted, but the boat had traveled about 5000 km in 8 weeks. With an extra week of sailing, it would have reached his goal.
The story could stop here with a failed expedition and a not fully demonstrated theory, but we are talking about Thor Heyerdahl: very confident and determined to prove also this theory, about a year later, he put the previous expedition back on its feet; he built a new boat, the Ra II, with four Aymara indigenous people help, from Lake Titicaca (where there are boats similar to the reed boats of ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt), called back the last crew and sailed again from Morocco.
In 57 days and 6100 km he docked in Barbados, in the Caribbean, with the Ra II and all its crew. Once again, our Thor was able to question the beliefs of anthropologists all over the world; it was very possible, at this point, that the populations of the Mediterranean had had contact with the populations of Central and South America before the discovery of the continent by Christopher Columbus.

Thor Heyerdahl led many other expeditions, but these I have told you about are the two that most I like and impressed me.
Honestly, I wonder why there isn't a deepening, a reference or a hint of Dr. Heyerdahl and his deeds in history school books. Or rather, on mine or those of my children (I'm writing from Italy) there have never been and when we talk, for example, of Egyptian and/or South American populations, the first thing they teach us at school is that these two peoples cannot have interacted with each other, ignoring and totally neglecting the fact that a Norwegian scholar, while everyone was ecstatic by the man on the Moon, has rewritten part of history of ancient peoples.
It's a shame. It is a pity that this scholar, that this man and his deeds are unknown to most. It's a shame because I think Heyerdahl is not just an anthropologist, a man of science. Thor Heyerdahl is an example. An example for all those times we have an idea, an interest, a theory, but we never put ourselves on the line. We sketch the idea or maybe even share it, but then at the first criticism and/or perplexity, we discard it. We get discouraged.
Often it is comfortable to stay in our comfort zone of mental lucubrations, without going further. Without daring. Without sail away. Staying in our living room talking and talking and talking, shielding us with words, dialectics and beautiful phrases. Thinking and pondering are essential, but acting and doing are also essential. Believing in what we think and don't stop. Whatever they may say, whatever others may think, we have this idea and why not try to take it to the end? Maybe even shipwrecking on a metaphorical coral reef or arguing with a broken rudder that gets in the way of our life navigation.
We should all be a little more protagonist, we should all be a little more Thor Heyerdahl.