I’m reading Kon Tiki by Thor Hyerdahl. I read a school kid’s version when I was that age a long time ago. Wow! The voyage, yes, but far more, the people they were emulating with their raft and voyage. The people that left Peru overnight and left their incredible cities to the Incas. A people of incredible knowledge of math, astronomy and building prowess in huge stone pieces. Led by the mystical sun-god Kon Tiki. Their departure was legend passed down and told to the Spanish while the Incas still existed. The Polynesians have exact matching legends of a people led by a sun-god of the same name arriving from the east. All the legends describe those people as being white, fine featured and with often red hair and beards. The huge stone figures of Easter Island were of faces with fine features, very prominent chins (beards?) and topped with red stone hair(?). The red stone was also used in the same way in Peru. In both places, the red stone quarries were often miles from the quarries for the big stones. Legend in Peru says that these people came from the north.

On the raft, they spent a lot of time talking about Easter Island, the stones and the fact that these stones and the well documented procedure to quarry, carve, move and erect them was exactly the process that the ancient people of Peru used to work similar sized stones to make their incredible buildings. (Legend has it that all the men of those people on Easter Island were killed by invaders from islands to the west. The stone work was quite obviously interrupted abruptly, left exactly as is and not touch by the new people ever. Tools were still right where they were put down hundreds of years ago. Heads in process, heads being dragged, heads being erected.

I have also read in recent years the books about and by followers of the Toltec spiritual practice in Mexico. The Toltecs; the people who built the incredible city of Teotihuacan and left it overnight to the Aztecs, disappearing completely save (apparently) a few individuals who carried on the spiritual practice master to apprentice in complete secrecy, emerging in the 1970s thanks primarily to Carlos Castanada.

So, my mind takes me to: did the people of the Toltecs become the Polynesians? If so, wow! And what a people. No metals. All their incredible stonework was done with stone tools, wood and rope. What amazing architecture skills, astronomy skills (including superb navigation skills in the southern hemisphere with its lack of the oh-so-convenient North Star to tell you your latitude with no math required at all) and math skills. (I picked up a large treatise of the ancient arts and knowledge of Central American civilization. Haven’t started it yet but in a quick scan I read of a calculator they used to multiply, divide and do square roots and other high functions!) Those Polynesians could sail the 2000 miles to Hawaii and back, no problem. Without metal for sextants. Without clocks. I believe without compasses. They knew the earth was round. They knew the equator and had names for it and the hemispheres. They knew the stars, the first 5 planets and constellations like very few do now. (They lived in a world of 12 hours of warm darkness every day with usually very clear skies. On an open boat, that sky is much of your world.)

The early westerners found fair skinned and sometimes red haired people among the Polynesians. Also heard the legends that these people were descendants of the sun-god.

This has me thinking: are the Polynesians, formally pre-Incans, formally Toltecs(?), originally from Europe or the mid-east? Did they bring their knowledge with them? (Pyramids? The great Greek buildings? The evidence that some of the ancients of North Africa or Greece had measured the diameter of the earth and got it right. (Well a little off. They didn’t know it was pear shaped.) And, whether these are two distinct peoples or one, what a loss of knowledge! I want to know more! I was kind of dreading plowing through the scholarly text on the ancient Central Americas but now I just want to learn as much as I can.

Ben