[dalke]

All of the following are "right even if in reverse": Columbus started from the Caribbean and discovered Spain in the late 1400s; the Mormons left Utah due to persecution and relocated to the Midwest; Australians convicts in the early 1800s were transported to Britain to work and live in penal colonies; millions of free people were sold into slavery in the Americas and shipped to Africa to work; and the Mississippi flows from Louisiana to Minnesota.

Heyerdahl believed there were cultural similarities between pre-Columbian civilizations of the Andes and Polynesians because the South Americans "colonized the then-uninhabited Polynesian islands as far north as Hawaii, as far south as New Zealand, as far east as Easter Island, and as far west as Samoa and Tonga around 500 AD". (Quoting Wikipedia.) He also believed the current Polynesian population came to the islands centuries later by first going to the Pacific Northwest of the Americas and then to Hawaii before going to the rest of the Pacific.

That can't be so easily reversed.

[chx]

Then maybe I should have said "the Kon-Tiki expedition was relevant even if not exactly in the way we expected". Thor Heyerdahl has proven it is possible to cross this distance by using only the materials and technologies available to those people at the time, that there were no technical reasons to prevent them from having done so.