Lake Titicaca, Peru - 18 May 2018 Believe it or not, this is the very type of traditional boat that inspired Thor Heyerdahl to make his famous Kon Tiki voyage in 1949; this attempted to prove that Australasia and Polynesia could have been settled from South America. Most anthropologists, however, maintain that population dissemination was from Asia - in other words, from East to West rather than the other way.