I enjoyed the book Kon Tiki, an adventure story about traveling from South America to Polynesia. Maybe the 1950s science was backwards in terms of who went where but the idea was really interesting. And the adventures on the raft were interesting ,too.
I read that book too and maybe he wasn’t wrong.
“”We found identical-by-descent segments of Native American ancestry across several Polynesian islands,” Ioannidis said. “It was conclusive evidence that there was a single shared contact event.” In other words, Polynesians and Native Americans met at one point in history, and during that time people from the two cultures produced children with both Native American and Polynesian DNA. Statistical analyses confirmed the event occurred in the Middle Ages, around A.D. 1200, which is “around the time that these islands were originally being settled by native Polynesians,” Ioannidis said. Using computational methods developed as part of Ioannidis’ graduate work, the team then localized the source of the Native American DNA to modern-day Colombia.”
The 1953 Original Film is on Amazon Prime - It's very good