Thor Heyerdahl, whose Kon-Tiki expedition captured the young imagination of the world, visited Easter Island in the last few years and with a party of arachæologists and anthropologists made his own investigations…. He claims that as a result he has solved the mystery of Easter Island, that it was first settled about AD 400 by people from central and south America, that the great statues (which he places in his second period of occupation, say between the tenth and fifteenth centuries AD) get later as one travels westwards, and that the statue-building people were massacred by the ancestors of the present inhabitants of the island who came in canoes from Polynesia.

All this may be right, but it is impossible to accept his case, or even to understand it clearly, on the basis of the present book [Aku-Aku: The Secret of Easter Island], which is a highly garnished...