Aku-Aku

Aku-Aku: the Secret of Easter Island is a 1957 book by Thor Heyerdahl[1] published in Norwegian, Swedish, Danish and Finnish, and in French and English the following year.

Much of the book's interest derives from the interaction of the expedition staff, from their base at Anakena beach, with the Easter Islanders themselves, who lived mainly in the village of Hanga Roa.

Heyerdahl is mostly associated with an attempt to revive the theory that some of the islanders' stone-carving technology is almost identical to the one in some parts of South America, notably Peru.

Many decades after the hypotheses put forth in the book were proposed, modern DNA analysis has been used to examine Heyerdahl's hypothesis of a South American origin for some of the Easter Island inhabitants.

DNA sequence analysis of Easter Island's current inhabitants indicates that the 36 people living on Rapa Nui who survived the devastating internecine wars, slave raids and epidemics of the 19th century and had any offspring,[6] were Polynesian.