In January of 2012, recently the 16 year old Dutch
teenager Laura Dekker finished successfully her 500 plus days sailing trip of
27,000 nautical miles circumnavigating the world. Not long before Laura there,
were two other teenage girls who attempted similar feats.
Some Ramifications
Of Daring Teenagers
This feat also reminds all humans that teenagers are not
children anymore. For too long, in western Societies there was a popular belief
that children should enjoy the blessings of childhood for as long as possible,
because life as an adult is not desirable or just tough or so the argument went.
Does this not also fly in the face of juvenile crime
adjudication in the western world? Adolescent teenagers are believed to be less
culpable than adults.
In western societies, the pendulum with respect to teenagers
has swung from forced child labor in the opposite direction. Will the pendulum
swing back towards the center?
Remember Thor
Heyerdahl And The Kon-Tiki Expedition
Heyerdahl is not only remembered for the Kon-Tiki but
also for the Ra and Ra II expeditions. With the former one he tried to prove
that people from Polynesia long ago could have reached the shores of South
America with a raft made from balsa wood and other native materials. With the
Ra and Ra II expeditions, Heyerdahl demonstrated that the ancient Egyptians
could have used a typical boat made of papyrus to reach North America.
To The Many
Unknown Maritime Explorers And Merchants In History
What Laura Dekker and the other girls as well as
researchers like Thor Heyerdahl have shown is that there probably were many
more explorers and cross ocean contacts between humans on all continents than
we know about.
Perhaps one day genetic analysis will tell us more about
long distance contacts between people in ancient times.
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