Artifacts and human remains taken by a Norwegian explorer and anthropologist in the late 1940s are being returned by a museum in Norway to Chile's remote territory of Easter Island in the mid-Pacific.

Four members of the delegation sent from Easter Islands spent the night at the Oslo museum as part of a ritual ceremony to take back the spirits of the remains.

Norway's Kon-Tiki Museum on Wednesday returned human remains taken from Easter Island by the explorer Thor Heyerdahl during his trans-Pacific raft expeditions in the 1950s.

Artefacts and human remains taken by a Norwegian explorer in the late 1940s as part of the famous Kon-Tiki expedition are being returned to Chile’s Easter Island in the mid-Pacific. In 1947, the anthropologist and adventurer Thor Heyerdahl sailed on a log raft named Kon-Tiki from Peru to Polynesia in 101 days in order to prove his theory – that the South Sea Islands were settled by seafarers from South America.