Richard Leakey: I think it was an unusual childhood, looking around the world today. We lived in rather simple circumstances. My father was a public employee running the then-museum, not well paid. He was really quite busy, didn’t see a lot of him. My mother was working as an archeologist in the museum. She was fairly busy and I think never really liked having children. So we were rather left alone as boys, and there were four years between us. So we weren’t at all close to each other, my younger brother and myself and my older brother. We went to a nearby school, which I didn’t like, found it irritating and boring. The good parts about my growing up in Kenya was that my parents, two or three times a year, would go off some way into the wilder places to look for artifacts and archeological traces, fossils, and these were generally in areas where there was a lot of wildlife, a lot of natural beauty, a lot of adventure, and we used to enormously look forward to these outings for two or three weeks at a time where we lived pretty simply, in very simple tents, but it was just a tremendous adventure. I think more than anything else, it brought me in close touch with nature and the environment and gave me a feel for the land.