Rift Valley, Kenya

We are born with what some psychologists call an “explanatory drive.” You give a baby a strange object or something that doesn’t make sense and she will become instantly absorbed; using all her abilities — taste, smell, force — to figure out how it fits in with the world.

I recently met someone who, though in his seventh decade, still seems to be gripped by this sort of compulsive curiosity. His name is Philip Leakey.

He is the third son of the famed paleoanthropologists Louis and Mary Leakey and the brother of the equally renowned scholar, Richard Leakey. Philip was raised by people whose lives were driven by questions. Parts of his childhood were organized around expeditions to places like Olduvai Gorge where Louis and most especially Mary searched for bones, footprints and artifacts of early man. The Leakeys also tend to have large personalities. Strains of adventurousness, contentiousness, impulsivity and romance run through the family, producing spellbinding people who are sometimes hard to deal with.

Philip was also reared in the Kenyan bush. There are certain people whose lives are permanently shaped by their frontier childhoods. They grew up out in nature, adventuring alone for long stretches, befriending strange animals and snakes, studying bugs and rock formations, learning to fend for themselves. (The Leakeys are the sort of people who, when their car breaks down in the middle of nowhere, manage to fix the engine with the innards of a cow.)