Amid stacks of books in the front room of his house near Oxford University, writer and evolutionist Richard Dawkins points to a piece of memorabilia: A replica of the Australopithecus africanus skull known as "Mrs. Ples," a gift to him from a 1997 lecture in South Africa. Dawkins, who spent the first two years of his life in East Africa, still remembers the whitewashed huts his parents built near the Mbagathi River, a scene he calls his private Eden. "On a larger scale, Africa is Eden to us all," he writes.[1]