Thor Heyerdahl was born on 6 October 1914 in Larvik, a small coastal city south of Oslo, where he also spent his formative years. His father, also called Thor, was a brewer, and his mother, Alison, was the head of the Larvik regional museum association. It was Alison who inspired Thor’s life-long interest in animals and the natural sciences. At one point, he even had a zoological museum in his father’s old brewery. Thor was good at drawing, and by the age of eight he was drawing imaginative pictures of South Sea islands and had resolved to become an explorer when he grew up.