February 20, 2018 • 42 mins
For millennia people have been amazed by legends of wild children found in the forest or jungle, sometimes raised by animals like wolves or apes. But it turns out these stories may actually be true in some cases and may actually have been children with cognitive impairments who were abandoned by their parents.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody, we are going on tour in twenty eighteen,
and where are we going? On April fourth, we're gonna
be in Boston at the Wilburg. You can get tickets
at the Wilber dot com, Chuck. And then on April fifth,
we're gonna be in DC at the Lincoln Theater and
you can get tickets for that at ticket fly, that's right.
And then we're going to two new cities, right yep.
On May twenty second, we're gonna be in Saint Louis.
(00:20):
You can get tickets on Ticketmaster. And on May twenty third,
we're gonna be in Cleveland and you can get tickets
there at playhouse Square dot org. And then there's one more, Chuck,
that's right. We're gonna wrap it up in Denver, specifically Inglewood,
Colorado at the Gothic Theater on June twenty eighth, and
possibly adding a show on the twenty seven. Stay tuned
for that, yep. And you can get ticks at axs
(00:41):
dot com. So come see us live. We'll have a
good time. Come on out. Welcome to stuff you should
know from HowStuffWorks dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
Son Josh Clark's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, I almost forgot
(01:02):
my name for a second. There's Jerry. It is a
little weird. Jerry Jerome the Germster Roland kaboom, how you
doing fine? Jerry stops snorting. I have a complete whip
(01:23):
flash over this topic. Ok of what and you know
why I have? I have just doing this topic after
what the story is behind it? Yeah, I still kind
of like shudder. So should we even talk about her twitching? Yeah? No,
here's the story is. And I think it was two
(01:47):
years ago now, rightly, yeah, two years ago in March,
it'll be two years At south By Southwest in Austin, Texas.
We were going to do a live podcast, which we've
done there before. It's always been great. Yes for this one.
We had a bar that we were doing it in
that was set up with a lot of events all
(02:09):
day long, and we thought, Okay, no big deal, we'd
like bars, we're closer to the booze, no props. But
what they failed to do and failed to tell us
was that they did not clear the room after the
hippie jam band beforehand, and so what ended up happening
was we ended up doing a live podcast in front
(02:32):
of a noisy, crowded bar full of drunks, with about
seventeen stuff you should know, fans upfront trying to listen,
turning around and shushing the people at the bar. And
it was about as fruitless as a shift could get.
And this is the part I feel though worst about
a couple of hundred real deal stuff you should know,
(02:54):
listeners standing out on the sidewalk in the hot sun,
unable to get in. Yeah, it was all around maybe
our third worst show, but I know VidCon is up
there in the top three, right, Yeah, I'm just putting
a phantom show in to hold the number two slot
because I'm sure there's one I've blocked out too. Just
so you guys know, VidCon and was bad because we
(03:16):
did a show in front of about seventeen people maybe,
and we worked with eleven of them, although we did
get to meet Taijon day that day. Oh true. So anyway,
we did feral children in front of a crowded, noisy
bar full of drunks, and you and I we've been
doing this for so long and we have such great
(03:37):
you know, unspoken eye contract eye contact chemistry. Sh don't
speak it that I remember looking over at you, and
our eyes both said skip through as much of this
as possible. Let's get the heck out of here as
soon as we can. I cocked it. We did it
in like twenty two minutes. I believe it was supposed
to be at least forty five. We were talking like
(03:59):
the guy from the old FedEx ads from like the
early eighties. Oh man. It was truly truly a miserable experience.
So it's taken a full two years until I could
wrap my head around actually doing this again. Yep. So
here we are. We're gonna do it, Chuck, and it's
gonna be great because it's just the three of us today. Yeah.
And that's also where we had that too drunk guy,
(04:22):
Oh yeah, remember him. That was a bad jam all around,
and that's where I lost my hat. That was the
worst trip ever, what's really bad. It really just sucked
all the way around. We considered burning Austin to the
ground on the way out of town, but I did so.
We're glad we did because we've been back to Austin
a couple of times and we're always happy to be there. Now,
(04:42):
this is not Austin's fault. No, but we just didn't
want to have any memories of it. Aye, I hear you.
So we're talking fearal children. And even if you were
at that show, this is probably really the first time
you'll hear it, So it doesn't matter, and we're gonna
start in Moscow. In the late nineties, there was a big,
(05:04):
big problem that had developed from the dissolution of the USSR,
namely that the fabric of society had largely disintegrated in
a lot of ways, and one of the results of
this was that there were a lot of families that
were broken up for one reason or another, and a
lot of very young children from what I see, something
like two million of them living on the streets of Russia.
(05:28):
In Moscow, of course, being the biggest city in Russia,
it had the largest problem. And one of those kids
was a little boy named Ivan Mushikov and nailed it sure.
And Ivan was six in nineteen ninety eight, they estimate,
(05:50):
And he was a little different from the rest of
the children living on the street at the time because
he was what you would was widely considered and actually
example of a feral child, because not only was he
living by his own wits, from the age of four
to six on the streets. He was leading a pack
of stray dogs that protected him as well, and he
(06:11):
had been fully absorbed into their pack, into their society. Yeah, so,
as the story goes, like you said, he left home
at four and was basically just another one of the
begging children on the streets until he started to feed
a little bit of the food he would get to
(06:33):
these dogs, and the dogs they trusted him, they befriended him,
and you know, you hang out with dogs long enough
and give enough food, all of a sudden they say, hey,
you know, we're pals. And they literally took him in
as one of their own and would show him, would
guide him to the warm places to sleep at night, underground,
(06:54):
your heated pipes and things like that. They and they
lived together for a couple of years to the point
where the cops could not get close to this kid
because of these dogs. Right, So they finally apparently baited
some traps and got the dogs just systematically away from Ivan,
and they finally had him cornered, and he snapped and
(07:16):
growled and barked at the social workers who were advancing
on him to get him and to take them off
of the streets and into a group home, and they
were finally successful. But they said, like, this kid was
acting like a dog with its back against the wall,
and they got their hands on him. They put him
into a group home, and he was actually a success story.
(07:38):
He managed to become enculturated into human society as a
result of just being taken over by the state. But
he is one of these He stands as one of
the very few documented examples of a feral child. I mean,
(08:00):
there have been stories all throughout history people have been
fascinated with this notion, whether it was Mowgli in the
Jungle Book, or stories of baboon girls and ostrich boys
and bird girls. And then you know, they give them
these names because that's who they eventually take up with,
and they're very compelling stories. But and in fact, I
(08:23):
think at one point there's a taxonomist named Carl Andaeis
who he's credited who created the tree of life. He
actually established a whole separate category Homo ferus, which was
literally a different variety of human being because they didn't
even think at one point that they counted as humans. Yeah,
there was a time when this is all very much
(08:45):
discussed and talked about what exactly feral children were who
they represented in One of the competing theories is that
they were like basically like sasquatch. Like if we found sasquatch,
you'd be like, oh, there's we need to expand the
tree of life to inclin. Dude, these cousins to homies
Homo sapiens. That's right. So Romulus and Remus were Another
(09:08):
very famous story too that Romulus, the founder of Rome.
He and his brother Romulus and Remus were cast out
by their uncle, their wicked uncle, and they were raised
by wolves, I believe, according to legend. So yeah, there's
this long standing legend of children of wild children, feral
(09:30):
children being raised. But for the most part, it has
existed in legend. It's not like there's all these great
well documented cases. There's just enough documented cases. There's just
enough tantalizing evidence that science has remained interested in this
idea of what are feral children that it's just kept
(09:54):
it's kept it going, and still to this day we
don't really have enough evidence to say definitively feral children
are this, or more to the point, feral children tell
us this about ourselves, about human development, But there are
documented cases. Ivan Mushakov is not the only one. Yeah,
(10:15):
and this could happen in a lot of ways. What
would cause a child to become separated from their family
and end up with a pack of monkeys or wolves
or ostrich It sort of depends. It was one girl
name Emiyata Emiyati who survived a boat capsizing. It killed
her friends and left her stranded in nineteen seventy seven
(10:38):
in the Sumatran forest. Eventually, she was found in the
early eighties living with orangutangs orangutung. I think she was
living alone. She was mistaken for an orangutang. Oh I
thought she had taken up with them. No, that was
what I saw. That actually makes her kind of different
as far as feral children concerned. She was living by herself. Oh. Interesting.
(11:00):
Other ones have been taken in by everything from pigs.
This girl in China, Wang Shingfing was discovered living with pigs.
She had been nursing on a pig, later fed as
a pig. And that's one of the more depressing cases
of straight up abuse from parents. Yeah, her parents were
(11:23):
unable to raise her. They were both cognitively impaired and
they basically left her with the pigs out back, and
the pigs ended up raising her for years. There was
another girl, and this is if this is even more depressing, frankly,
there was a girl named Jeanie that was a pseudonym.
Obviously I don't know what her real name was, but
(11:45):
she's very well known as Genie, who was raised back
in the nineteen thirties or forties, I believe, locked in
a closet for the first ten from age two to
age twelve, she was kept away from hum in society.
So rather than being kept away from human society by
(12:05):
being stranded in the wilderness or being raised by animals,
she was left by herself and as a result, she
developed a feral nature as well. So there's basically like
three categories that develop when you're looking at stories of
feral children, and Genie would be one that's called isolated.
(12:25):
There's also or no, she would be confined. Imi Yati
would be isolated where she was just stranded in the
woods and lived by herself. And then the third category
would be among animals like Ivan Mishchikov. Yeah, and we're
gonna talk mainly about the ones who live among animals.
Because the other two are just some of the you know,
(12:46):
worst cases of abuse and neglect you could imagine. And
it's not like the ones who live among animals are fun.
But at least they have their pack of dogs and
they're not like chained in a closet, you know, right,
that's the the weird silver lining it. What would you
want to be taken in? What kind of animal? Dogs
(13:07):
would be pretty good? Yeah, yeah, you know, lots of apsos. Yeah,
I could probably become the leader of that pack. I
think monkeys would be pretty great. They would be. But
they're also man. Those things will bite you. Well, they'll
bite their own, do they It depends if you say
something wrong. I would get along. They would they would
(13:28):
just pick my nets and they would love me as
their own. In my jungle book story, do you wait
a minute? Do you have knits now? Occasionally? Oh? Man,
should we take a break? Yeah, I think we should.
All right, let's take a break, and we're going to
talk more about feral children right after this, So Chuck.
(14:12):
One thing that one of the big reasons that feral
children has really kind of kept the interest of science
over the years, especially starting in about the eighteenth century
on is that they provide this the idea that they
provide a window into human nature. Right, They're like a
natural laboratory. Nobody's gonna say, hey, get that kid away
(14:34):
from its parents. It's one and a half years old.
Now throw it out into the forest, and then we'll
come back and get it in twelve years and see
what happens with it. You just can't do that. Even
back in the eighteenth century, they wouldn't have done something
like that. It was just too unethical, right, Yeah, So
the idea that there are children that this actually happened
to through you know, no scientist's fault. They can be
(14:58):
studied and they could answer conceivably some questions. And some
of the questions are things like language acquisition, like do
we go through what's called a critical period where we
either learn language or we don't, And if we don't,
then we've and we missed that window. We'll never be
able to learn language even a native language, let alone
(15:18):
a second language like you and me are having trouble
with these days. And then another is well, basically any
any way that they differ from a normal kid, like
their behaviors there, the way they carry themselves, all this
stuff you could say this clearly stands for nature or nurture. Bam,
(15:42):
that's right. And when these kids are out, at least
the ones with the animals, they become as much like
these animals and sometimes even physically as as they can.
They a lot of times, like even the dog boy
would bark. There's another a dog girl that we'll talk
about later, she would bark. Some would chirp like birds.
(16:02):
Sometimes they would run on all fours like a dog,
or clean themselves like a cat, and they would eat
raw meat. They would sleep on the floor because of
the way, like you know, going all fours, their bodies
would actually change in a lot of cases, like their
knees would become just super tough from running around on
their knees, or their teeth would become sharp from eating
(16:25):
bones like an animal. So sometimes they were super fast,
sometimes they might and a lot of this stuff is anecdotal,
but you've heard stories about them developing even like keener
senses of smell that they're animals that they live with have,
which is amazing. Yeah, there was a kid named Jean
Delige who is five in Liege, Belgium, which is why
(16:48):
he's called John of Liege. But he and his whole
village moved to the woods because war was taking place,
and once the war subsided and they moved back to
their village, Jean stayed and over time he became like
a feral child, and he was known to be able
to root out like truffles and stuff from the bases
(17:08):
of trees just with his nose. Again, it's anecdotal, but
it's a pretty good story. Yeah, And I mean some
of them could climb trees like an animal, or sleep
in a tree. Some could run on all fours faster
than their counterparts could run on two legs. So the
really remarkable stories over time that have been collected. But
(17:30):
again the problem is this, these are a lot of
these stories, like Jean Deligia's story comes from the sixteen twenties,
so there are some modern ones, but there's plenty of
ones that came between this the eighteenth century, the seventeenth century,
and like the nineteenth century or even early twentieth century.
(17:50):
And the stories are almost invariably so fantastic that they
defy belief. Yeah right, especially if you're a scientist. Start
hearing about these things like so, wait, the kid could
outrun a human, but on all fours. That doesn't make
any sense. It's just basically not possible. And if there
(18:11):
were enough people who are eyewitnesses to this and who
documented it independently, then maybe it would get some credence.
So there's this whole problem here where feral children the
stories are so fantastic that science wants to believe it,
but they don't know what to believe. And it does
turn out that there's actually been plenty of cases of
fraud over the years where I mean, somebody said, hey,
(18:33):
I think the best way to get famous is to
make up a feral child story. So I'm going to
do that. Yeah, and one dude, foresure did that. Mister
j Al Singh in the nineteen twenties found two young girls,
a toddler eighteen months old and an eight year old
in India and claim they were raised by wolves, named
(18:56):
them Amala and Kamala, and said they prefer raw meat,
walk on all fours, they howl at the moon. I
can't get them to walk upright or speak, you know,
like a human being would speak. I was about say,
speak English, but it was India, sure, uh. And they
had books written about them and it was sort of
a big media sensation until people started poking around and said, well,
(19:20):
these girls are real, but you know what, they weren't
raised black wolves at all. They actually had developmental and
birth defects, and he would eventually admit that, and then
we start learning that in a lot of these cases,
although not all, a lot of these cases are kids
with autism or or other developmental birth defects that they
(19:44):
just maybe at the time didn't know how to deal
with or how to categorize, or just would straight up
lie about. Yeah, there's there's this this line in here
that says that the the investigation into feral children's kind
of revealed that you could also call feral children's stories
stories of amazing survival of attempted and fanticide. Basically that
(20:07):
that accounts in some people's minds, and this is not
a new idea. Going back a couple hundred years, some
people have said, you know what, I think, I think
all of the stories of feral children are probably true.
But they weren't really raised by wolves, or they weren't
necessarily raised by wolves, or they hadn't adopted wolf like behavior.
They were kids who had cognitive impairments and intellectual disabilities,
(20:30):
who had been left to die and friend for themselves
in the woods by their parents, had grown wild and
then were Somebody came across them five or ten years
later and mistook them for a wolf boy or an
ostrich boy or a wolf girl or whatever animal you
want to call it, or loss opso man. Some people
think that accounts for basically all stories of all of
(20:54):
the older stories of feral children. I think that's definitely debatable,
but that's when one camp. Yeah, here's another case. Misha
the Wolf Girl nineteen ninety seven, Monique Misha Difonesca. Even
though she's not Italian, she actually published her memoirs about
the Holocaust called Misha Colin and memoir of the Holocaust
(21:17):
years basically you mean her memoirs, that's right, memories. She
said that Nazis killed her parents in Brussels when she
was seven. She set off on her own through Europe,
ended up in the Ukraine, and then a pair of
wolves brought her in and she lived with them for years.
(21:41):
Published this story. It was a big sensation, and like
I said, this was in the nineties. It turns out
she made it all up, which was I mean disappointing
in that she could have been a real good case
study and ended up just lying about it all. Yeah.
She said that she told the Belgian press that her
(22:01):
she had made it up, but that her story was
her way of coping with what had happened to her.
In reality, like her parents had been killed during World
War Two, but her grandfather raised her and by all
accounts he was not a wolf at all, just a
dude with a beard. Yeah. There was another famous case
that's not necessarily fraud, but just isn't very well documented.
(22:24):
A woman named Marina Chapman who supposedly was left in
the woods after a kidnapping that went bad and was
raised by monkeys and eventually became a housewife in England
and published her story with the help of her daughter.
I think again, in the nineties, the nineties must have
been super hot for feral children memoirs. I guess that
(22:47):
was probably some stupid Jerry Springer or something. I'll bet
it was. The people were you know, it was his influence,
the Springer influence. Yeah, should we talk about should we
take a break of talk about Peter the wild Boy first?
I think Pete deserves his due before the break. All right,
we'll talk about Peter the Wild Boy. Then this was
a true one, because there are a few cases which
(23:09):
are verified. This is the summer of seventeen twenty five
in the forest of Hertzwold, near Hamil in northern Germany,
which we know has no bodies of water near it.
This landlot, he was about twelve years old, walked on
all fours, fed on grass. He would run up trees.
(23:32):
He could not speak the language, and then he became
hereto known as the wild Boy of Hamilon, and achieved
such fame at the time. After he went to the
house of Correction for a little while, the king, the
Duke of Hanover and King of the UK, said, George said,
you know, bring him to me. Basically, they trot him
(23:56):
out there like a spectacle, essentially, dress him up in
a little boy's outfit, sit him down at a table,
and of course he acts like an animal. And then
George is like, you know, take him away. He discussed
me right, so he wasn't like. It wasn't like put
him back in the woods. Once he was brought to court,
(24:18):
he was under the King's care, and he was they
attempted to tutor him. Not only could he not speak German.
He couldn't he couldn't speak any language. He just basically
grunted right, But he was basically under the royal largess.
After that point, they baptized him, they dressed him up,
(24:38):
they cleaned him up, they tried everything they could to
teach him. But eventually they were like this, this kid
can't be taught. We don't know what we're doing. We
can't get through to him. So let's send him over
to London. Apparently they'd heard about him in London, because
I mean, you noticed that the Duke of Hanover in
Germany was also the same person who was the King
of the United Kingdom. Didn't that seem odd to you? No? Okay, well,
(25:04):
at any rate, he had a connection to London. So
London heard about Peter the Wild Boy and they went
crazy for him. They're like, send him over here if
you guys are sick of them. So Peter the Wild
Boy made his way over to London and became like
a sensation, but basically had like the same experience there.
Everybody wanted to be around him. They saw what he
was actually like and they were like, Okay, I don't
(25:25):
want to be around this kid any longer. Because he's
grossing me out. Well, yeah, except for the Princess of Wales.
Caroline said I want him and give him to me,
and so they did, and she persuaded the King to
allow Peter to move into her place in the West End,
and he was basically like a pet for her. Yeah,
(25:47):
he would still insist on sleeping on the floor. They
would dress him up again in his little green and
red suit every day like little Lord Fauntleroy still tried
to tutor him, baptize him, taught him the manners of
the day. They taught him to bow and to kiss
the hands of the ladies in the court, and he
was a sensation there for a while and was the
(26:10):
talk of the town. And they even painted a very
famous painting of him and put it on the King's
grand staircase at Kensington Palace. Yeah. So again though he
kind of I guess, lost his luster as far as
the courtiers were concerned, and he was sent off to
live on a farm, and again he was cared for
(26:30):
by the Crown. I think he got like a thirty
five pound pension for the rest of his life, thirty
five pounds a year maybe, And he was just taken
care of by a kindly old farm owner. The problem
is is he would well, he had a good life.
Supposedly he liked gin a lot, right, yeah, man, and
he would clap and sway to music and dance basically
(26:53):
until he would just fall over. He'd be so tired.
So he was like me, Yeah, he was having a
good time out in the country. I think it was
definitely more his speed than say, like London. The problem
was he would wander off sometimes, so they eventually after
he was arrested a couple times and thought to be
somebody who was undermining the state like a spy. Basically,
(27:14):
he was fitted with a leather collar that basically gave
instructions to anybody who found him if they brought him
back to this farm, they would be rewarded for their troubles.
And he lived a long life still. Yeah, he died
at like seventy two years old in seventeen eighty five.
And the story actually has an interesting ending. Not too
(27:37):
long ago, a historian named Lucy Worsley did some investigating
and saw this painting that we mentioned at Kingington Palace
and said, hold on a minute, I think he may
have actually had this been suffering from Pitt's Hopkins Pitt
Hopkins syndrome, and it's an intellectual disability and character rise
(28:00):
by developmental delay, breathing problems, seizures, epilepsy, and these facial
features that it looks like he had in this painting,
like he was short, he had coarse hair, droopy eyelids,
thick lips and club fingers and everything kind of led
people to think, well, wait a minute, this wasn't a
(28:21):
fairal child at all. Again, it's another case of mistaken
developmental delay. Yeah, that's what they think. Unbelievable, it really is.
Now you want to take a break, Yeah, we'll take
a break and talk about a pretty remarkable story, the
story of Oksana Malaya, the Ukrainian dog girl. And okay, Chuck,
(29:06):
we're back and we're in Ukraine. Now. I don't know
if you noticed. It's not bad. So there's this girl.
She's probably in her mid to late twenties by now,
but at the now today, yes, I think she's like
thirty five. Oh really, I thought this article is way
more recent than that. She was born in November in
(29:27):
nineteen eighty three. Oh okay, yeah, she's old. So this wow,
this is a very old article. So at the time
of this visit with her that the article is based on,
she was twenty three and she was living in Ukraine,
but she had been raised on a village, on a farm,
(29:48):
actually in a village called Novaya Blagoveshenka nailed that one too,
I think, so in Ukraine, and she was raised there,
not by her parents, who apparently they discarded her like
so much human garbage, but she was raised by dogs,
a pack of dogs that lived on the farm. After
her parents left her out one night and didn't bring
(30:10):
her in, she just stayed outside for basically the next
I think five years, living with the dogs who took
her under their care. Yeah, her parents were severe alcoholics
and didn't even notice she was gone for a while,
and so yeah, she stayed there. She lost what little
(30:32):
She was three years old, so she only had a
little bit of language at that point anyway, so she
had tapped into a bit of that critical period, but
then lost that after becoming a member of this dog pack. Yep.
So again for five years she lived like this, basically
living on raw meat and scraps. Being a member. I
(30:52):
didn't get the impression that she was the pack leader,
but a member of the pack of dogs, and finally
a neighbor's like, okay, it's been five years. I got
to call somebody. So the neighbor called the authorities, and
the authorities came out and got her, and apparently they
didn't do a very good job documenting when she was found.
(31:13):
But later on the people who worked with her all
basically very roundly said, like, yes, this girl behaved exactly
like a dog, which she slept on the floor, she
walked on all fours, she ate raw meat, she would
bark at you, she would she just had the demeanor
of a dog. And so this is actually one of
(31:34):
the more documented cases. It's also a case that turns
out was it turned out about as well as you
could hope for from a situation like that, because she
managed to, like ivan, to be inculturated into human culture,
human society over the course of years. Yeah, I mean
(31:56):
she I don't know if she's marry now, but she
got a boyfriend at one point, learned to speak intelligently.
Seems about as well adjusted as you can be. At
the time of this article, which was now a while ago,
she was working on a dairy farm. But at this time,
which was like I said, this was quite a few
(32:17):
years ago that they wrote this, but she was deemed
to have the mental capacity of a six year old
because a child's college named Lynn Frye ended up doing
a lot of interviews and tests with her, and she
had a low, a dangerously low boredom threshold. Could count,
but couldn't add, could not read or spell her name correctly.
(32:39):
And she said that she would still like when she
was just feeling bad or whatever, she would still go
off in the woods by herself because that made her
feel better and more calm. Right, And so her case
is one of the ones that's pointed to is evidence
that there is a critical period and that it can
(32:59):
be got and back if it started because she was
beginning to be verbal, like you said, when she was
left by her parents, and then she managed to get
it back. So they think that that's evidence for the
critical window period. And you can see videos on YouTube
and pictures of Alexander the Dog Girl, and it's pretty
(33:20):
remarkable to see. She was on a Ukrainian TV show
and I think it ended up. I think Discovery Channel
did a special on her that used that footage. I
don't think they did any new footage but just really
really amazing to look at the footage of her running
around like that. Yeah, it was like she knew that
(33:40):
that was socially unacceptable, they were saying, but she could
still do it. Yeah. That also is a check in
the box of people who say, like, there's this thing
where if that critical window is if it happens to
pass over a period where the kid is being encultured
by a non human culture, sure they could conceivably adopt
(34:02):
the behaviors or learn those behaviors just like they would
learn human behaviors, but they're not surrounded or interacting with humans.
They are surrounded by and interacting with wolves or ostriches
or chickens or whatever, so they're actually they're not mimicking it,
they're actually learning this behavior. So goes one school of
thought that is kind of a subgroup of the critical
(34:23):
window people. Yeah, and there's some people that have thought,
I think incorrectly. There was this one psychologist named Bruno
Bettelheim that said, basically, all of these examples are children
with autism who are abandoned. Sadly, a lot of them
probably were, but there have definitely been enough cases that
weren't to know that it's not always the case. Yeah,
(34:45):
So as it stands now, apparently the sciences science believe
that for a little while, the Bruno Bettlheim theory that
it was just all cases of mistaken identity were just
children with cognitive impairments or developmental disabilities who'd been abandoned
by their parents. But they're I think the science, the
(35:09):
scientific community who studies this kind of thing are kind
of coming around to say, like, well, you know, we
actually don't know, and that's probably not that's probably just
too broad of a statement. That probably covers a lot
of them, but clearly it doesn't cover all of them,
because Ivan Mushikov was not cognitively impaired and he was
(35:31):
clearly a documented feral child. There's another There was another
one from the eighteenth century the seventeen thirties. I think
Memmy LeBlanc, who showed up in Champagne, France, and they
taught her to speak French. She wasn't cognitively impaired, and
she eventually told them that she gave them enough clues
(35:51):
to figure out that she was a Huron Indian who
been captured by slavers and escaped from a shipwreck and
made her way to France and showed up as a
wild child there, so she wasn't cognitively impaired at all.
There's there's just too many examples of ones that are
probably true that weren't cognitively impaired, but we're still clearly feral,
(36:14):
feral children. Yeah, to say Bruno Bettlheim was right. Yeah,
I mean it's a shame because there is so much
you could learn. It's a shame that so many of
these stories turn out to be dead ends or these
really sad stories or fakes. Yeah, because if they were true,
we'd be able to say this is a great, perfect
natural laboratory for human development. Yeah, but they're just there.
(36:37):
We don't know enough to base it on that, And
that's not necessarily the case across the board. Like j
al Singh and Kamala and Amala, they wrote like textbooks
on their case Unfounded it turned out. So I think
science has kind of learned to say this is really interesting,
but we don't know enough about it to really extrapolate
onto the larger the larger human race. Yeah, yeah, but
(37:01):
it's still pretty interesting, dude. Yeah, I had a script idea.
I'm not going to reveal any more of those on
the show, though, because I think people are ripping me off. Okay, yeah,
definitely the Sharknado people did. But I will just well, no,
I'm not gonna say anything. Okay, don't don't keep it
under your hat, and we'll announce it when the thing's
(37:24):
in production, which will never happen. You don't know, so
you got anything else, No, let me say this. I
will sell this idea for one thousand dollars to a
Hollywood big shot. Oh wow wow, but you have to
pay before you hear the idea. I think that's good man,
because those Hollywood big shots they will they'll trick you.
(37:46):
We'll try it. They'll be like, go ahead and tell me. Okay, Well,
if you want to know more about feral children, there's
actually a lot more cases that we didn't get to cover,
like Shamdeo who was raised by wolves, and Suji Kumar,
the chicken boy of Fuji. They all have pretty astounding names,
but when you start to dig in, they're actually all
pretty depressing cases. But it's really interesting stuff. So dig
(38:08):
into feral children by jumping onto your favorite search engine today,
because oh no, there is an article on how stuff
works isn't there. Yeah, well you can check that one
out too. Yeah. And since I said that, it's time
for listener mayo, I'm gotta call this one proud pothead
(38:28):
anonymous proud podhead, so he's not that proud. Hey, guys,
long time listener. I want to let you know I'm
a chronic pot user for most of my life. I'm
not condoning the use of marijuana. Individual results may vary,
but here's my story in my mid thirties of smoke
pot on an almost daily basis since I was sixteen.
I have no medical reasons to use it, and I
(38:51):
am also not in a state word as legal. But
I enjoy it similar to the reason people enjoy alcohol.
I am not a frequent drinker. I enjoy nice bourbon
every now and then. If I can't recall the last
time I was drunk, it's just not my cup of tea.
I view pot as a luxury, though, so if money
becomes tight, it's the first thing to go. I did
not smoke for an entire year to save money for
my wedding. I smoked daily and then would not advise
(39:14):
us to many smokers. But most days I start and
end the day with a bowl. Almost ninety five percent
of the time I'm driving, I'm stoned. All right, dude,
maybe you shouldn't say that, yeah, or do that. But
I've never been in an automobile accident, never wrecked a car,
never received a ticket, never follow an entrance claim. I've
never damaged any vehicles, own a house I bought my
(39:36):
mid twenties, drive a nice sports car, pay my Texas, Texas,
pay my taxes. He pays his taxes in Texas. I've
never been in trouble with a law and have a
successful career as a chef, worked long, hard hours. Most
people would enjoy drink after a long day. I enjoy
a bullpack. That's funny, Like he could have just summed
all this up originally by saying, hey, guys, I'm a chef.
(39:59):
The no, A lot of chefs are drunks. Oh yeah yeah,
and a lot of them are just you know, regular, awesome,
normal people without vices. Yeah, actually that's not true. All
chefs have vices, hardcore gambling, et cetera. I would do
a lot of chefs. They're a different breed. They're good people, though,
(40:20):
Oh sure, for sure. Yeah. Anyway, back to the email,
But in my state, I'm still viewed as a criminal,
which to me makes no sense. Although I never travel
around with my pot, I do have to buy it
and drive it with it home. I'm always incredibly nervous.
I could end up in cuffs during that drive. I'm
glad times are changing, though, and I wait the day
when I can smoke I legally in my state. I
(40:41):
just want to say thank you for not putting Pat pot.
What is going on with me? Pass from Texas. We
just cracked the coat subliminally, not putting pot in the
same category as methamphetamines and speaking the facts rather than
a bunch of untrue propaganda. Yeah, except when it comes
to chefs, and we're just paint everybody with the same broadbrush.
Chef's newer. Thanks Pat from Texas. We appreciate that letter,
(41:06):
that anonymous letter. If you want to get in touch
of this anonymously, we will keep your name secret. How
about that? Tell us whatever? You can tweet to us
at Josh M. Clark or s Y s K podcast.
I also have a website you can visit called ru
Series Clark dot com. Chuck is on Facebook at Facebook
dot com, slash Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's an
(41:28):
official Facebook page for Stuff you Should Know too, called
Facebook dot com slash stuff you Should Know. You can
send all of us an email to Stuff podcast at
HowStuffWorks dot com and has always joined us at our
homeown the web, stuff Youshould Know dot com. For more
on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks dot
(41:50):
com
Hey, everybody, we are going on tour in twenty eighteen,
and where are we going? On April fourth, we're gonna
be in Boston at the Wilburg. You can get tickets
at the Wilber dot com, Chuck. And then on April fifth,
we're gonna be in DC at the Lincoln Theater and
you can get tickets for that at ticket fly, that's right.
And then we're going to two new cities, right yep.
On May twenty second, we're gonna be in Saint Louis.
(00:20):
You can get tickets on Ticketmaster. And on May twenty third,
we're gonna be in Cleveland and you can get tickets
there at playhouse Square dot org. And then there's one more, Chuck,
that's right. We're gonna wrap it up in Denver, specifically Inglewood,
Colorado at the Gothic Theater on June twenty eighth, and
possibly adding a show on the twenty seven. Stay tuned
for that, yep. And you can get ticks at axs
(00:41):
dot com. So come see us live. We'll have a
good time. Come on out. Welcome to stuff you should
know from HowStuffWorks dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
Son Josh Clark's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, I almost forgot
(01:02):
my name for a second. There's Jerry. It is a
little weird. Jerry Jerome the Germster Roland kaboom, how you
doing fine? Jerry stops snorting. I have a complete whip
(01:23):
flash over this topic. Ok of what and you know
why I have? I have just doing this topic after
what the story is behind it? Yeah, I still kind
of like shudder. So should we even talk about her twitching? Yeah? No,
here's the story is. And I think it was two
(01:47):
years ago now, rightly, yeah, two years ago in March,
it'll be two years At south By Southwest in Austin, Texas.
We were going to do a live podcast, which we've
done there before. It's always been great. Yes for this one.
We had a bar that we were doing it in
that was set up with a lot of events all
(02:09):
day long, and we thought, Okay, no big deal, we'd
like bars, we're closer to the booze, no props. But
what they failed to do and failed to tell us
was that they did not clear the room after the
hippie jam band beforehand, and so what ended up happening
was we ended up doing a live podcast in front
(02:32):
of a noisy, crowded bar full of drunks, with about
seventeen stuff you should know, fans upfront trying to listen,
turning around and shushing the people at the bar. And
it was about as fruitless as a shift could get.
And this is the part I feel though worst about
a couple of hundred real deal stuff you should know,
(02:54):
listeners standing out on the sidewalk in the hot sun,
unable to get in. Yeah, it was all around maybe
our third worst show, but I know VidCon is up
there in the top three, right, Yeah, I'm just putting
a phantom show in to hold the number two slot
because I'm sure there's one I've blocked out too. Just
so you guys know, VidCon and was bad because we
(03:16):
did a show in front of about seventeen people maybe,
and we worked with eleven of them, although we did
get to meet Taijon day that day. Oh true. So anyway,
we did feral children in front of a crowded, noisy
bar full of drunks, and you and I we've been
doing this for so long and we have such great
(03:37):
you know, unspoken eye contract eye contact chemistry. Sh don't
speak it that I remember looking over at you, and
our eyes both said skip through as much of this
as possible. Let's get the heck out of here as
soon as we can. I cocked it. We did it
in like twenty two minutes. I believe it was supposed
to be at least forty five. We were talking like
(03:59):
the guy from the old FedEx ads from like the
early eighties. Oh man. It was truly truly a miserable experience.
So it's taken a full two years until I could
wrap my head around actually doing this again. Yep. So
here we are. We're gonna do it, Chuck, and it's
gonna be great because it's just the three of us today. Yeah.
And that's also where we had that too drunk guy,
(04:22):
Oh yeah, remember him. That was a bad jam all around,
and that's where I lost my hat. That was the
worst trip ever, what's really bad. It really just sucked
all the way around. We considered burning Austin to the
ground on the way out of town, but I did so.
We're glad we did because we've been back to Austin
a couple of times and we're always happy to be there. Now,
(04:42):
this is not Austin's fault. No, but we just didn't
want to have any memories of it. Aye, I hear you.
So we're talking fearal children. And even if you were
at that show, this is probably really the first time
you'll hear it, So it doesn't matter, and we're gonna
start in Moscow. In the late nineties, there was a big,
(05:04):
big problem that had developed from the dissolution of the USSR,
namely that the fabric of society had largely disintegrated in
a lot of ways, and one of the results of
this was that there were a lot of families that
were broken up for one reason or another, and a
lot of very young children from what I see, something
like two million of them living on the streets of Russia.
(05:28):
In Moscow, of course, being the biggest city in Russia,
it had the largest problem. And one of those kids
was a little boy named Ivan Mushikov and nailed it sure.
And Ivan was six in nineteen ninety eight, they estimate,
(05:50):
And he was a little different from the rest of
the children living on the street at the time because
he was what you would was widely considered and actually
example of a feral child, because not only was he
living by his own wits, from the age of four
to six on the streets. He was leading a pack
of stray dogs that protected him as well, and he
(06:11):
had been fully absorbed into their pack, into their society. Yeah, so,
as the story goes, like you said, he left home
at four and was basically just another one of the
begging children on the streets until he started to feed
a little bit of the food he would get to
(06:33):
these dogs, and the dogs they trusted him, they befriended him,
and you know, you hang out with dogs long enough
and give enough food, all of a sudden they say, hey,
you know, we're pals. And they literally took him in
as one of their own and would show him, would
guide him to the warm places to sleep at night, underground,
(06:54):
your heated pipes and things like that. They and they
lived together for a couple of years to the point
where the cops could not get close to this kid
because of these dogs. Right, So they finally apparently baited
some traps and got the dogs just systematically away from Ivan,
and they finally had him cornered, and he snapped and
(07:16):
growled and barked at the social workers who were advancing
on him to get him and to take them off
of the streets and into a group home, and they
were finally successful. But they said, like, this kid was
acting like a dog with its back against the wall,
and they got their hands on him. They put him
into a group home, and he was actually a success story.
(07:38):
He managed to become enculturated into human society as a
result of just being taken over by the state. But
he is one of these He stands as one of
the very few documented examples of a feral child. I mean,
(08:00):
there have been stories all throughout history people have been
fascinated with this notion, whether it was Mowgli in the
Jungle Book, or stories of baboon girls and ostrich boys
and bird girls. And then you know, they give them
these names because that's who they eventually take up with,
and they're very compelling stories. But and in fact, I
(08:23):
think at one point there's a taxonomist named Carl Andaeis
who he's credited who created the tree of life. He
actually established a whole separate category Homo ferus, which was
literally a different variety of human being because they didn't
even think at one point that they counted as humans. Yeah,
there was a time when this is all very much
(08:45):
discussed and talked about what exactly feral children were who
they represented in One of the competing theories is that
they were like basically like sasquatch. Like if we found sasquatch,
you'd be like, oh, there's we need to expand the
tree of life to inclin. Dude, these cousins to homies
Homo sapiens. That's right. So Romulus and Remus were Another
(09:08):
very famous story too that Romulus, the founder of Rome.
He and his brother Romulus and Remus were cast out
by their uncle, their wicked uncle, and they were raised
by wolves, I believe, according to legend. So yeah, there's
this long standing legend of children of wild children, feral
(09:30):
children being raised. But for the most part, it has
existed in legend. It's not like there's all these great
well documented cases. There's just enough documented cases. There's just
enough tantalizing evidence that science has remained interested in this
idea of what are feral children that it's just kept
(09:54):
it's kept it going, and still to this day we
don't really have enough evidence to say definitively feral children
are this, or more to the point, feral children tell
us this about ourselves, about human development, But there are
documented cases. Ivan Mushakov is not the only one. Yeah,
(10:15):
and this could happen in a lot of ways. What
would cause a child to become separated from their family
and end up with a pack of monkeys or wolves
or ostrich It sort of depends. It was one girl
name Emiyata Emiyati who survived a boat capsizing. It killed
her friends and left her stranded in nineteen seventy seven
(10:38):
in the Sumatran forest. Eventually, she was found in the
early eighties living with orangutangs orangutung. I think she was
living alone. She was mistaken for an orangutang. Oh I
thought she had taken up with them. No, that was
what I saw. That actually makes her kind of different
as far as feral children concerned. She was living by herself. Oh. Interesting.
(11:00):
Other ones have been taken in by everything from pigs.
This girl in China, Wang Shingfing was discovered living with pigs.
She had been nursing on a pig, later fed as
a pig. And that's one of the more depressing cases
of straight up abuse from parents. Yeah, her parents were
(11:23):
unable to raise her. They were both cognitively impaired and
they basically left her with the pigs out back, and
the pigs ended up raising her for years. There was
another girl, and this is if this is even more depressing, frankly,
there was a girl named Jeanie that was a pseudonym.
Obviously I don't know what her real name was, but
(11:45):
she's very well known as Genie, who was raised back
in the nineteen thirties or forties, I believe, locked in
a closet for the first ten from age two to
age twelve, she was kept away from hum in society.
So rather than being kept away from human society by
(12:05):
being stranded in the wilderness or being raised by animals,
she was left by herself and as a result, she
developed a feral nature as well. So there's basically like
three categories that develop when you're looking at stories of
feral children, and Genie would be one that's called isolated.
(12:25):
There's also or no, she would be confined. Imi Yati
would be isolated where she was just stranded in the
woods and lived by herself. And then the third category
would be among animals like Ivan Mishchikov. Yeah, and we're
gonna talk mainly about the ones who live among animals.
Because the other two are just some of the you know,
(12:46):
worst cases of abuse and neglect you could imagine. And
it's not like the ones who live among animals are fun.
But at least they have their pack of dogs and
they're not like chained in a closet, you know, right,
that's the the weird silver lining it. What would you
want to be taken in? What kind of animal? Dogs
(13:07):
would be pretty good? Yeah, yeah, you know, lots of apsos. Yeah,
I could probably become the leader of that pack. I
think monkeys would be pretty great. They would be. But
they're also man. Those things will bite you. Well, they'll
bite their own, do they It depends if you say
something wrong. I would get along. They would they would
(13:28):
just pick my nets and they would love me as
their own. In my jungle book story, do you wait
a minute? Do you have knits now? Occasionally? Oh? Man,
should we take a break? Yeah, I think we should.
All right, let's take a break, and we're going to
talk more about feral children right after this, So Chuck.
(14:12):
One thing that one of the big reasons that feral
children has really kind of kept the interest of science
over the years, especially starting in about the eighteenth century
on is that they provide this the idea that they
provide a window into human nature. Right, They're like a
natural laboratory. Nobody's gonna say, hey, get that kid away
(14:34):
from its parents. It's one and a half years old.
Now throw it out into the forest, and then we'll
come back and get it in twelve years and see
what happens with it. You just can't do that. Even
back in the eighteenth century, they wouldn't have done something
like that. It was just too unethical, right, Yeah, So
the idea that there are children that this actually happened
to through you know, no scientist's fault. They can be
(14:58):
studied and they could answer conceivably some questions. And some
of the questions are things like language acquisition, like do
we go through what's called a critical period where we
either learn language or we don't, And if we don't,
then we've and we missed that window. We'll never be
able to learn language even a native language, let alone
(15:18):
a second language like you and me are having trouble
with these days. And then another is well, basically any
any way that they differ from a normal kid, like
their behaviors there, the way they carry themselves, all this
stuff you could say this clearly stands for nature or nurture. Bam,
(15:42):
that's right. And when these kids are out, at least
the ones with the animals, they become as much like
these animals and sometimes even physically as as they can.
They a lot of times, like even the dog boy
would bark. There's another a dog girl that we'll talk
about later, she would bark. Some would chirp like birds.
(16:02):
Sometimes they would run on all fours like a dog,
or clean themselves like a cat, and they would eat
raw meat. They would sleep on the floor because of
the way, like you know, going all fours, their bodies
would actually change in a lot of cases, like their
knees would become just super tough from running around on
their knees, or their teeth would become sharp from eating
(16:25):
bones like an animal. So sometimes they were super fast,
sometimes they might and a lot of this stuff is anecdotal,
but you've heard stories about them developing even like keener
senses of smell that they're animals that they live with have,
which is amazing. Yeah, there was a kid named Jean
Delige who is five in Liege, Belgium, which is why
(16:48):
he's called John of Liege. But he and his whole
village moved to the woods because war was taking place,
and once the war subsided and they moved back to
their village, Jean stayed and over time he became like
a feral child, and he was known to be able
to root out like truffles and stuff from the bases
(17:08):
of trees just with his nose. Again, it's anecdotal, but
it's a pretty good story. Yeah, And I mean some
of them could climb trees like an animal, or sleep
in a tree. Some could run on all fours faster
than their counterparts could run on two legs. So the
really remarkable stories over time that have been collected. But
(17:30):
again the problem is this, these are a lot of
these stories, like Jean Deligia's story comes from the sixteen twenties,
so there are some modern ones, but there's plenty of
ones that came between this the eighteenth century, the seventeenth century,
and like the nineteenth century or even early twentieth century.
(17:50):
And the stories are almost invariably so fantastic that they
defy belief. Yeah right, especially if you're a scientist. Start
hearing about these things like so, wait, the kid could
outrun a human, but on all fours. That doesn't make
any sense. It's just basically not possible. And if there
(18:11):
were enough people who are eyewitnesses to this and who
documented it independently, then maybe it would get some credence.
So there's this whole problem here where feral children the
stories are so fantastic that science wants to believe it,
but they don't know what to believe. And it does
turn out that there's actually been plenty of cases of
fraud over the years where I mean, somebody said, hey,
(18:33):
I think the best way to get famous is to
make up a feral child story. So I'm going to
do that. Yeah, and one dude, foresure did that. Mister
j Al Singh in the nineteen twenties found two young girls,
a toddler eighteen months old and an eight year old
in India and claim they were raised by wolves, named
(18:56):
them Amala and Kamala, and said they prefer raw meat,
walk on all fours, they howl at the moon. I
can't get them to walk upright or speak, you know,
like a human being would speak. I was about say,
speak English, but it was India, sure, uh. And they
had books written about them and it was sort of
a big media sensation until people started poking around and said, well,
(19:20):
these girls are real, but you know what, they weren't
raised black wolves at all. They actually had developmental and
birth defects, and he would eventually admit that, and then
we start learning that in a lot of these cases,
although not all, a lot of these cases are kids
with autism or or other developmental birth defects that they
(19:44):
just maybe at the time didn't know how to deal
with or how to categorize, or just would straight up
lie about. Yeah, there's there's this this line in here
that says that the the investigation into feral children's kind
of revealed that you could also call feral children's stories
stories of amazing survival of attempted and fanticide. Basically that
(20:07):
that accounts in some people's minds, and this is not
a new idea. Going back a couple hundred years, some
people have said, you know what, I think, I think
all of the stories of feral children are probably true.
But they weren't really raised by wolves, or they weren't
necessarily raised by wolves, or they hadn't adopted wolf like behavior.
They were kids who had cognitive impairments and intellectual disabilities,
(20:30):
who had been left to die and friend for themselves
in the woods by their parents, had grown wild and
then were Somebody came across them five or ten years
later and mistook them for a wolf boy or an
ostrich boy or a wolf girl or whatever animal you
want to call it, or loss opso man. Some people
think that accounts for basically all stories of all of
(20:54):
the older stories of feral children. I think that's definitely debatable,
but that's when one camp. Yeah, here's another case. Misha
the Wolf Girl nineteen ninety seven, Monique Misha Difonesca. Even
though she's not Italian, she actually published her memoirs about
the Holocaust called Misha Colin and memoir of the Holocaust
(21:17):
years basically you mean her memoirs, that's right, memories. She
said that Nazis killed her parents in Brussels when she
was seven. She set off on her own through Europe,
ended up in the Ukraine, and then a pair of
wolves brought her in and she lived with them for years.
(21:41):
Published this story. It was a big sensation, and like
I said, this was in the nineties. It turns out
she made it all up, which was I mean disappointing
in that she could have been a real good case
study and ended up just lying about it all. Yeah.
She said that she told the Belgian press that her
(22:01):
she had made it up, but that her story was
her way of coping with what had happened to her.
In reality, like her parents had been killed during World
War Two, but her grandfather raised her and by all
accounts he was not a wolf at all, just a
dude with a beard. Yeah. There was another famous case
that's not necessarily fraud, but just isn't very well documented.
(22:24):
A woman named Marina Chapman who supposedly was left in
the woods after a kidnapping that went bad and was
raised by monkeys and eventually became a housewife in England
and published her story with the help of her daughter.
I think again, in the nineties, the nineties must have
been super hot for feral children memoirs. I guess that
(22:47):
was probably some stupid Jerry Springer or something. I'll bet
it was. The people were you know, it was his influence,
the Springer influence. Yeah, should we talk about should we
take a break of talk about Peter the wild Boy first?
I think Pete deserves his due before the break. All right,
we'll talk about Peter the Wild Boy. Then this was
a true one, because there are a few cases which
(23:09):
are verified. This is the summer of seventeen twenty five
in the forest of Hertzwold, near Hamil in northern Germany,
which we know has no bodies of water near it.
This landlot, he was about twelve years old, walked on
all fours, fed on grass. He would run up trees.
(23:32):
He could not speak the language, and then he became
hereto known as the wild Boy of Hamilon, and achieved
such fame at the time. After he went to the
house of Correction for a little while, the king, the
Duke of Hanover and King of the UK, said, George said,
you know, bring him to me. Basically, they trot him
(23:56):
out there like a spectacle, essentially, dress him up in
a little boy's outfit, sit him down at a table,
and of course he acts like an animal. And then
George is like, you know, take him away. He discussed
me right, so he wasn't like. It wasn't like put
him back in the woods. Once he was brought to court,
(24:18):
he was under the King's care, and he was they
attempted to tutor him. Not only could he not speak German.
He couldn't he couldn't speak any language. He just basically
grunted right, But he was basically under the royal largess.
After that point, they baptized him, they dressed him up,
(24:38):
they cleaned him up, they tried everything they could to
teach him. But eventually they were like this, this kid
can't be taught. We don't know what we're doing. We
can't get through to him. So let's send him over
to London. Apparently they'd heard about him in London, because
I mean, you noticed that the Duke of Hanover in
Germany was also the same person who was the King
of the United Kingdom. Didn't that seem odd to you? No? Okay, well,
(25:04):
at any rate, he had a connection to London. So
London heard about Peter the Wild Boy and they went
crazy for him. They're like, send him over here if
you guys are sick of them. So Peter the Wild
Boy made his way over to London and became like
a sensation, but basically had like the same experience there.
Everybody wanted to be around him. They saw what he
was actually like and they were like, Okay, I don't
(25:25):
want to be around this kid any longer. Because he's
grossing me out. Well, yeah, except for the Princess of Wales.
Caroline said I want him and give him to me,
and so they did, and she persuaded the King to
allow Peter to move into her place in the West End,
and he was basically like a pet for her. Yeah,
(25:47):
he would still insist on sleeping on the floor. They
would dress him up again in his little green and
red suit every day like little Lord Fauntleroy still tried
to tutor him, baptize him, taught him the manners of
the day. They taught him to bow and to kiss
the hands of the ladies in the court, and he
was a sensation there for a while and was the
(26:10):
talk of the town. And they even painted a very
famous painting of him and put it on the King's
grand staircase at Kensington Palace. Yeah. So again though he
kind of I guess, lost his luster as far as
the courtiers were concerned, and he was sent off to
live on a farm, and again he was cared for
(26:30):
by the Crown. I think he got like a thirty
five pound pension for the rest of his life, thirty
five pounds a year maybe, And he was just taken
care of by a kindly old farm owner. The problem
is is he would well, he had a good life.
Supposedly he liked gin a lot, right, yeah, man, and
he would clap and sway to music and dance basically
(26:53):
until he would just fall over. He'd be so tired.
So he was like me, Yeah, he was having a
good time out in the country. I think it was
definitely more his speed than say, like London. The problem
was he would wander off sometimes, so they eventually after
he was arrested a couple times and thought to be
somebody who was undermining the state like a spy. Basically,
(27:14):
he was fitted with a leather collar that basically gave
instructions to anybody who found him if they brought him
back to this farm, they would be rewarded for their troubles.
And he lived a long life still. Yeah, he died
at like seventy two years old in seventeen eighty five.
And the story actually has an interesting ending. Not too
(27:37):
long ago, a historian named Lucy Worsley did some investigating
and saw this painting that we mentioned at Kingington Palace
and said, hold on a minute, I think he may
have actually had this been suffering from Pitt's Hopkins Pitt
Hopkins syndrome, and it's an intellectual disability and character rise
(28:00):
by developmental delay, breathing problems, seizures, epilepsy, and these facial
features that it looks like he had in this painting,
like he was short, he had coarse hair, droopy eyelids,
thick lips and club fingers and everything kind of led
people to think, well, wait a minute, this wasn't a
(28:21):
fairal child at all. Again, it's another case of mistaken
developmental delay. Yeah, that's what they think. Unbelievable, it really is.
Now you want to take a break, Yeah, we'll take
a break and talk about a pretty remarkable story, the
story of Oksana Malaya, the Ukrainian dog girl. And okay, Chuck,
(29:06):
we're back and we're in Ukraine. Now. I don't know
if you noticed. It's not bad. So there's this girl.
She's probably in her mid to late twenties by now,
but at the now today, yes, I think she's like
thirty five. Oh really, I thought this article is way
more recent than that. She was born in November in
(29:27):
nineteen eighty three. Oh okay, yeah, she's old. So this wow,
this is a very old article. So at the time
of this visit with her that the article is based on,
she was twenty three and she was living in Ukraine,
but she had been raised on a village, on a farm,
(29:48):
actually in a village called Novaya Blagoveshenka nailed that one too,
I think, so in Ukraine, and she was raised there,
not by her parents, who apparently they discarded her like
so much human garbage, but she was raised by dogs,
a pack of dogs that lived on the farm. After
her parents left her out one night and didn't bring
(30:10):
her in, she just stayed outside for basically the next
I think five years, living with the dogs who took
her under their care. Yeah, her parents were severe alcoholics
and didn't even notice she was gone for a while,
and so yeah, she stayed there. She lost what little
(30:32):
She was three years old, so she only had a
little bit of language at that point anyway, so she
had tapped into a bit of that critical period, but
then lost that after becoming a member of this dog pack. Yep.
So again for five years she lived like this, basically
living on raw meat and scraps. Being a member. I
(30:52):
didn't get the impression that she was the pack leader,
but a member of the pack of dogs, and finally
a neighbor's like, okay, it's been five years. I got
to call somebody. So the neighbor called the authorities, and
the authorities came out and got her, and apparently they
didn't do a very good job documenting when she was found.
(31:13):
But later on the people who worked with her all
basically very roundly said, like, yes, this girl behaved exactly
like a dog, which she slept on the floor, she
walked on all fours, she ate raw meat, she would
bark at you, she would she just had the demeanor
of a dog. And so this is actually one of
(31:34):
the more documented cases. It's also a case that turns
out was it turned out about as well as you
could hope for from a situation like that, because she
managed to, like ivan, to be inculturated into human culture,
human society over the course of years. Yeah, I mean
(31:56):
she I don't know if she's marry now, but she
got a boyfriend at one point, learned to speak intelligently.
Seems about as well adjusted as you can be. At
the time of this article, which was now a while ago,
she was working on a dairy farm. But at this time,
which was like I said, this was quite a few
(32:17):
years ago that they wrote this, but she was deemed
to have the mental capacity of a six year old
because a child's college named Lynn Frye ended up doing
a lot of interviews and tests with her, and she
had a low, a dangerously low boredom threshold. Could count,
but couldn't add, could not read or spell her name correctly.
(32:39):
And she said that she would still like when she
was just feeling bad or whatever, she would still go
off in the woods by herself because that made her
feel better and more calm. Right, And so her case
is one of the ones that's pointed to is evidence
that there is a critical period and that it can
(32:59):
be got and back if it started because she was
beginning to be verbal, like you said, when she was
left by her parents, and then she managed to get
it back. So they think that that's evidence for the
critical window period. And you can see videos on YouTube
and pictures of Alexander the Dog Girl, and it's pretty
(33:20):
remarkable to see. She was on a Ukrainian TV show
and I think it ended up. I think Discovery Channel
did a special on her that used that footage. I
don't think they did any new footage but just really
really amazing to look at the footage of her running
around like that. Yeah, it was like she knew that
(33:40):
that was socially unacceptable, they were saying, but she could
still do it. Yeah. That also is a check in
the box of people who say, like, there's this thing
where if that critical window is if it happens to
pass over a period where the kid is being encultured
by a non human culture, sure they could conceivably adopt
(34:02):
the behaviors or learn those behaviors just like they would
learn human behaviors, but they're not surrounded or interacting with humans.
They are surrounded by and interacting with wolves or ostriches
or chickens or whatever, so they're actually they're not mimicking it,
they're actually learning this behavior. So goes one school of
thought that is kind of a subgroup of the critical
(34:23):
window people. Yeah, and there's some people that have thought,
I think incorrectly. There was this one psychologist named Bruno
Bettelheim that said, basically, all of these examples are children
with autism who are abandoned. Sadly, a lot of them
probably were, but there have definitely been enough cases that
weren't to know that it's not always the case. Yeah,
(34:45):
So as it stands now, apparently the sciences science believe
that for a little while, the Bruno Bettlheim theory that
it was just all cases of mistaken identity were just
children with cognitive impairments or developmental disabilities who'd been abandoned
by their parents. But they're I think the science, the
(35:09):
scientific community who studies this kind of thing are kind
of coming around to say, like, well, you know, we
actually don't know, and that's probably not that's probably just
too broad of a statement. That probably covers a lot
of them, but clearly it doesn't cover all of them,
because Ivan Mushikov was not cognitively impaired and he was
(35:31):
clearly a documented feral child. There's another There was another
one from the eighteenth century the seventeen thirties. I think
Memmy LeBlanc, who showed up in Champagne, France, and they
taught her to speak French. She wasn't cognitively impaired, and
she eventually told them that she gave them enough clues
(35:51):
to figure out that she was a Huron Indian who
been captured by slavers and escaped from a shipwreck and
made her way to France and showed up as a
wild child there, so she wasn't cognitively impaired at all.
There's there's just too many examples of ones that are
probably true that weren't cognitively impaired, but we're still clearly feral,
(36:14):
feral children. Yeah, to say Bruno Bettlheim was right. Yeah,
I mean it's a shame because there is so much
you could learn. It's a shame that so many of
these stories turn out to be dead ends or these
really sad stories or fakes. Yeah, because if they were true,
we'd be able to say this is a great, perfect
natural laboratory for human development. Yeah, but they're just there.
(36:37):
We don't know enough to base it on that, And
that's not necessarily the case across the board. Like j
al Singh and Kamala and Amala, they wrote like textbooks
on their case Unfounded it turned out. So I think
science has kind of learned to say this is really interesting,
but we don't know enough about it to really extrapolate
onto the larger the larger human race. Yeah, yeah, but
(37:01):
it's still pretty interesting, dude. Yeah, I had a script idea.
I'm not going to reveal any more of those on
the show, though, because I think people are ripping me off. Okay, yeah,
definitely the Sharknado people did. But I will just well, no,
I'm not gonna say anything. Okay, don't don't keep it
under your hat, and we'll announce it when the thing's
(37:24):
in production, which will never happen. You don't know, so
you got anything else, No, let me say this. I
will sell this idea for one thousand dollars to a
Hollywood big shot. Oh wow wow, but you have to
pay before you hear the idea. I think that's good man,
because those Hollywood big shots they will they'll trick you.
(37:46):
We'll try it. They'll be like, go ahead and tell me. Okay, Well,
if you want to know more about feral children, there's
actually a lot more cases that we didn't get to cover,
like Shamdeo who was raised by wolves, and Suji Kumar,
the chicken boy of Fuji. They all have pretty astounding names,
but when you start to dig in, they're actually all
pretty depressing cases. But it's really interesting stuff. So dig
(38:08):
into feral children by jumping onto your favorite search engine today,
because oh no, there is an article on how stuff
works isn't there. Yeah, well you can check that one
out too. Yeah. And since I said that, it's time
for listener mayo, I'm gotta call this one proud pothead
(38:28):
anonymous proud podhead, so he's not that proud. Hey, guys,
long time listener. I want to let you know I'm
a chronic pot user for most of my life. I'm
not condoning the use of marijuana. Individual results may vary,
but here's my story in my mid thirties of smoke
pot on an almost daily basis since I was sixteen.
I have no medical reasons to use it, and I
(38:51):
am also not in a state word as legal. But
I enjoy it similar to the reason people enjoy alcohol.
I am not a frequent drinker. I enjoy nice bourbon
every now and then. If I can't recall the last
time I was drunk, it's just not my cup of tea.
I view pot as a luxury, though, so if money
becomes tight, it's the first thing to go. I did
not smoke for an entire year to save money for
my wedding. I smoked daily and then would not advise
(39:14):
us to many smokers. But most days I start and
end the day with a bowl. Almost ninety five percent
of the time I'm driving, I'm stoned. All right, dude,
maybe you shouldn't say that, yeah, or do that. But
I've never been in an automobile accident, never wrecked a car,
never received a ticket, never follow an entrance claim. I've
never damaged any vehicles, own a house I bought my
(39:36):
mid twenties, drive a nice sports car, pay my Texas, Texas,
pay my taxes. He pays his taxes in Texas. I've
never been in trouble with a law and have a
successful career as a chef, worked long, hard hours. Most
people would enjoy drink after a long day. I enjoy
a bullpack. That's funny, Like he could have just summed
all this up originally by saying, hey, guys, I'm a chef.
(39:59):
The no, A lot of chefs are drunks. Oh yeah yeah,
and a lot of them are just you know, regular, awesome,
normal people without vices. Yeah, actually that's not true. All
chefs have vices, hardcore gambling, et cetera. I would do
a lot of chefs. They're a different breed. They're good people, though,
(40:20):
Oh sure, for sure. Yeah. Anyway, back to the email,
But in my state, I'm still viewed as a criminal,
which to me makes no sense. Although I never travel
around with my pot, I do have to buy it
and drive it with it home. I'm always incredibly nervous.
I could end up in cuffs during that drive. I'm
glad times are changing, though, and I wait the day
when I can smoke I legally in my state. I
(40:41):
just want to say thank you for not putting Pat pot.
What is going on with me? Pass from Texas. We
just cracked the coat subliminally, not putting pot in the
same category as methamphetamines and speaking the facts rather than
a bunch of untrue propaganda. Yeah, except when it comes
to chefs, and we're just paint everybody with the same broadbrush.
Chef's newer. Thanks Pat from Texas. We appreciate that letter,
(41:06):
that anonymous letter. If you want to get in touch
of this anonymously, we will keep your name secret. How
about that? Tell us whatever? You can tweet to us
at Josh M. Clark or s Y s K podcast.
I also have a website you can visit called ru
Series Clark dot com. Chuck is on Facebook at Facebook
dot com, slash Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's an
(41:28):
official Facebook page for Stuff you Should Know too, called
Facebook dot com slash stuff you Should Know. You can
send all of us an email to Stuff podcast at
HowStuffWorks dot com and has always joined us at our
homeown the web, stuff Youshould Know dot com. For more
on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks dot
(41:50):
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