Post by KNOWTHIS on Apr 25, 2007 8:30:41 GMT -5
On National Geographic there’s a TV series known as Is It Real? They did a piece on feral children. It’s the idea that human beings have actually been raised by wild animals from a young age after being abandoned by their human families. They try to separate the real stories from the Tarzan type myths. Because you can’t intentionally deprive a child of its parents and place it with wild animals as an experiment (for obvious moral and legal reasons) it’s impossible to know if this phenomenon is real or not. I found it to be well worth watching though.
They interview a boy from Africa who claimed to have been raised by monkeys. He was eventually re-acclimated to human society but the villagers said that when they first found him he was behaving just like a monkey and couldn’t speak words.
There was also video of this Russian girl with an abusive family that put her out with the dogs when she was just a child. She grew up walking on all fours, barking and doing all of the things that a dog would do. She modeled her own behavior after the only thing that she ever knew which came from the interaction with the dogs.
It was amazing to see just how dramatically a child can be effected by such an upbringing during the earliest developmental stages. The debate was whether or not an animal would actually nurture a human child or simply tolerate it. In other words, the child would just pick up leftovers of the food that the monkeys had leftover as opposed to being proactively fed and taken care of by them as if one of their own.
I recommend this program to anyone that has cable.
They interview a boy from Africa who claimed to have been raised by monkeys. He was eventually re-acclimated to human society but the villagers said that when they first found him he was behaving just like a monkey and couldn’t speak words.
There was also video of this Russian girl with an abusive family that put her out with the dogs when she was just a child. She grew up walking on all fours, barking and doing all of the things that a dog would do. She modeled her own behavior after the only thing that she ever knew which came from the interaction with the dogs.
It was amazing to see just how dramatically a child can be effected by such an upbringing during the earliest developmental stages. The debate was whether or not an animal would actually nurture a human child or simply tolerate it. In other words, the child would just pick up leftovers of the food that the monkeys had leftover as opposed to being proactively fed and taken care of by them as if one of their own.
I recommend this program to anyone that has cable.