Stuff You Should Know - Are Feral Children Real?

Episode Date: February 20, 2018

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. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey everybody, we are going on tour in 2018, and where are we going? On April 4th, we're gonna be in Boston at the Wilbur. You can get tickets at thewilbur.com, Chuck. And then on April 5th, we're gonna be in D.C.

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 22nd, we're gonna be in St. Louis. You can get tickets on Ticketmaster. And on May 23rd, we're gonna be in Cleveland, and you can get tickets there at PlayhouseSquare.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 28th, and possibly adding a show on the 27th. Stay tuned for that. Yep, and you can get tickets at AXS.com. So come see us live.

We'll have a good time. Come on out. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, from HowStuffWorks.com. ["Prem-House, StuffWorks.com"] Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant.

I almost forgot my name for a second. And there's Jerry. It is a little weird. Jerry Jerome the Germster Rowland. Kaboom. How you doing? Fine. Jerry, stop snorting.

I have complete whiplash over this topic. You have what? And you know why. I have just doing this topic after what the story is behind it. I still kind of like shudder. So should we even talk about it,

or pretend it never happened? You see my eye-twitching. No, here's the story is, and I think it was two years ago now, right? Easily. Yeah, two years ago in March, it'll be two years at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas. We were gonna 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 day long. And we thought, okay, no big deal. We like bars. We're closer to the booze, no probes.

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 of a noisy, crowded bar full of drunks with about 17 stuff you should know fans up front trying to listen.

Turning around and shushing the people at the bar when it was about as fruitless as a shush could get. And this is a part of feel the worst about a couple of hundred real deal stuff you should know 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 blocked out too. Just so you guys know VidCon, it was bad because we did a show in front of about 17 people. Maybe, and we worked with 11 of them. Although we did get to meet Teja on 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, you know, unspoken eye contact chemistry. Shh, 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 clocked it, we did it in like 22 minutes, I believe. It was supposed to be at least 45. We were talking like the guy from the old FedEx ads from like the early 80s. 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 two drunk guy. 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. It was really bad. It really just sucked. Yeah. All the way around. We considered burning Austin to the ground on the way out of town, but we didn't. Oh gosh. 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. No, this was not Austin's fault. No, but we just didn't wanna have any memories of it at all now. Yeah, I hear you. So we're talking feral 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 90s. There was a big, 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 2 million of them living on the streets of Russia. 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. I nailed it.

Sure. And Ivan was six in 1998, they estimate. And he was a little different from the rest of the children living on the street at the time, because he was widely considered an actual 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 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 these dogs. And the dogs, they trusted him, they befriended him. And you hang out with dogs long enough, and given enough food, all of a sudden they say, hey, we're pals. And they literally took him in as one of their own and would guide him to the warm places to sleep at night, underground near heated pipes and things like that.

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 growled and barked at the social workers who were advancing on him to get him

and to take him 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 successor. He managed to become inculturated 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. Yeah, I mean, 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 they give them these names because that's who they eventually take up with. Right. And they're very compelling stories, but in fact, I think at one point, there's a taxonomist named Carl Linnaeus who he's credited, who created the Tree of Life.

He actually established a whole separate category, homoferis, 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 was all very much discussed and talked about what exactly feral children were, who they represented.

Yeah, one of the competing theories is that they were basically like Sasquatch. Like if we found Sasquatch, we'd be like, oh, we need to expand the Tree of Life to include these cousins to homo sapiens. That's right. So Romulus and Remus were another very famous story too. 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 longstanding legend of children, of wild children, feral 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 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 Mushikov is not the only one. Yeah, and this can 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 named Emiyata, Emiyati who survived a boat capsizing. It killed her friends and left her stranded in 1977 in the Sumatran Forest. Eventually she was found in the early 80s

living with orangutans, orangutan. I think she was living alone. She was mistaken for an orangutan. Oh, I thought she had taken up with them. No, that's what I saw. That actually makes her kind of different as far as feral children are concerned. She was living by herself.

Oh, interesting. Other ones have been taken in by everything from pigs. This girl in China, Wang Xingfing 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 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 she's very well known as Jeanie, who was raised back in the 1930s or 40s, I believe, locked in a closet for the first 10, from age two to age 12. She was kept away from human society. She, so rather than being kept away from human society by 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 Jeanie would be one that's called isolated. There's also, or no, she would be confined. Imiyadi 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 Mishikov. 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, 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 weird silver lining. What would you wanna be taken in? What kind of animal? Dogs would be pretty good.

Yeah, you know, lots of opsos. 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 don't bite their own, do they? It depends.

If you say something wrong. I would get along. They would just pick my nits and they would love me as their own in my Jungle Book story. Do you, wait a minute, do you have nits now? Well, occasionally. Oh, man. Should we take a break?

Yeah, I think we should. All right, let's take a break and we're gonna talk more about Feral Children right after this. On the podcast, HeyDude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces.

We're gonna use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever.

Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper

because you'll wanna be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to HeyDude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself,

what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS

because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one.

Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast

or wherever you listen to podcasts. So Chuck, one thing that, one of the big reasons that Farrell Children has really kind of kept the interest of science over the years, especially starting in about the 18th 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 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 12 years and see what happens with it. You just can't do that. Even back in the 18th 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 no scientist's fault, they can be 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 and we miss that window, we'll never be able to learn language, even a native language, let alone a second language like you and me are having trouble with these days. And then another is, well, basically any way that they differ from a normal kid, like their behaviors, the way they carry themselves,

all this stuff, you could say this clearly stands for nature or nurture. Bam. 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 they can,

they, a lot of times like Ivan the dog boy would bark, there's another dog girl that we'll talk about later, she would bark, some would chirp like birds, sometimes they will 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 on 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 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's a kid named Jean de Lige who was five in Lige, Belgium, which is why he's called Jean of Lige, 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 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 there's really remarkable stories over time that have been collected. But again, the problem is this, these are a lot of these stories like Jean de Lige's story comes from the 1620s. Yeah. There are some modern ones, but there's plenty of ones

that came between the 18th century, the 17th century and like the 19th century or even early 20th century. And the stories are almost invariably so fantastic that they defy belief, right? Especially if you're a scientist. You 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 were enough people who were eyewitnesses to this and who documented it independently, then maybe it would get some credence. So there's this whole problem here where the 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, I think the best way to get famous is to make up a feral child story. So I'm gonna do that. Yeah, and one dude for sure did that, Mr. J. A. L. Singh.

In the 1920s, found two young girls, a toddler, 18 months old and an eight-year-old in India, and claimed they were raised by wolves, named them Amala and Kamala, and said they prefer raw meat. They 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 to say speaking English, but it was India. Sure. And they had books written about them, and it was sort of a big media sensation until people started poking around and said, well, these girls are real, but you know what, they weren't raised by 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 other developmental birth defects that they 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 this line in here that says that the investigation into feral children has kind of revealed that you could also call feral children stories. Stories of amazing survival of attempted infanticide, basically, that 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 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 who had been left to die and fend for themselves

in the woods by their parents had grown wild and then where somebody came across them five or 10 years later and mistook them for a wolf boy or an ostrich boy or a wolf girl or whatever animal you wanna call it. Or a lasso opso man. Some people think that accounts for basically all stories of all of the older stories of feral children.

I think that's definitely debatable, but that's one camp. Yeah, here's another case, Misha the wolf girl, 1997, Monique Misha, Defonesca, even though she's not Italian. She actually published her memoirs about the Holocaust called Misha colon, a memoir of the Holocaust years. Basically- You mean her memoirs.

That's right. Momores. She said that Natties 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. Published this story, it was a big sensation.

And like I said, this was in the 90s. 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 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 II, 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.

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 90s. The 90s must have been super hot for feral children memoirs, I guess.

That 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 take a break or 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 are verified. This is the summer of 1725 in the forest of Hertzwold near Hameln in northern Germany, which we know has no bodies of water near it. It's landlocked.

He was about 12 years old, walked on all fours, fed on grass. He would run up trees. He could not speak the language. And then he became here to known as the Wild Boy of Hameln 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. This, they trot him out there like a spectacle, essentially. Dress him up in a little boys 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 disgusts me. Right.

So he wasn't, it wasn't like put him back in the woods. Once he was brought to court, 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 speak any language. He just basically grunted, right? But he was basically under the royal largesse after that point.

They baptized him. They dressed him up. They cleaned him up. They tried everything they could to teach him, but eventually they were like, 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 notice 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 at any rate, he had a connection to London. So London heard about Peter the Wild Boy

and they went crazy for him. They were like, send him over here if you guys are sick of him. 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 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. Daddy, 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. 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 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 by the crown. I think he got like a 35 pound pension for the rest of his life, 35 pounds a year maybe. And he was just taken care of by a kindly old farm owner. The problem 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 until he would just fall over, he'd be so tired. So he was- He sounds 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 of times and thought to be somebody who was undermining the state like a spy basically, 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'd lived a long life still. Yeah, he died at like 72 years old in 1785. And the story actually has an interesting ending. Not too long ago, a historian named Lucy Worsley did some investigating and saw this painting that we've mentioned at Kensington Palace. And said, hold on a minute.

I think he may have actually had this, been suffering from Pitt Hopkins syndrome. And it's an intellectual disability and characterized 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 feral child at all. Again, it's another case of mistaken developmental delay. Yeah, that's what they think. Unbelievable. It really is. Now you wanna 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. Letting things with chug and chug. Chugging all the things that you should know. On the podcast, Paydude, the 90s, called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude,

bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews,

co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger

and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s.

Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road.

Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God.

Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so, my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander

each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast, and make sure to listen,

so we'll never, ever have to say, bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Okay, Chuck, 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 20s by now, but at the time- Now's in today? Yes. I think she's like 35. Oh, really? I thought this article was way more recent than that. She was born in November of 1983.

Oh, okay, yeah, she's old. So, wow, this is a very old article. So, at the time of this visit with her, that the article was based on, she was 23, and she was living in Ukraine, but she had been raised on a village, on a farm, 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 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 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, 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. Yeah, so, again, for five years she lived like this, basically living on raw meat and scraps, being a member, I didn't get the impression that she was the pack leader, but a member of the pack of dogs. And then finally, a neighbor's like, okay, it's been five years, I gotta 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. 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 just had the demeanor of a dog. And so, this is actually one of 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 enculturated into human culture, human society over the course of years.

Yeah, I mean, I don't know if she's married 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 years ago that they wrote this,

but she was deemed to have the mental capacity of a six-year-old because a child of the college named Lynn Fry ended up doing a lot of interviews and tests with her. And she had a dangerously low boredom threshold, could count, but couldn't add, could not read or spell her name correctly. 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 be gotten back if it started because she was beginning to be verbal, like you said, when she was left by her parents

and then she was managed to get it back. So they think that that's evidence for the critical window period. And you can see videos like on YouTube and pictures of Oksana the dog girl. And it's pretty remarkable to see. She was on a Ukrainian TV show and I think 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 that was socially unacceptable, they were saying, but she could still do it. 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, they could conceivably adopt 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 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 were 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, so as it stands now, apparently the science is, science believed that for a little while. The Bruno Bettelheim theory that it was just all cases of mistaken identity were just children

with cognitive impairments for developmental disabilities who've been abandoned by their parents, but I think the scientific community who studies this kind of thing are kind of coming around to say like, well, we actually don't know, and 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 Muschikov was not cognitively impaired, and he was clearly a documented feral child. There was another one from the 18th century, the 1730s, I think, Memila Blanc, 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

to figure out that she was a Huron Indian who'd 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 just too many examples of ones that are probably true that weren't cognitively impaired, but were still clearly feral children

to say Bruno Bettelheim 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, but we don't know enough to base it on that. And that's not necessarily the case across the board. Like J.A.L. Singh and Kamala and Amala, they wrote 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 human race. Yeah. Yeah, but it's still pretty interesting, dude. Yeah, I had a script idea. I'm not gonna 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, don't keep it under your hat and we'll, we'll announce it when the thing's in production. Yeah, which will never happen. You don't know. So you got anything else? No, let me say this. I will sell this idea for $1,000 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. They'll try it. They'll be like, go ahead and tell me. Okay, well, if you wanna know more

about Feral Children, there's actually a lot more cases that we didn't get to cover. Like Shamed Ayo, 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 into Feral Children by jumping on to your favorite search engine today. Because, oh no, there is a, there is an article on how stuff works, isn't there? Yeah. No, you can check that one out too. And since I said that, it's time for Listener Mail. I'm gonna call this one Proud Pothead.

Anonymous proud pothead, so he's not that proud. Hey guys, long time listener, I wanna 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 30s of smoke pot on an almost daily basis, since I was 16, I have no medical reasons to use it.

And I am also not in a state where it is 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. But 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 smoke daily and then would not advise this to many smokers, but most days, I start and end the day with a bowl. Almost 95% 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 filed an insurance claim, I've never damaged any vehicles. I own a house, I bought my mid 20s, drive a nice sports car, pay my taxes, Texas, pay my taxes. He pays his taxes in Texas.

I've never been in trouble with the law and have a successful career as a chef. Worked long, hard hours. Most people would enjoy a drink after a long day. I enjoy a bowl pack. That's funny, like he could have just summed all this up originally by saying, hey guys, I'm a chef, the end. No, a lot of chefs are drugs.

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. They're gambling, et cetera.

I work with a lot of chefs. They're a different breed. They're good people, though. 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 legally in my state. I just want to say thank you for not putting Pat. What is going on with me?

Pat from Texas. We just cracked the code. Subliminally. Not putting Pat in the same category as methamphetamines and speaking to facts rather than a bunch of untrue propaganda. Yeah, except when it comes to chefs. And we just paint everybody with the same broad brush. Chefs know it.

Thanks, Pat, from Texas. We appreciate that letter, that anonymous letter. If you want to get in touch with us anonymously, we will keep your name secret. How about that? Tell us whatever. You can tweet to us at joshumclark or syskpodcast. I also have a website you can visit called rucerysclark.com.

Chuck is on Facebook at facebook.com slash Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And there's an official Facebook page for stuff you should know too called facebook.com slash stuff you should know. You can send all of us an email to stuffpodcastathousestuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude,

bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands

give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help, and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye bye bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.