Have there been any documented cases of a person being raised by wolves?

by SirSqueep
mythoplokos

I'm not an expert on this, but before somebody else with some more specialized knowledge comes along, I can chip in somewhat. I read for leisure Serge Aroles' L'Enigme des enfants-loups [The Enigma of wolf-children], published in 2007. It's really quite a fascinating book just for reasons of historical methodology, as it's got quite thorough examples of what it's like paddling through huge amounts of archival data, trying to separate fiction from fact from all the recorded cases of feral children (i.e. children that have lived in isolation from human contact). Aroles is a doctor himself and he uses modern medical knowledge about the behaviour and psychology of feral children to assess whether the recorded cases seem plausible, so the book's got an interesting inter-disciplinary approach.

So, to OP's question, 'have there been any documented cases of a person being raised by wolves' - yes, quite a few of them. But, it's a different story just how many of them are actually true; 'documented' does not really mean 'more truthful'. In the book, Aroles proves that the clear majority of historical cases of children raised by animals were 100% hoaxes; this is, for example, the case with the Indian 'wolf-girls' Amala and Kamala, who were long considered the 'best documented' case of feral children. The diary of Joseph Amrito Lal Singh, where he supposedly documented the day-to-day progress of Amala and Kamala, turned out to be a fabrication written after the girls passed away, as were all photos of them. Singh had created the 'wolf girls' in order to raise money for his orphanage. Amala and Kamala were most likely autistic children; the 'raised by wolves' was a common explanation for children with severe learning defects in societies before modern medicine. The problem with all the recorded feral children cases is that they are practically impossible to prove true or false, since they are always based on first-person accounts, and children who are completely isolated from people in the definitive years of speech development can never really learn to speak. So, Aroles thinks that there are no cases were children DEFINITELY were brought up by animals. There are a couple of modern cases where it's likely that children indeed lived in the wild and more or less 'befriended with animals' - such as Marcos Rodriguez Pantoja, born. c. 1946 - and perhaps some cases where small children were raised by monkeys, such as a boy called Saturday Mthiyane. Aroles thought that all the recorded cases of children raised by wolves are not very convincing, though.

Searocksandtrees

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