I agree, with both Tyana and also that infants can be reared by wild animals and accepted into animal social groups such as packs and herds.

I was recently told about a boy abandoned at the age of 2 in a shopping center near Deli India.
The boy survived mostly on his own, with little help from shop keepers or shoppers. Until he was about 16 he lived in the shopping center when he was then “adopted” by a low-middle class family from the Local church, but was unable to deal with the luxury of 4 walls . So he retreated back to the familiar shopping center. Several attempts were made to “bring the boy home”, but he never stayed more than a month . After this he was taken in by one of the shop keepers who lives in the slums, this being a much more comfortable environment for the boy has been his home for the past 2 years.
He is Called Kite. Because his greatest joy is… well you guessed it “flying kites”. He is very Intelligent (though extremely shy), and speaks well. He has a job as a parking lot guard at the same shopping center where he was abandoned.

I know this isn’t exactly a wilderness scenario. But I still find it amazing that a child abandoned at the age of 2, could grow into a reasonably healthy adult and member of society with little rearing other than the occasional kindness of strangers.

also here are some links to relating (feral children) story’s.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7803699
http://argentinareporter.wordpress.com/2008/08/22/heroic-dog-adopts-baby/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gpfvkeo0KBc

Another more recent but equally horrific and saddening example.

Ya know, after re-visiting this one, your comment made me think of Big Foot, Yeti, Sasquach etc.
Now wouldn’t it be funny if those creatures were the remains of those kids,never found. I say this half in jest as I have no idea that crypto creatures actualy exist, but like all things here it is fun to speculate upon.

Tynan said: “Some of these childrens’ lack of interest in sex and rocking behavior suggests to me at least that they suffered from some form of autism or mental illness. It seems unlikely that proto-humans would have been able to reproduce very well without a natural interest in sex. Perhaps some of them were mentally disabled and left in the wilderness by parents at a young age. A baby could never fend for itself in the wild – an abandoned 2-year old with a mental speech handicap and some luck could theoretically do much better.”

The distance we’re accustomed to assuming between the mentally disabled and the ‘normal’ is almost certainly not applicable to the case of a human who has been isolated from their con-specifics for a long period.

An interest in sex is certainly an evolutionary requirement. But given the absence of a community of humans with which to interact, all of the important things we share with the other higher primates would fail to develop properly – being able to understand and participate in a social hierarchy, for example. The expression of sexual desire in the human animal couldn’t be put entirely ‘on hold’ and still come out ‘normally’ years later once a community was entered.

You’re right of course that a baby couldn’t survive on its own in the wild, which is I guess why the ‘raised by animals’ theory is maintained when a feral child is discovered to exhibit animal behaviours.

! (.)(.)-BOOB ALERT! !

There has been a ‘feral adult’ i heard about it in sociology the other day as we were discussing feral children. the woman was 38 when she was found in a loft by the council! Her parents had kept her in the loft since birth because they believed she was ‘ugly’. She was not toilet trained and could speak no words as her mother was the only person she had any contact with and she didnt speak to her, when she went up to the loft. The mother only went up to the loft to take the woman food and water and to clean out the litter tray in which the woman went to the toilet in. When her mother died she was left to fend for herself (her father had died a number of years earlier) and she was found 1 week after the death of her mother when the council went into the house to clear it out; they heard moving around in the loft so went up to investigate and found the woman cowering in the corner. She couldn’t speak and was naked as her parents had told everyone that she had died at birth so she had never had any clothes after the first 6/7 months because after that her parents would have looked strange buying clothes for their ‘dead’ child so even to this day she doesn’t like anything touching her skin so shreds her clothes whenever she’s given the opportunity. For the week after her mothers death she had been living on her own excretement until the council found her.