You’ve heard of Tarzan the Ape Man, and Mowgli, the boy who was raised by wolves in The Jungle Book. But did you know there are real kids who have been raised by animals?
In 1960 Jean-Claude Armen went into the Spanish Sahara in search of a wild child who lived with a herd of gazelles. Natives pointed him to the place where the boy had been seen, and sure enough, Armen found him “galloping in gigantic bounds among a long cavalcade of white gazelles.”
The boy, who was about 10, walked on all fours, pulled up desert roots with his teeth, and constantly twitched his muscles, ears, and nose like the rest of the herd. He had thick muscular ankles from leaping and running. Armen observed that the boy had even learned to speak the gazelle “language”: He would stamp to indicate the distance of a food source and greet the other gazelles by sniffing and licking them.
Armen chased the boy with a Jeep to see how fast he could run and was astonished to discover the boy hit speeds of 32 miles per hour. (Olympic sprinters can only reach about 25 miles per hour in short bursts.)
Though several people tried, the gazelle boy was never captured. He may still be out there in the Spanish Sahara, leaping and running with the gazelles.
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When John Ssabanya was only two, he was abandoned in the dense jungle of Uganda and left to die. Luckily for John, some monkeys found him and adopted him as part of their family. For the next four years, John climbed trees and hunted for fruit, nuts, and berries, just like a monkey.
In 1991 a woman out gathering firewood spotted the naked boy with his monkey family and told the people in her village. When they tried to catch John, he ran up a tree and hurled sticks at them. His monkey parents put up a ferocious fight to protect him. But he was finally caught and later adopted by Paul and Molly Wasswa, who run the Kamuzinda Christian Orphanage in Masaka.
It took John nine years to learn to speak and to stand up straight like a human. He still has an odd, lopsided walk, and when he smiles, he pulls his lips back just like a monkey. John greets people with a powerful hug, which is the way monkeys say hello. When he was taken to visit monkeys, he avoided eye contact and approached them from the side with open palms, just as he’d been taught to do by his monkey parents.
Now in his teens, John still speaks a little slowly, but he has a big singing voice and is a member of the Pearl of Africa Children’s Choir.
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Near Godamuri, India, villagers found two little girls living in a giant anthill with their adopted family—a pack of wolves. The mother wolf fought hard to protect her two “cubs,” but villagers killed the she-wolf, took the girls, and gave them to Reverend Singh, a Christian missionary.
The girls were named Kamala and Amala. Kamala appeared to be about eight years old, and Amala was not quite two. Though they were undoubtedly human, they behaved completely like wild beasts. They walked on all fours and snarled and showed their teeth to anyone who came near. They lapped water out of a bowl and howled when they were unhappy.
Their time in the forest with the wolves had completely changed the girls’ bodies. Their jawbones and canine teeth had grown longer. Like wolves, their night vision had become very keen, and they liked to roam the missionary compound at night. They could hear the slightest sound from miles away and could smell raw meat from a distance. When Amala, the youngest, died of an illness, Kamala wandered the house sniffing Amala’s clothes, bowl, and bed, searching for her.
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Kamala lived with the Singh family for eight more years. She learned to speak a few words but never really adapted to life among humans. When she died at the age of 16, Kamala was still the little wolf child that had been found deep in the forests of India.
•Sixteen-year-old Elif Bilgin of Turkey slipped into the finals in Google’s 2013 science fair with a project based on…banana peels. Her brilliant idea? To make plastic from them. Elif’s banana peel bio-plastic can replace traditional petroleum-based plastics to make everything from cosmetic prostheses (devices to replace missing body parts) to cable insulation.
•Thirteen-year-old Aleix Spiride of Texas got into the Google finals by studying squid. Watching squid jet around underwater gave him the idea for the Squid-Jet. It’s a jet-propelled propulsion system that can reach speeds of more than 30 centimers per second. Zip-p-p!
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