From 'World Tapestry' by Madeleine Jarry
Elaine Meinel Supkis
A mixed up story about a 'jungle girl' being captured in Cambodia is already unravelling. But the stories of children raised by animals has some justification in reality. And this is all part of a very long history of people believing in 'wild men and wild women.' In Medieval times, the nobility played at this, they made pictures and stories about this. Ancient Rome claimed the city was founded by foundlings who were raised by a wolf mother. Time to examine all this.
&hearts The story didn't fit the pictures, I noticed this right away.
PHNOM PENH, Jan 19 (Reuters Life!) - A Cambodian woman who went missing in the jungle for 18 years before being found last week is struggling to adapt to life as a human and wants to return to the forest, police said on Friday."She prefers to crawl rather than walk like a human," said Mao Sun, a district police chief in the jungle-clad northeastern province of Rattanakiri where the girl's family live.
"Unfortunately, she keeps crying and wants to go back to the jungle," he said. "She is not used to living with humans. We had to clothe her. When she is thirsty or hungry she points at her mouth," he told Reuters by phone.
The girl, called Ro Cham H'pnhieng, went missing as an eight-year-old along with her cousin when they were sent to tend cows near the border with Vietnam.
I did a double-take when looking at the photos of her. She wasn't thin nor was she 'feral' looking. She did look apprehensive. One suspects that when she was captured and handed over to the police, she probably didn't speak their language so she played it mum. The international news services that covered this story did so without first having it checked out by professional investigators or scientists. It was merely a time for sensation. And like many such sensations, the minute questions are asked, people disappear. In this case, the police man who had seized this woman at first assented to a simple DNA test suddenly changed his mind.
The fact that this woman wished to return to the jungle suggests she might have a family there and might be the wife of someone who is not a member of the policeman's clan or tribe. Even if she were his daughter, finding out if she has children and wishes to be with them is very important, hopefully they are still alive!
&hearts Her probable husband has been reportedly spotted.
Ro Cham Chanthy, the younger sister of the two girls, told Cambodia Daily that villagers were afraid of the “wild man”. She said: “He had a long sword and villagers could not capture him. He had tattoos and made his eyes very wide, so the villagers were very afraid.”When the young women vanished the region was covered with dense forest but it has been steadily cut back in recent years for cashew and rubber plantations, leading to speculation that the “wild man’s” home is shrinking and perhaps forcing him to make foraging raids.
Several things here: I note with satisfaction that the unsophisticated young people described the Wild Man as having 'eyes very wide': he showed the whites of his eyes which scared them. This 'You have such big eyes, Grandma' business is a deep part of our evolution. Humans who could show 'big eyes' won confrontations with humans with smaller eyes. And this had to be the white of the eyes, not the dark iris which isn't scary at all.
The fact that they believe this Wild Man has tatoos means he is most certainly a member of one of the deeper jungle tribes, one that still practices the ancient arts of covering the body with artwork. I would suggest since tatooing and making scars into designs is practiced by all ancient tribal people across the entire planet including distant Australia, our first ancestors in Africa did this and they did it to distinguish themselves from other hominids.
In this particular case, the poor young woman who was captured by these farmers doesn't 'walk on all fours' or anything remotely like this. She probably does scramble about energetically, this is what all jungle people do, they have to move about in a 3D environment with little stable ground underfoot.
&hearts There is a case of a young boy in Africa who ended up being raised by a troop of apes.
An orphan boy reared by apes in the African jungle has arrived in Britain to sing with a children's choir.John Ssabunnya, aged 14, was abandoned as a two-year-old in the dense jungle of Uganda to what seemed certain death.
He was rescued by some women who felt sorry for him. He really did stroll around on all fours and he had few language skills but he could interpet the various moods and signals the apes used to communicate. Evidently, the troop fought as hard as they could to protect their 'child' and the boy joined them in throwing sticks and screaming.
He too some time to adjust to human ways and seems to be quite intelligent.
&hearts Looking for more information, I got this story in Spanish, here it is in babelfish:
But John Ssabunnya is very different. Whereas those arrived at the wild arms that raised to them of accidental form, the Ugandan left voluntarily with them. “My father fought itself all along, until he killed my mother. For that reason I escaped to the jungle; it was scared of which also it beat to me and it killed to me”, declared the adolescent. Johny did just like before it had seen make his neighbors, when the Ugandan guerrilla and the Army escaped of the conflict between. If its integrity were in danger, the forest was the only safe refuge. Whole clans and towns hid fleeing from a as horrible death as safe.
Evidently his father was a drunk and a murderer. Far from being abandoned, he ran off to save himself. I know from my own history that children who are rejected and shoved outside go off to animals for help. I did it. I learned the language of birds, insects and beasts. I can go to a zoo and immediately get into conversations with many different species. Once, at a place that trained circus animals, I met my first kangaroo. It was depressed, of course, and refused to let anyone touch it. Within an hour it and I were romping happily. I knew not to look at it or notice it. I pretended to be very interested in something on the ground. Curiosity brought it over and I used universal gestures of pleasure and sharing to entice it to join me voluntarily.
This is why unhappy animals distress me. I hate zoos and circuses but I go visit them to touch the imprisoned animals and give them some small hope.
It seems this boy still maintains his spiritual connection with the animal world. I hope he is doing well in life, he is very fascinating. One of the amazing things about nature is this sort of cross-species adoptions. I have seen it myself, cats and dogs adopting mice and birds, hamsters adopting kittens, swans adopting pigs, whatever. One tragic case of this was a turkey hen I had that adopted a duckling who rode on her back. He fell down and was killed on day. The hen cried and I ran outside only to see the pathetic fluffy tike lying on the ground. The turkey hen shoved my hand over, trying to get me to revive him only I couldn't.
She was depressed for several days. I had to let her follow me around so she wouldn't be alone in her grief!
&hearts A whole tribe of Wild Men and Wild Women was found in the Philippines 35 years ago.
As Lawrence Reid concluded, the Tasaday really had been living on their own in the rain forest, but apparently only for about 150 years. Not one thousand years. In addition, they seemed to have made contact with neighboring tribes sometime in the 1950s, and through this contact had acquired steel tools and learned some agricultural skills. So when the wider world discovered them in 1971 they were definitely not as isolated, nor as 'stone-age,' as was first claimed. However, they really were living a very primitive existence.
It was a huge sensation. Even as the USA was dropping Agent Orange on the jungles where today's Wild Man's tribe lived, the American public was gripped by the story of the Tasaday. I was rather disgusted because I spent a lot of time yelling about the other tribes we were butchering in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. And I feared for this tribe but they were protected from being adored to death. Then they were accused of not being innocent tribal people as if they thought up their discovery and storyline!
Like all Wild Men and Wild Women, the minute they get involved with us 'civilized' people, they are corrupted. It is sad watching them lose their cultural unity and instead of the clever arts of survival pulled out of Nature's essence, all primitive people end up wearing the rags and tags of society and they pick up all the worst habits and addictions. Not that we are exactly a great example at all.
There is a very famous story of the King of France in 1400, at a party thrown by the Queen, he and his pals, all nobles, covered themselves with tar and stuck feathers and fur on themselves and carrying clubs, chained together, they performed a 'Wild Man' dance in the feast hall. But a clumsy squire burst into the chambers with a flaming torch and tripped. The King's friends were all hideously burned to death while the Queen bravely protected her husband by wrapping her huge velvet and fur gown with a long train, around him. He went insane.
There lies a moral in that story. Later, the King lost his throne and Joan d'Arc got it back for him only to be burned at the stake. And we are civilized?
In the Rukh describes how Gisborne, an English forest ranger in India at the time of the British Raj, discovers a young man named Mowgli, who has extraordinary skill at hunting and tracking, and asks him to join the forestry service. Later Gisborne learns the reason for Mowgli's almost superhuman talents: he was raised by wild animals in the jungle.Kipling then proceeded to write the stories of Mowgli's childhood in detail. Lost by his parents in the Indian jungle, a human baby is adopted by the wolves Mother (Raksha) and Father Wolf, who call him Mowgli the Frog because of his furlessness. Shere Khan the tiger demands that they give him the baby but the wolves refuse. Mowgli grows up with and runs naked with the pack, hunting with his brother wolves.
Bagheera (the black panther) befriends Mowgli, partly because Mowgli, being a human, has the power of dominion over beasts: Bagheera cannot withstand Mowgli's gaze. Baloo the bear, teacher of wolves, has the thankless task of educating Mowgli in The Law of the Jungle.
Most Wild Children are poorly fed. This is because our evolution is all about maniuplating nature with fire, cultivation and group hunting. Our dietary needs are actually quite complicated yet simple: we must eat a great deal of high-energy foods or we starve. This is why we like carbohydrades and oils so much. Eating berries and fruits isn't enough at all. Eating raw meat with little fat is a difficulty, too. Chewing on things with our lousy teeth means an early death if we doen't process food somehow but cutting it with knives or cooking it. This is why Wild Children seldom become Wild Men.
Genie is the name used for a feral child discovered by California authorities on November 4, 1970 in the Los Angeles suburb of Arcadia. Her real name remains private. She was born in April of 1957 and was the fourth (and second surviving) child to unstable parents. Her mother was partially blind due to cataracts and a detached retina, and her father (who was 20 years the mother's senior) was mentally unbalanced due to depression over his mother's death from a hit-and-run accident.At the age of 20 months, Genie was just beginning to learn how to speak when a doctor told her family that she seemed to be developmentally disabled and possibly mildly retarded. Her father took the opinion to extremes, believing that she was profoundly retarded, and subjected her to severe confinement and ritual ill-treatment in an attempt to "protect" her.
Genie had spent her life locked in her bedroom. During the day, she was tied to a potty chair in diapers; and most nights, she was then bound in a sleeping bag and placed in an enclosed crib with a metal lid to keep her shut inside. Her father would beat her every time she vocalized and he barked and growled at her like a dog in order to keep her quiet; he also forbade his wife and son to ever speak to her. She became almost entirely mute, and knew only a few short words and phrases, such as "stopit" and "nomore."
This disgusting story shows how the desire to tap into the 'power' of the Wild Child causes brutality and abuse beyond the obvious abuse of the demented father and mother. Nearly universally, apes raised by humans end up in prisons of various sorts when they become adults because of sex. Raised inappropriately or abusively, they can't cope with the mores or cultural framework of sex. The Tasaday who were very primitive still had many sexual taboos and rules. These rules tend to collapse in society because of social degradations. This also destorys tribes that intersect with modern civilization.
This is the famous Truffaut movie about a Wild Child in the 1700s.
&hearts This sounds like an abused and abandonde child who was deemed 'defective' and thrown away.
Three hunters discover and a naked child, living in a forest. Capturing him, he is taken to an institute for deaf and mute children. From there he is used as little more than an exhibit.Having read of his story, Jean Itard, a Parisian doctor, played by Truffaut himself, makes it his goal to integrate this `wild child' into society. What follows is an astonishing tale of a boy, completely deprived of all human contact, as he adapt to life in an unfamiliar, structured society. Named simply `Victor' by Dr Itard, we watch as kindly doctor attempts to educate and communicate with this unusual child. We see Victor's first smiles; we hear his first intelligible sounds, and witness, for the first time, his tears.
Seldom do such children prosper. Many withdraw into themselves and refuse to conform or interact like poor Genie.
&hearts Here is another case like the Jungle Book story.
Two Indian girls, Amala and Kamala, were discovered living in a wolves' den in India's Bengal jungle in 1920. They were being looked after by a she-wolf, along with two wolf clubs. They were about 18 months old and eight years, respectively, but were not sisters. They walked on all fours, refused to wear clothes and ate raw meat.
People trying to be civilized are fascinated by Wildness. The carefully hidden demonic side is projected upon these people who are truly innocent. And yet, innocence is fatal in the long run. And seemingly innocent people are actually 'normal'. They have elaborate rules, customs and beliefs. They have a culture. And this troubles us as we hate and love our own culture which frightens us and yet fascinates us like a giant snake looming over our heads..
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