Mowgli

What would it take for small children to survive being abandoned to the wild?

There are many fictional children of myths and legends, depicting feral children reared by wild animals. Mowgli, in Rudyard Kipling's “Jungle Book”, was raised by wolves and Edgar Rice Burroughs's boy, Tarzan, was raised by apes. In the ancient foundation myth of Rome, the infant twins Romulus and Remus, descendants of the Trojan prince Aeneas, like Mowgli, were also abandoned to the wilderness and suckled by a she wolf.

There are, supposedly, real children with similar stories. A young wild girl, known as the Snow Hen of Jostedal of Norway, survived the Black Death, by living on her own in the wild after her parents died in 1349. In 1724, a boy, described as a naked brownish black-haired creature, was seen running up and down in the fields near the German town of Hamelin. Enticed into town, he was trapped. Another, in France, this time a girl, Marie-Angélique Memmie LeBlanc, was found running wild in the woods in 1731. Also in France, in 1797, the most well known and best documented account of such a child was The Wild Boy of Aveyron, who apparently lived his entire childhood naked and alone in the woods before being discovered, at the age of twelve.