[language] [Fwd:"Savage Girls and Wild Boys" by Michael Newton]

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"Savage Girls and Wild Boys" by Michael Newton
Kids raised by wolves? It happens, says an English academic. But the mute and
bizarre children in these outlandish histories don't grow up to be Tarzan.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Laura Miller

Feb. 12, 2003  |  If you visit the Capitoline Museums in Rome, you'll find them
pretty quiet except for the little cluster of people gathered around the statue
of Rome's mythological founders, the twins Romulus and Remus. What attracts the
visitors isn't patriotism or historical interest, though, but the hypnotic
weirdness of the 2,500-year-old bronze sculpture: It depicts a standing
she-wolf with two human infants sitting under her belly, nursing from her
dangling teats.

Romulus and Remus are two of the most famous legendary examples of feral
children, the subject of Michael Newton's new book, "Savage Girls and Wild
Boys." There are plenty more of them, too, from Rudyard Kipling's Mowgli ("The
Jungle Books") to Tarzan. This is one of humanity's favorite fables, a tale of
cross-species benevolence touched by fate. In stories, the abandoned child
raised by wolves or bears or apes tends to come from exceptional, if not
downright noble, stock, and in the wilderness he acquires the honest, pure,
courageous spirit so lacking in his decadently civilized brothers. When he
rejoins his own kind, it's usually to run a nation or take some other position
of authority where his virtues can be admired by all.

That's a far cry from the fate of most real-life feral children. Yes, they do
exist -- at least Newton thinks so, and his judgment seems sound enough -- even
if their stories are clouded by mystery and doubt. The author opens his book
with a contemporary example: Ivan, a Russian 4-year-old who in 1996 fled his
mother's home for the streets, where he took up with a pack of stray dogs,
trading scavenged and begged food for the animals' protection, companionship
and bodily warmth during the long winter nights. The police had a hell of a
time capturing him, since the dogs turned out to be far more committed to his
safety than his own flesh and blood had been.

Full text
http://www.salon.com/books/review/2003/02/12/wild_boys/index_np.html

BBC Radio Four

The Material World
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/thematerialworld.shtml
Thursday 27 February  2003

Ivan Mishukov (Found 1998) The moscow boy who chose to live with a pack
of wild dogs.  Reproduced with permission of Moscoop Picture Library,  Moscow.

Wild Children

      This week's Book of the week on Radio 4 is "Savage Girls and Wild
Children" by Michael Newton - a history of the feral child. The feral child in
myth and legend goes back to Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome. One of
the the first documented cases was Victor, the wild boy of Averyon. He was a
child captured in 1800 in France. He was the first to be "scientifically"
studied to be seen if he could be made "human" and develop language. What does
the study of feral children tell science and how do they influence scientific
thinking? The famous case of "Genie" found in a Los Angeles home abused and
isolated by her father she became "the forbidden experiment" of the 20th
century. Linguists and psychologists cared for her and worked with her to try
and understand how her development and language had been affected. Did she
confirm or deny - Chomsky's idea that children are pre-programmed to acquire
language?

      Modern day cases in Russia might be turning up some interesting evidence
about the window of opportunity for acquiring language. Feral children are
still being found - how have they been treated by science and in turn, how have
they influenced the science itself and what it can tell us about what it means
to be human?

      Quentin speaks to Michael Newton, Part time lecturer at UCL and author of
"Savage Girls and Wild Children" and to Dr James Law, Professor of Language and
Communication studies at City University, London.

 Animal Coat Pattern Formation

      Animal coat pattern formation is one of those things that turns out to be
a lot less random that you would imagine. In fact, mathematical models and
equations are able to predict how they form. Alan Turing initially came up with
the idea that mathematical equations related to chemicals in the bodies of
animal that related to coat pattern. Although this turns out to be not quite
true, it was certainly very close. In actual fact it seems that there is a
genetic component to this pattern formation, which drives, as Turing puts it,
Morphogenesis. The organism also involves the laws of physics and chemistry in
its response as well.

      Quentin speaks to the Professor Ian Stewart from the Institute of
Mathematics at Warwick University and to Professor Philip Maini, head of the
Centre for Mathematical Biology at Oxford University who is taking Turing's
work and adding to it to create complex mathematical models of how animals form
their patterned coats.

Listen to the programme
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/rams/materialworld.ram

Savage Girls and Wild Boys
Michael Newton
Hardcover - 192 pages (18 February, 2002)
Faber and Faber; ISBN: 0571201393
AMAZON - US
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/031230093X/darwinanddarwini
AMAZON - UK
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0571201393/humannaturecom/

Editorial Reviews
>From Publishers Weekly
As a child, literature professor Michael Newton (University College, London)
was captivated by Tarzan movies and Kipling's The Jungle Book. It's only
fitting, then, that his first book, Savage Girls and Wild Boys: A History of
Feral Children, would investigate the history of children raised by (among
others) wolves, monkeys and wild dogs. If these children help us understand
"our continuing relationship with the savage image of ourselves" they also
serve as a useful mirror of society's ills. As Newton argues, the medical
treatments, therapeutic interventions, and general media hoopla following the
discoveries of these children sharply reveal the intellectual and political
fixations of their particular historical milieu from Victor, the "Wild Child of
Aveyron," in 1800, onward. As interesting as such stories are in themselves,
however, Newton's real strength lies in his ability to recognize how these
children, seemingly helpless yet astonishingly self-contained, inevitably
awaken our rescue fantasies and parental longings. Newton is a consummate
storyteller, and this richly detailed study will work just as well outside of
academe as within it.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Reviews
Amazon.co.uk Review

Stories of abandoned children and those children supposedly raised by animals
have long fascinated us, as the legend of Romulus and Remus makes clear. More
recent stories also capture the imagination. The Wild Boy of Aveyron, caught
running naked in woods in provincial France in 1800, has been the subject of
biography and fiction and the attempt by the physician Jean Itard to educate
the boy formed the basis for a memorable film by Truffaut. The appearance of
Kaspar Hauser in the streets of early 19th-century Nuremberg, after a
mysterious 16-year imprisonment in a dark and tiny cellar, evoked fantastic
tales of a lost prince and rightful heir cruelly shut away. He too was the
subject of a film--a visionary and visually inventive masterpiece by the German
director Werner Herzog. Michael Newton's Savage Girls and Wild Boys: a History
of Feral Children tells these stories and many more like them--wolf-children in
1920s India, a Russian boy living on the streets of Moscow and scavenging with
a pack of wild dogs, a boy brought up by monkeys in Uganda. Much more than just
a frisson-inducing account of the weird and the bizarre, Savage Girls and Wild
Boys is an ambitious exploration of what these stories (and our fascination
with them) tell us about the shifting boundary between nature and
civilisation.--Nick Rennison

Synopsis

This is an account of feral children - those brought up with no human contact,
sometimes raised by wild animals, unable to speak or perform many of the
functions we consider human. The cases discussed include those of Kamala and
Amala, twin girls reputed to have been brought up by wolves in India in the
1920s; Genie, a girl kept in a single room in New York; a boy raised in a hen
house in Northern Ireland; and a boy found among wild dogs in Moscow. The book
examines their lives and the experiences of those who "rescued" them, looked
after them, educated them or abused them.





News in Brain and Behavioural Sciences - Issue 87 - 1st March, 2003
http://human-nature.com/nibbs/issue87.html

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