(Music)
Children are precious to human kind.
We satisfy our innate desire to nurture
and carry on our bloodline through our progeny.
Our children, in turn, rely on us for love and survival.
What happens to a child that's been abandoned by all who are charged
with protecting him and left to fend for himself in the wild.
Or when a girl grows up in solitary confinement in her own family's home
never knowing love or social interaction.
(Piano music)
Since the earliest of times, such stories
were thought to be nothing more than myths.
Could there be any truth to the lore of feral children?
(Ire music)
The word "feral" means wild or undomesticated.
It brings to mind the myth of Romulus, the founder of Rome,
and his twin brother Remus, who were raised by a wolf.
Or that of Tarzan, who lived among animals in the wild.
For centuries, feral children have posed questions that go to the very heart
of what it is to be human.
One of the central questions in all of science that has to do with humans
is are we a product of our genes or are we a product of our experience.
The old nature, nurture issue.
Feral children tap into this because they are the natural experiment
that we're not allowed to carry out.
They are the children who go through extraordinary circumstances at
which no one could naturally create.
But the fascination, I think, actually originates in these sort of primal ideas
about the difference between humans and animals.
Part of being a human is being brought up by humans.
If you're not brought up by humans are you completely human?
And I think in some of these cases that's the issue that we're dealing with.
(bark, bark, bark, bark)
(bark, bark, bark)
One of the most extraordinary cases ever
has recently come to light in the Ukraine.
Oxana Malaya was born in November 1983.
According to medical records, she was a healthy child.
So, how did Oxana become more like a dog than a human being?
Her parents were alcoholics, and one night,
too drunk to care, they left Oxana outside.
Looking for warmth, the three year old crawled into the farm kennel
and curled up with the mongrel dog that probably saved her life.
(Bark, growl)
But while the dog helped her survive,
her time in the kennel also had awful consequences.
(Arf, Arf, growl)
For the next five years, she would spend her life living as a dog.
(Bark, bark bark, growl)
(Howling)
(drum music)
(Speaking Ukrainian)
She was more like a little dog then a human child.
First of all she couldn't speak, or she could hardly speak.
And actually the purpose of speaking,
well she didn't think it was necessary to speak at all.
(Speaking Ukrainian)
Children can copy the habits of the creatures around them
if those creatures are human beings they become like human beings
but, as you know, she was surrounded by dogs.
So she became more like a dog than a human being.
(Water running noise)
But surely the story of Oxana is a rarity,
the product of alcoholic parents in a poor and depressed part of the world.
Incredibly, it would seem not.
Throughout history, children have been abandoned by their parents.
Most die quickly, but some, the survivors,
have resorted to extraordinary means to stay alive.
How they have survived and who they become are questions that have long
fascinated scientists, but understanding these children
has been a slow and difficult process.
A very very good clinicians and researchers
have, with the tools that they had in their day and age,
they've tried to understand what happened but because
it's such a complex set of phenomenon, our understanding has been limited,
and it's incrementally, from generation to generation to generation,
we've had better tools to better
understand what happens to these children.
The first scientifically documented case occurred in 1800 in France.
It would send shock waves throughout civilized Europe.
(music)
The scientific study of feral children began in the most
improbable of circumstances.
On a cloudy afternoon in southwest France,
two hunters were out in the woods looking for deer.
It had been a long day and they hadn't caught anything,
but their luck was about to change.
(ire noises)
(tribal drums)
For years, scared villagers had talked of a strange wild child
that lurked in the forest.
(bark, bark, bark, bark, bark)
He had been caught twice before but had always managed to escape.
(bark, bark bark)
This time, however, he wouldn't get away.
(bark, bark, bark)
News of the capture spread fast.
In Paris, one young doctor, Jean Itard, was especially interested.
(music)
The boy was brought to Paris.
Most of the city's medical professionals
quickly decided that the boy, now called Victor, was nothing more than an idiot.
But something about him captivated Itard.
The first thing which is truly remarkable about Itard,
is his extremely scientific approach to reporting what he did.
He gives a wonderful wealth of detail about the child,
what the child did, when he tried certain things.
So he is very clearly linked into
a tradition which we're still involved with now.
(clap, clap)
The modern scientific study of feral children had begun.
For Itard there were two tests of what it meant to be human,
the ability to feel empathy and to use language.
Victor could do neither, and so was, in Itard's eyes scarcely human.
(music)
No, Victor no alet.
At first, he was wild and hard to control.
But slowly, Dr. Itard and his housekeeper, Madame Guérin
started making progress.
Itard's belief in love and kindness seemed to be working.
(music)
But after his years alone in the woods, Itard knew that Victor
still craved for the wild.
Every day they would walk together,
and with every day, Victor became less wild.
(music)
And eventually, Madame Guérin was able to take over
what were, for Victor, some of his happiest times.
(music)
He loved nature, but he also seemed to be showing
real feelings for the people around him.
I think that Jean Itard understood the importance of parental love
and so, he put Victor in a situation where he had in essence a um,
substitute mother, Madame Guérin and she played the role of mother.
She understood the importance of constant care
and understood intuitively how important it is to touch people.
(music)
And in the months that followed, there was even more progress.
Victor enjoyed helping Madame Guérin and had learned to lay the table.
(flute music)
But one lunch time he was laying the table as usual when Madame Guérin
started crying.
Her husband had recently died.
Incredibly, Victor seemed to understand.
Quietly, he simply removed the place setting.
(flute music)
This was the breakthrough Itard had been waiting for.
Victor seemed to be showing real empathy and understanding at last.
(music)
By putting away, um, the place he laid, he was showing that he could empathize
with Madame Guérin.
He realized that he'd made a mistake.
That his mistake had hurt her and I think in by doing that,
he was showing his ability to put himself in a position of another human being,
something which, when he was first brought to Paris,
would have seemed impossible.
Victor had passed the first of Itard's tests.
Nervous but excited, Itard realized that it was now or never.
It was time for Victor to learn to talk.
(music)
But before he could talk, Itard wanted to know that Victor could recognize sounds.
To test this, he blindfolded him and gave him a drum and a bell.
(music)
It was a game Victor loved and understood immediately.
For Itard, this was just the start he had wanted.
Did his mean that Victor would finally be able to master language?
(drum and bell sounds)
A drum is one thing, but language is infinitely more complex.
Before he would be able to talk, Itard knew that Victor would have to
master his vowel sounds,
the building blocks of all language.
O
Victor (something in French)
Victor.
But this time, Victor was at a complete loss.
To him, it was all nothing more than a game.
Ah,
Itard could see his dreams for Victor disappearing before his eyes,
and for the first time ever, lost his temper with the boy.
Victor no (slap sound)
(boy crying)
But it was no good, Itard realized that Victor just couldn't make sense
of the sounds that other children take for granted.
(music)
Without this, how could he ever be expected to talk?
Itard felt that, to be a human being in the fullest possible sense,
you had to be sociable, you had to be language using,
had to be measured, orderly, artificial, and when he realized
that Victor was unable to obtain that, I think he loses interest
and um, really leaves him to his own devices.
For the next 20 years, Victor would live with Madame Guérin.
Happy, but abandoned by the man who had tried so hard to save him.
With Victor, Itard had shown that it possible to bring a feral child
back into society, but with language, the ultimate test, he had failed.
Despite this, interest in feral children continued unabated.
In 1828, a young boy, Casper Hauser, was found lost and alone
in Germany.
His background as much of a mystery as Victor's.
And as the century wore on, more reports were appearing from distant corners
of the globe.
From India, in particular, came a series
of stories about children living with wolves.
Distant and unproven, to scientists they seemed little more than myth.
Then, in 1930, a properly documented case
of two girls living with a wolf pack came to light.
American scientists were particularly interested,
but before the girls could get to the United States, both died of fever.
One of the scientists who had been waiting to see them
was primatologist Winthrop Kellogg.
Despite this setback, he was determined to prove
that nurture was the dominant influence in child development.
Kellogg knew that the perfect way to prove his theory was to um,
engineer a feral child .
To bring to get a baby, put them among wolves and to see what happened.
Clearly this is the one experiment he couldn't do,
this was the forbidden experiment.
So what he decided to do was the next best thing,
which was to reverse that forbidden experiment
and to bring an ape into human family.
For the next year, the chimpanzee Gua,
would spend every day with Kellogg's young son Donald.
As Kellogg had predicted, Gua could learn many human characteristics,
but the experiment had unforeseen consequences.
Kellogg really thought of this as an experiment on the chimpanzee.
In actual fact, it became equally an experiment on his son.
Particularly in the way in which his son was picking up,
or not picking up, language.
Rather than learning words,
Donald was learning the barks and yelps of a chimpanzee.
Horrified, Kellogg called off the experiment.
Almost by accident, Kellogg had shown the vulnerability of early childhood.
How the smallest changes in environment
can have unforeseen and long lasting effects.
It was a subject that continued to intrigue scientists.
In the 1960s, American psychologist Harry Harlow
continued where Kellogg had left off.
Harlow's work was really seminal in this entire field
because he showed the crucial importance of the caregiving relationship
between a mother and an infant and how the physical stimulation,
literally the physical contact with the caregiver,
has profound impact on healthy development.
At birth, Harlow took baby monkeys from their mothers.
They were then given a choice between a cold wire monkey with milk
or a soft warm monkey without.
Amazingly, they chose the more comforting figure every time.
And socially, the effects were devastating.
Raised in isolation, without any love or encouragement,
these young monkeys were scared and confused.
Harlow couldn't explain it,
but something about this early isolation had damaged them for life.
But these were monkeys.
Would the same be true for a human child?
It would be another 20 years before scientists had a chance to find out,
and when they did, it would be in the busiest, most urban setting imaginable.
Officials in the Los Angeles suburb of Arcadia
have taken custody of a 13-year-old girl,
and they say was kept in such isolation by her parents
that she never even learned to talk.
The girl still wore diapers and was uttering
infantile noises when a social worker discovered the case two weeks ago.
The authorities are hoping she still may have a normal learning capacity.
Among the first to see the child was
Temple City detective Sergeant Frank Linley.
(Ire music)
I already knew that the child was 13 1/2 years old
and I took one look at her and she wasn't much bigger
than my daughter Beverly, who had just turned seven about three months earlier,
and I really had a hard time conceiving of the idea
that the child was the age that she was.
The child obviously had been severely mistreated.
After she was still in diapers, couldn't walk,
she had no verbal skills at all at that point.
(Ire music)
The last time I was on this street was probably 30 years ago.
Yup, there it is.
Hasn't changed much, the backyard looks the same,
it's all weeds and dead grass.
Looks the same as it did in 1970.
The house belonged to Clark Wiley.
A loner, Clark had turned his back on the world
after his mother had been killed in a hit and run accident.
After the accident, things in the Wiley house would never be the same again.
(ire piano music)
The house was completely dark,
all the blinds were drawn,
and there were no toys,
no clothes, nothing that would ever indicate
to you that a child of any age lived there.
(Ire music)
The child's bedroom was back in this corner.
That was the bedroom.
The windows were covered to about three inches from the top,
which were the only natural light that had ever come in there
in all the time the child was in the bedroom.
Entire furnishings in the bedroom consisted of a cage
with a uh, pull-down chicken-wire lid
and some type of piece of wire securing it when they closed it down.
There was a potty chair with some kind of homemade strapping device.
For 13 years Genie had spent her nights locked in bed.
Her days, strapped to a potty chair.
During that time, Clark had ordered his son John
and wife Irene never to talk to her.
In her darkened room, she had lead a life of near-total isolation.
Even close neighbors were completely unaware of her presence.
We came home from work and the police was here and
they came to question us.
That's when we found out you know, what happened
and, you know, that they had a little girl.
Nobody know, nobody knew before.
And when we found out what happened,
how she was treated.
I mean, everybody was shocked and just unbelievable.
For their whole marriage, Clark had imposed his will on Irene,
and blind with cataracts, she had been too scared to resist.
But one day, something broke.
While Clark was out buying groceries, she seized her chance and fled.
It was the first glimpse the world would have of Clark and Irene's dark secret.
I met Clark and Irene at Temple City Sheriffs station,
they were both under arrest at the time.
When we interviewed Irene, she would make no mention of the family whatsoever,
particularly the children.
I attempted along with my partner to interview Clark.
he refused to talk to us, he wouldn't say a word.
He never even acknowledged that he understood what we were talking about.
Unable to face the truth, Clark took matters into his own hands.
This morning, the authorities reported that 70-year-old Clark Wiley
shot and killed himself, just before he was
to go to court and be arraigned for child abuse.
After 13 years, Genie was at last free.
And for scientists, she was just the case they had been waiting for.
For 13 years, Genie had lived a life of complete isolation.
Raised in a city bedroom, Genie was as much a feral child
as if she had been brought up by wolves.
At 13, she was the size of a six-year-old.
Worst of all, she had never been taught to speak.
The question now, could she ever learn?
(Ire music)
Genie's case was so scientifically important that the government
funded a team of scientists to help answer the many questions she posed.
(It's so good to see you.)
Two of the scientists who would become especially important to Genie
were child psychologist Kent and linguist Susan Curtis.
(It's so wonderful to see you, thank god.)
Neither had ever encountered a case as extreme as Genie's.
(ire music)
We looked at her as a as a newborn in a way, even though we know she hadn't.
She came with 13 years of memories and experiences, not all of them wonderful,
most of them not, I think, and so we felt we needed to start to expose her
to what the world was going to be like for her outside the hospital bed.
To Genie, everything was a new experience.
We did what you would do with, with your own kids,
if you were introducing them to the world.
You'd take them out and hold them up and show them,
and sort of judge from how they reacted to whether this was to much or not enough
and you could move on and do the next thing.
Genie was making amazing progress, as the experts looked on
they realized that she might be the answer to the question that
had troubled science for so long.
So, we seized this wonderful opportunity that she provided us
in as loving a way as we could, but using it to finally
get our chance to address head on specific hypotheses
and notions about human language and the human mind.
(piano music)
These hypotheses were based on the latest ideas
about how children's brains developed.
According to the theory, young children could
only learn certain things at certain times, called critical periods.
Language was one of these critical periods, and according to the theory,
Genie, who was now a teenager, had missed her chance forever.
(Piano music)
But incredibly, Genie seemed to be proving the theory wrong.
As this footage shows, Genie was blossoming.
Not only was she delighted by the world around her,
but she was learning the words for the new things
she was seeing.
[piano music]
She was extremely interested in everything around her,
she wanted to know the word for everything around her.
She wanted to engage people all around her.
She was not mentally deficient, her lights were on,
and everyone who worked with her, from teachers,
to therapists, to me, knew that she was not retarded.
It was clear as day.
[piano music]
And as she began to learn more and more words, hundreds of words,
much more rapidly than I ever imagined and swinging them together,
I began to think maybe I will be wrong,
maybe she will be the one that will prove that this hypothesis is incorrect.
But Genie could not escape the effects of her past so easily.
She was still haunted by her traumatic upbringing.
Trapped by the memories of the awful fate she had suffered.
And linguistically, she had stopped making progress.
She learned tons of words, she has an enormous vocabulary.
But language is not words, language is grammar,
language is sentences.
How do you make a sentence?
What can be a sentence?
What is a sentence?
How do you automatically know something's a sentence?
So, it wasn't because she was cognitively deficient in other respects,
it was because she was cognitively deficient in this island of human mind,
the mental faculty that we call grammar.
At the time Genie was found, brain science was in its infancy.
But today, we have a much clearer picture of what actually happens
in cases of extreme neglect like Genie's.
In Genie's brain, the left part of her, her brain, the, her cortex
that, that has those neural systems responsible for speech and language,
because she never heard any words
and because she was never taught,
spoken to very often, they didn't get stimulated.
And because they weren't stimulated, they got smaller and less functional
and disconnected and ultimately that part of the brain literally physically changes.
Today, with modern imaging technology, we can actually see what happens
in the brains of feral children, and the effects are shocking.
Without normal stimulation, their brains are smaller and malformed.
And the earlier this neglect begins, and the longer it carries on,
the worse the damage will be.
Starved of stimulation,
Genie's brain had simply not developed the capacity for language.
And now that she was a teenager, she would never be able to learn.
Despite this, Genie continued to be a close part of everyone's life.
But there was more trouble ahead.
Children have to belong to somebody when they grow up,
and she was still a child, and she needed a family to belong to.
So that's what we would have liked, a family that she could belong to.
Um, and that's not what happened unfortunately.
What did happen is about the worst outcome, I think we would have envisioned.
On her 18th birthday, Genie moved back with her mother Irene
into the house in which she had been so terribly abused.
But after only a few weeks, it was clear that Irene couldn't cope.
From here, Genie was moved into state care with terrible consequences.
[piano music]
I was a student, and people wouldn't listen to me,
people who needed to intervene did not listen to me,
and so I spent lots and lots of time
on the phone pleading with people to intervene and save this person,
who had had the worst experience of deprivation and isolation
in all recorded medical history.
Genie moved from home to home,
sometimes with the very people who served as her therapists.
This potential conflict of interest
raised tensions among the many people involved in her life,
and a tug of war erupted over the child.
As Genie's condition deteriorated, Irene decided that Susan Curtis
and the other academics had become too close to Genie.
A lawsuit followed.
I went from being asked to be her guardian
to one week later being prevented from seeing her or phoning her.
And ever since then, I've been prevented from having any contact at all.
So, although I have lots of, you know that I'm still a scientist,
I'm still interested in knowing things
about her language now and all kinds of interesting things
I would like to pursue academically.
Primarily, I would just like to see her.
Now a ward of the court, Genie lives in an adult care home somewhere in Los Angeles.
Prevented from seeing the people who once meant so much to her.
But children like Genie continue to be discovered even today.
We actually are seeing an increase in the number of severely neglected children
who are in physically and socially isolated environments
and, and have feral child-like properties.
[piano music]
[roar]
[music]
In the Ukraine, we uncovered an incredible story.
Mirny is a depressed and rundown town miles from anywhere.
Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Mirny was a thriving Navy town.
But now, half the flats are empty, and stray dogs roam the streets.
But in 1999, social workers found a situation
shocking even by the standards of Mirny.
On the third floor of this block, a four-year-old boy called Edic
was found in a deserted flat.
His alcoholic mother was nowhere to be seen.
As the authorities started asking questions,
a horrifying picture began to emerge.
While Edic's younger sister Nadia had been cared for by neighbors,
Edic had been forced to look elsewhere for love and affection.
Without a mother to care for him, Edic had turned to the local stray dogs
for warmth and protection.
Worse, he started to behave more like a dog than a human being.
[music]
[girl speaking Ukrainian]
His behavior was exactly like a dog's behavior should be.
He was taking the food only with his hands,
and he was scratching the younger kids and biting them.
[dog growling with kids talking in background]
Two years later, Edic is six and lives in a foster home in the nearest city.
He has made remarkable progress but still has many problems.
His behavior has improved, and he is better with the other children.
But linguistically, he is slow.
Doctors have told us while Edic is six, his language is that of a three-year-old.
It seemed that Edic was suffering from many of the same language problems
that had affected Victor and Genie so badly.
The crucial question:
Had he been found in time, or would he, like them, never recover?
To try and gain an accurate picture of Edic's condition,
we took a leading language expert, professor James Law,
to the Ukraine to evaluate Edic.
There seemed to be a lot of similarities between Edic and other feral children.
One of the interesting things is he's being identified rather younger
than some of the more extreme cases.
So, they were...
They had a, had a much longer, extended period of neglect,
whereas his neglect has been pretty acute, but, but for a finite period of time,
and then he's come to this warm and very supportive foster family,
and that has to be a good thing.
I'd like to start.
To get a better picture, James spoke with Edic's foster mother.
[Speaking Ukrainian]
At the beginning, he was a wild child.
He didn't know anything, he didn't even know what a plate or a spoon was,
or how he should use them,
and it took months to make him to eat normally and to get him to wear clothes
and behave normally.
Picture that his foster mother paints is in the last six months or so,
there seems to be a bit of a breakthrough in some way,
and it's not so much to do with his language,
although that has been improving,
it's to do with his ability to relate to other people and to like empathize.
With Edic's background clear in his mind,
James could begin to make a more formal assessment
of Edic's strengths and weaknesses.
As the session progressed, it was clear that Edic was reveling in the attention.
But just how much of an impact had two years of neglect had on his language?
It was time for James to find out.
[dogs barking]
[boy speaking in Ukrainian]
Listen, listen, sh sh sh sh.
Edic, (Ukrainian)
Just quickly, point to the elephant first.
Sh sh, listen very carefully.
Point to the elephant first and then point to the giraffe.
(Speaking Ukrainian)
Good boy, well done.
Point to the cat and then to the bird.
(Speaking Ukrainian)
Okay.
Nocking.
Nocking, oh.
(laughter)
Linguistically, Edic had made good progress since moving
from the awful conditions in the town in which he was found.
But the details of his past were still unclear.
To get a better picture, James needed to take Edic back to Myrni,
the town where he had been so badly treated by humans
that dogs had become his most faithful companions.
[music]
As he walked around the village, Edic could remember
little of the details of what happened to him.
[music]
But he could remember some of the places behind the flats
where he had run and slept with the dogs that had become his family.
[music]
As he continued, Edic's confidence and memory seemed to be improving.
He wanted to show James the flat where he had lived with the dogs.
But as we reemerged at the front of the block,
we were greeted by a local delegation.
Somehow, the mayor and police had been alerted to our presence.
They claimed that the story about Edic was a lie and demanded we stop filming.
She knows this woman, she saying that everything that she
was told about this family is totally wrong
and that's why you shouldn't film anything here.
It was clear that something had happened here,
but with the mayor and police's vigorous denials,
it was far from certain exactly what.
However, as we were leaving the town, James was approached by a local woman
who clearly recognized both Edic and Nadia.
Despite the police's intervention, she was determined to tell him
what she had seen when the children lived in the town.
It was horrible conditions, she never come in her flat.
There was fish, there was fish on the floor, and the dogs living there
and just the conditions was absolutely awful.
We have heard stories that the children used to play a lot with the dogs
with the animals around the flats.
(Speaking Ukrainian)
She's saying that...she's saying that yes, the children were good friends
of the local dogs and home, and stray dogs use to come live in their flat.
There were always not less then three dogs in their flat
and Edic was sleeping with them.
But could a young child really live with dogs?
And if they could, how would this incredible relationship work?
Animal expert Steve Fryer has worked with dogs for over 20 years
and studied their very special bond with man.
The relationship between domesticated dogs and humans is really very special
and it's almost a primeval, urgent feelings that we get about dogs,
and I'm sure they have about us because they've been around us
for so many thousands of years and
it's been passed on through generation after generation.
But how would he explain Edic's incredible story?
I believe food was the issue and the dogs were coming into the warmth and security
of the apartment and getting regular food or irregular food.
So, they must have seen this young child as a provider for the pack
and perhaps pushed his status up much higher than if he had just been
a three-year-old child running around with them.
Dogs are very quick to learn to seize on an opportunity.
So, if there's free food source, then it would be a very big bonus
in their thinking capacity for, for, towards this child.
Edic, it seems, was lucky.
By offering the dogs food and shelter, he in return
received the warmth and and companionship that probably saved his life.
But after only two years with the dogs, he had suffered serious consequences.
But what of Oxana?
She is now 19, but spent almost six years living in a kennel.
She was found at eight, almost the same age as Victor.
Would she ever be able to talk, or would she, like Victor and
Genie before her, be condemned to a life of silence?
[music]
Oxana is now 19 and lives miles from the nearest town
in a home for the mentally ill.
When she was discovered at eight, she couldn't even talk.
According to brain theory, Oxana would have only three or four years
to learn language before she lost the chance forever.
In this short time, Oxana made it.
She can now talk in simple sentences, but she is haunted
by the memories of her terrible past, and even now,
as this footage shows, she can still revert to her old behavior.
[barking, howling]
My mom wanted to have a boy and she had a girl instead,
and so she just threw me out and put me into the kennels.
When I was small, the dogs would breast feed me,
and later they brought me, like when I was bigger,
they brought me what people gave them, and they shared it with me.
I wasn't scared of them at all, it was my home.
So what does the future hold for Oxana?
The only thing we can do is to try and correct her behavior
so she gets use to living in a human society.
The best way to do it is to try and find a proper occupation for her,
and it will focus her mind from dogs and animals to some sort of useful occupation,
but she will never be considered a normal person.
[piano music]
Found at eight, Oxana has made amazing progress,
but like Victor and Genie before her, it seems that her development
has come some way but will now go no further.
[piano music]
But what about Edic, what does his future hold?
The earlier children are identified and something can be done about it,
even if it's just stabilizing their environment,
the better it is for those children.
My sense is that the fact that he was identified when he was four
is going to stand him in good state.
Linguistically, Edic's future looks encouraging.
And what you're seeing in Edic is a, a really substantial number of
words that he's now acquired over a, relatively short period of time.
We're also, seeing his grammar developing and it seems to be
developing more slowly, but of course it always does
develop more slowly, and then it would, it'll really take off.
I'm assuming that in the next year or so that we, we would have a,
what they call a grammar burst, where you get a massive number
of new structures and it looks to me as if Edic is doing that on his own
without instruction.
And one would take that to be a very positive sign.
But socially, he's likely to find things more difficult.
In Edic's case, we probably have an example of a child who
orientates towards the dogs because being with them was actually
to his advantage.
I think it's impossible to underestimate the impact that this could
have in the long term.
Do we observe him in the orphanage?
You see, he attaches to almost anybody indiscriminately,
and what is likely to happen is that
he's gonna be vulnerable socially and I think his personal development
is what I would be most concerned about.
Edic is likely to suffer the consequences
of his early experiences for many years to come.
But it would be wrong to see feral children simply as hopeless.
[piano music]
We should look at these children not with pity but with awe.
I mean, they're just, it's fascinating that
you can go through something like that
and that you would still be willing, after what human beings have done to you,
that you'd still be willing to put your hand out and touch a new person.
Faced with almost unimaginable situations, feral children have come up
with the best strategies they could to survive.
And for the last 200 years,
science has tried to understand the mysteries they pose.
With Victor, Itard made the first steps,
a process that continued with Susan Curtis's work with Genie,
and goes on right up to today
with evaluations of children like Oxana and Edic.
We are continuing to learn more and more about how to help these children
and more and more about how these
neglectful experiences influence their brain,
but we're just on the very very very cusp of being able to be helpful.
Because today, we haven't done a very good job of that,
we just haven't understood the brain and brain development in ways
that would allow us to be as good as we can be,
and I think that that's changing.
And as we look to the future, one thing is certain.
The story of feral children is far from over.
I think there always will be stories like this.
Really, as long as adults you know, abandoning children,
leaving them to their own devices.
As long as, really, adult cruelty goes on, then there will be feral children.