
A man who was raised by wolves - johnny313
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/aug/28/how-to-be-human-the-man-who-was-raised-by-wolves
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anigbrowl
_Janer says the young boy would have projected his social needs on to the
animals and imagined relationships with them. “When Pantoja says the fox
laughed at him, or that he had to tell off the snake, he gives us a version of
the true reality, what he believes happened – or how, at least, he explained
the reality to himself,” Janer told me. “Marcos’s mind was desperate for
social acceptance,” he told me, “so instead of understanding the animals’
presence as incentivised by the food, he thought they were trying to make
friends.”_

I continue to be perplexed as to why otherwise intelligent people deny the
possibility of personality and social relations among other species, or that
of interspecies communication. Then again this is just the mildest example in
this story of people's capacity for being awful.

~~~
nkoren
Yeah, I think that Rodríguez absolutely has the right of it here. Animal
communication is "simple" in human terms, but is quite rich on its own terms.
To anybody who spends quality time with animals in their own comfort zones, it
is utterly damned obvious that many animals experience and are entirely
competent at communicating love, friendship, curiosity, jealousy,
covetousness, and many other thoughts/feelings -- and, also, that they are
just as able to blur species boundaries as we are. There are varying levels of
complexity to this: snakes are too simple-minded to have a sense of humour,
for example, but foxes _definitely_ do. Fox humour isn't the same as human
humour, but when you anthropomorphize them, and they foxopomorphize you,
there's enough overlap for an intersubjectively meaningful exchange to take
place.

I think that science's unwillingness to acknowledge this has multiple roots.

The first is a religious relict of wanting to put Man at the centre of the
universe. Descartes, deeply religious, believed that humans were the only
beings endowed with a soul, and that therefore animals were necessarily mere
automata. This became the default "scientific" dogma, to be considered true
unless proven otherwise. But it really is just dogma, with no basis in either
rationality or observation.

The second is the scientific requirement for experimental controls and
reproducibility, which is easiest to do in a laboratory. If animals really
were automata, running on instinct, then that would be fine. But they're
(mostly) social creatures, formed through interaction as much as we are. If
your understanding of human psychology was formed wholly through the
observation of humans who spent their lives trapped in Skinner boxes, you'd
form some rigorously incorrect notions of what humans are capable of.
Ultimately, there's no way to to get a proper understanding of humans in a
non-subjective capacity. Same goes for animals.

~~~
thaumasiotes
> when you anthropomorphize them, and they foxopomorphize you

The _op_ is actually part of the word for human, anthrop·os.

Substituting "fox" in for "human", you'd get "alopecomorphize".

~~~
mindgam3
You know, you are undoubtedly technically correct, but I really love the use
of foxopomorphize. Something about it just so perfectly encapsulates the OP's
point about foxes and humans sharing a joke across species boundaries, in the
way that "alopecomorphize" does not. I say leave it.

~~~
thaumasiotes
Alopecomorphize suffers from the fact that nobody knows the ancient Greek word
for fox. I had to look it up. (And I left the comment for other people like
me, who might wonder.) You could put the whole thing into a more recognizable
Latinate form, "vulpiformify", but then you completely lose the parallel to
"anthropomorphize".

I doubt "arachnomorphize" would have the same issues, though.

~~~
mindgam3
Although I still prefer OP’s version, I do appreciate you leaving your
comment, because there was a small part of me that did wonder what the correct
version of foxomorphize was, and now I don’t have to. Also, points for
“vulpiformify” as a mid-grade poor man’s alopecomorphize.

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lqet
I would definitely not say "raised". He lived, and interacted with, humans
until he was 7, which is around the age you enter school. At 7, I suspect the
average human is far more intellectually advanced than the average grown wolf,
so I very much doubt that there was much "raising" going on.

~~~
Retric
I doubt most modern 7 year olds can forage for food effectively and provide
effective shelter for themselve etc. So, he could have learned some extremely
valuable skills for living in the wild from interacting with wolves. IMO, a
reasonable proxy for being raised by.

Personally, I find his story extremely unlikely, but taken at face value it
does not seem to be impossible.

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entropie
As interesting everhing of this is; I actually doubt that is the absolute
truth as long there is no evidence.

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pvaldes
And now the wolf is extinct in Sierra Morena, ruthlessly killed by the hunting
lobby in the last decades. It makes you think.

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Kagerjay
I think it's interesting to understand how feral children/adults adapt into
society, as this gives a glimpse of what people are actually capable of
learning in extreme niche cases.

I had done a fair bit of research on this topic in the past, out of sheer
curiosity. Mostly to see determine what animalistic instincts are retained, if
any at all, and how well someone can acclimate learning a language like
English in different age brackets. Also to determine what the fine line
between what human/animal instincts /intuition actually were. As you get
older, it becomes much more difficult to learn new things, due to new stigmas
associated with things you had learned previously. You have to unlearn just as
much as you have to learn _(e.g. smarter everyday, riding bike backwards)_. I
would watch videos on this topic, gauging effectiveness of speech information
rate VS years of learning based on how long someone has lived in animalistic
captivity.

I compared this with people who had been born without vision or sight growing
up, or if it was lost later in life. Whether learning to speak without ever
hearing a word spoken was possible. Extreme examples would be things like
Helen Keller, amongst others. Using niche cases like these is one of the best
ways to validate a theory, as there are less unknowns and its in a more
controlled environment. Its qualitative research over quantitative

On the other end of the spectrum, I would research things on child prodigies.
People who were austic savants and prodigies in music, or were off the scale
in what was considered average.

On another spectrum would be prisoners of war, during WWII and the effects of
solitary confinement / deprived senses for extended periods of time and its
effect on human psychology. I wanted to compare the effects of PTSD studies
and how this compares to feral humans / PTSD research here.

\------------------------------------------------------------------

The research was mostly just my obsession over optimization of learning
patterns & discovery of learning antipatterns. I wanted to validate what was
truly effective and what was not, based on actual research with extreme
examples, and narrowing it to down what I personally found works for me, and
basing it on different personality traits found in myer-briggs/disc/etc.

I don't even remember all the impliciations of this research I did. I would
read psychology papers/books on these topics and compare it with things in
DSM. Learn about linguistics, etc. Spent 2 months interested on this given
topic. I narrowed it down to 2 distinctive methods of thinking, with potential
subsystems inside of those. The first being fast, e.g. recognizing someone
you've seen before, simulated mostly by sensory information. The latter being
triggered as a result, based on "slower" iterative thought processes.

And I would test to see the limitations of expanding the "slower" approach by
seeing how much information I could cram in short term, e.g. how many words
could I memorize short term with a memory palace. It was only like 10
words/locations at best, for one given type of application. Meaning I could
remember at most, 10 todolists for a given day if I really made an attempt,
but it became extremely difficult to do.

With this system of (faster) thinking, I was curious how someone who lacks one
sensory resource (sight) and is able to compensate elsewhere (sound). People
who are blind generally process audio information at a much higher rate, if
you ever watch a programmers NVDA speech program the number of words it spits
out is incomprensible to most people to understand.

\------------------------------------------------------------------

I would conduct studies on myself, seeing if I could apply these same
principles, in speedwatching youtube videos with captions, podcasts,
audiobooks, etc. I would be obsessed with learning about speedreading,
shorthand notetaking, incremental reading, among other things. I ran tests on
myself to see if I would watch 2 videos at the same time, one with captions at
2x speed, the other at normal playback rate with audio, and see if I could
comprehend both well enough.

I have always been interested on how people like Tom Scott are able to do a 5
minute video shot in one take, without ever reading a script. Or how book
writers like stephen king or brandon sanderson are able to generate these
unique works of worldbuilding art, in book format. I would also learn things
like memory palaces/competitions, chess champions, speed math competitions,
and space repetition learning.

I'm starting to read a book called "Thinking fast and slow". It describes
everything that I had tried to formulate in words.

~~~
aoner
I would also recommend reading Why We Sleep from Matthew walker. It has a lot
of in depth information about how are memory works.

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qubax
What clickbait nonsense. Do people really believe this? Are people this naive?

He was raised by humans at least to the age of 7. Then he was "abandoned" and
he lived by "himself" in heavily populated spain? A few miles from cordoba,
madrid and other spanish cities? He wasn't raised by wolves. He lived near
wolves. Using this logic, everyone in spain was "raised by wolves".

Aren't journalists supposed to be skeptical? Aren't extraordinary claims
supposed to demand extraordinary evidence?

This article is on par with history channel's aliens built pyramids.

I walked through central park when I was younger. I guess that means I was
raised by squirrels.

~~~
jeandejean
I especially doubt so much the anecdote about the she-wolf that fed him like
Mowgli
([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNcBAI6iOn0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNcBAI6iOn0)).
That's just what people want to hear and is totally in tune with the guy that
seeks social acceptance.

Not to mention that people are in strong demand with "nature is so cool", and
"human are evil" narratives where it totally fits.

~~~
qubax
Yeah. It's obvious that these claims are lies or at the very least
exaggerated. And if they aren't lies, then we should be demanding real
evidence. I don't get why people are downvoting me. Of all places, you would
think that HN would be where skepticism reigns supreme.

~~~
nkoren
That's not how skepticism works. A cursory search reveals that his case is
quite well-attested to since the early 1970s, and the verifiable facts are not
in dispute. What happened when he was alone in the wilderness is _not_
verifiable, so "I won't believe it without evidence!" is a hollow and useless
bellow. There are many situations in which evidence will never be available --
there were no webcams set up to observe wolf-child interactions in the
mountains of Spain in the 1950s -- but that doesn't mean its untrue. A
skeptical mind, in such cases, needs to rely on other faculties rather than
complain about a lack of evidence.

~~~
jeandejean
I agree the lack of evidence doesn't mean it's untrue. But it doesn't mean
it's true either. So here we have to believe the story of a man. Some people
do, some don't...

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fiftyacorn
Was hoping it was Eddie Izzard -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKF_H_9AnAY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKF_H_9AnAY)

