Feral child
French surgeon Serge Aroles, however, has persuasively argued that the case was a fraud, perpetrated by Singh in order to raise money for his orphanage.
The historian Herodotus wrote that Egyptian pharaoh Psammetichus I (Psamtik) sought to discover the origin of language, and prove Egypt was the oldest people on Earth by conducting an experiment with two children.
[59] Following the 2008 disclosure by Belgian newspaper Le Soir[83] that the bestselling book Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years and movie Survivre avec les loups ('Surviving with Wolves') was a media hoax, the French media debated the credulity with which numerous cases of feral children have been unquestioningly accepted.
According to the French surgeon Serge Aroles, who wrote a general study of feral children based on archives (L'Enigme des Enfants-loups or The Enigma of Wolf-children, 2007), many alleged cases are totally fictitious stories: Myths, legends, and fiction have depicted feral children reared by wild animals such as wolves, apes, monkeys, and bears.
[87] Legendary and fictional children are often depicted as growing up with relatively normal human intelligence and skills and an innate sense of culture or civilization, coupled with a healthy dose of survival instincts.
The book Knowledge of Angels involves a feral girl found on a fictional island based upon Mallorca.
The Earthsea series by Ursula K. Le Guin mentions a brother and sister who were abandoned on a remote island as children, and thus grew up as feral children; in A Wizard of Earthsea, Ged washes up on their island and is unable to communicate much with them, as they only know a few words in their native language (which he did not speak at the time).
The 2006 novel Magic Hour by Kristin Hannah is about a six-year-old feral child living during her formative years inside a cave in the Olympic National Forest.
The girl wanders one day into the fictional small town of Rain Valley, Washington, searching for food and carrying her pet wolf pup and unable to speak.
