Science: Baboon Boy

From Romulus and Remus, mythical wolf-suckled founders of Rome, to modern times, the world’s folklore is full of tales of human children reared in the wilds by animals, and such tales have flowered in fiction from Kipling’s Mowgli to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan. Very few, nevertheless, are the cases, authenticated to the satisfaction of science, of moppets growing up in forest or jungle without human contacts, whether with or without animal foster parents. One authentic woodland waif was the “Wild Boy of Aveyron,” found in a French forest in 1799. Others were Amala and Kamala, two children discovered, in 1921, living in a cave in India with wolves.

For many years sporadic stories have come out of South Africa about a wild boy caught in the Koonap district in 1903 while traveling with a tribe of baboons. His captors were members of the Cape police. Last year Professor Raymond Arthur Dart of the University of Witwatersrand, discoverer of the celebrated fossil apeman named Australopithecus, queried the district police about the Baboon Boy. There was no written record of his finding, and the man who had caught him, Lance Sergeant Charles Holsen, had died; but another policeman who knew Holsen remembered his story, and this checked with the version previously given by the Baboon Boy himself. Psychologist John Porter Foley Jr. of George Washington University assembled the details of the case for the American Journal of Psychology, published a summary last week in Science. Africa’s Baboon Boy takes rank as the only child known to have been raised by “infrahuman primates” (apes or monkeys). The story:

Sergeant Holsen and another policeman were riding patrol one day when they sighted a troop of baboons. The men took a few pot shots with their revolvers and the apes fled. One, scuttling on all fours like the rest, lagged behind. Captured, he proved to be a black native boy, 12 to 14 years old. Like a baboon, he chattered, jerked and nodded his head, scratched his body with his forefinger. He had a nervous, baboon-like grin. His quadrupedal gait had caused an abnormal overdevelopment of his haunches.

The police turned the Baboon Boy over to a mental hospital at Grahamstown. Hospital officials soon decided that, although he could speak no human language, the boy was of normal intelligence, that all he needed was training. They gave him to a farmer named George Smith, who named him Lucas.

At first Lucas was wild and mischievous, and Farmer Smith had to thrash him repeatedly for “dirty animal habits in and about the house.” As a wild boy, he had eaten crickets, ostrich eggs, prickly pears, green mealies and wild honey. He continued to prefer this sort of food to a civilized diet, once devoured 89 prickly pears at a sitting. But he became gradually civilized as he learned to speak and understand English. He showed himself polite, obedient, fond of children, a devoted nurse. In the fields he was a prodigious worker, and Farmer Smith eventually came to regard him as his best servant. Lucas told Smith some of his experiences among the baboons, explained the big scar on his head as the mark of a kick delivered by an ostrich whose nest he was raiding. His origin remained in doubt, but it was remembered that a native woman had lost a child years before while she was weeding a field.

Today the Baboon Boy is about 50. He still has no clear idea of time, cannot write, retains some of his apish facial and bodily mannerisms. He has to be reminded to start any task. But once started, he works steadily until the job is done.