Episode 157 - Feral Children

SPOOKTOBER HAS BEGUN! This week, we discuss the trope in myth, legend, horror, and adjacent genres of feral children. We won't be directly discussing actual cases of trauma, neglect, or child abuse, but rather the place of the bestial feral child in the mythology of different ancient cultures all the way up to a more recent timeline. Why do these stories interest us, spook us, and who's the real monster here?

• Register for our International Archaeology Day Live Show on October 16!

• Black Doves Speak: Herodotus and the Languages of Barbarians (Center for Hellenic Studies)

• How Young Children Learn Language (Scholastic)

• Flint Dibble on Wolf’s Milk and More

• Guide to the classics: the Epic of Gilgamesh (The Conversation)

• Between gods and animals: becoming human in the Gilgamesh epic (Aeon)

• The History of Hayy ibn Yaqzan, translated by Simon Ockley

• Rewriting the Savage: The Extraordinary Fictions of the "Wild Girl of Champagne" (Eighteenth-Century Studies)

• The Wild Girl, Natural Man, and the Monster (via WorldCat)

• Why Sasquatch and Other Crypto-Beasts Haunt Our Imaginations (Anthropology of Consciousness)

• Feral Disorders and Colonial Exclusions: Animal Reared Feral Children, Discourses of Animality, and the Treatment of Animals in Colonial India (via Academia.edu)

• Wild stories: why do we find feral children so fascinating? (The Guardian)