Dog Boy of Siberia
In July 2004, Andrei Tolstyk was discovered living in a remote part of the Russian region seven years after his parents abandoned him. Left alone in a house from the age of about three months, it seemed he had been raised by the family guard dog. Deprived of human contact for so long, he could not talk, walked on all fours, bit people and sniffed his food before eating it. He has since begun to walk on two legs, eat with a spoon and communicate using simple sign language.
Turkish Bear Girl
Hunters who shot a bear in the forests close to the Turkish town of Adana in 1937 received a nasty surprise when they were attacked by what they first thought was a 'wood spirit'. When they finally wrestled the figure to the ground, they discovered it was a naked teenage girl, covered in dirt and growling like a bear. Confined to a mental institution, she refused all cooked food and would sleep only on a mattress in the corner of a dark room. It was presumed she was the two-year-old child who had disappeared from a nearby village some 14 years previously and had been adopted by a bear.
Chicken Girl of Portugal
Born to a mentally deficient mother in 1970, Isabel Quaresma was locked in a chicken coop soon after birth and fed on scraps of bread and chicken feed. Rescued by a local radiologist at the age of 10, Quaresma continued to act like a chicken, waving her arms and squawking when alarmed, eating by scrabbling up food with her hands and defecating on the floor. Lifelong malnutrition had also stunted her growth and left her with a deformed skull. She was eventually committed to an institute for severely handicapped children in Lisbon.