I just finished reading a collection of short stories by T. C. Boyle (T. Coraghessan Boyle). The title of the collection is the same as the last and longest story: Wild Child.
T. C. Boyle’s fiction is able to romp through all the fields of the imagination, including many scientific topics that might scare away other fiction writers. His imagination is wild, and yet every story is something that could, conceivably, have happened, and many of them are based on real events, as in the rich couple who spent a quarter million dollars to clone their dog.
But Wild Child is straight historical fiction. It sticks fairly closely to the known facts of the wild boy of Aveyron, in France, at the end of the eighteenth century. The boy, apparently aged about five, was left for dead in the forest by a family who could not afford another mouth to feed, but he survived. Legend has it that wolves raised him, but this is unconfirmed and Boyle does not use this element in his plot.
The boy was completely a brute. He knew only how to catch small animals with his bare hands and eat them raw, or dig potatoes from farmers’ fields (again with bare hands). When he was captured by well-meaning peasants, and later raised in special institutions that tried to rehabilitate him, his reaction was fierce and violent. He had no conscience, sense of shame, or capacity for empathy. Eventually the teacher who tried the most to rehabilitate him had to give up. The former wild child died at age forty without language, with minimal capacity to learn anything, and with continuing hostility.
What is interesting about this story for this blog is what it does and does not tell us about human evolution. Scientists at the time thought that the child represented an earlier stage of human evolution, before language and social skills developed. But we know today that this is not the least bit true. The Wild Child was the product of severe abuse—his throat had been cut when he was left for dead. He was not pre-verbal; if he was about five when abandoned, he had started to develop human skills and then forgot them. He may have had normal human capacity for language, conscience, and empathy, but these were cut short forever. All during human evolution, people lived in groups, where they had fully functional social skills. They hunted together and shared food. Families helped each other to raise the kids. Most mammals live in social groups. There has, for them or for us, never been a Wild Child stage of evolution.
While I was reading this story, I was watching and playing with my grandson, who is younger than the Wild Boy was when he was abandoned. Leo is always talking, exploring, being very expressive. We played catch with some of his stuffed animals. It was not just motor skills he was developing. He made up stories about the animals. This was imagination that he would not have had, or might have lost, if he had been abandoned in the forest like the Wild Child. He is cheerful, which is one of the options of human nature. The Wild Child might have been cheerful also, if he had a chance. Leo asked me what I was reading, and I told him it was about a little boy who grew up by himself until it was too late, so he did not know how to talk, or to get along, or do practically anything that Leo can do. Leo understands that his time spent with his parents, his sister, his grandparents, or his friends is essential for his normal growth.
One of the worst things about abuse is that it shatters the normal evolutionary social connections that every animal needs, especially humans who crave it most.
