Friday, January 19, 2007

A bending-forward position like a monkey

Wild girl found in Cambodian jungle.

(Thanks to A. for the link. Also, here's that feral children website again for those who missed it the first time round...)

2 comments:

  1. Kind of lame that the article doesn't tell us how old she was when she disappeared into the woods. I'm guessing quite young, if she's unable to speak. I studied some similar cases in sociology classes, and they indicated that there's a deadline for learning language. Language is one of the crucial factors in brain development, and so that sector simply doesn't (and won't ever be able to) develop if it misses that deadline. er, I'm now reading feral children site, and they're saying the same thing... hey, there's Genie! I remember her. I always had the suspicion that she got extra attention because she was an attractive girl. I mean, there's a lot of interesting things in her case, and I'm probably just being a cynical jerk... but the documentary sure did a lot of slow panning on her cute innocent face.

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  2. Ryan, I understand the girl was about 8 when she got lost in the jungle. So she must have learned to speak before...

    I'm interested in the 'bending forward position'. I often dream of walking like that (actual dreams, not fantasizing (sp?)), and today I saw a boy who was maybe six or seven in my son's taekwondo moving rapidly like that, effortlessly. Maybe it's still fairly close to the surface for us. Do you know of any material on this, Jenny? Has anybody studied this gait and who uses it? There were those people in Turkey, I remember... Should look into that again.

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