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Marina Chapman: Raised by Monkeys?

dmaker

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dmaker
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I saw this documentary recently: https://natgeotv.com/uk/woman-raised-by-monkeys

I had never heard of Marina Chapman prior to watching this show. It was interesting but felt biased toward her claim being true in my opinion. But it left me wondering.

Her claim is that she was snatched from her home at the age of 5 and abandoned in the jungle ( that part is not really explained well) and basically taught how to survive for 5 years by capuchin monkeys. She revealed her presence to some random people in the jungle when she was 10 and then was sold into slavery for another X number of years.

This particular show in my opinion deliberately leads you to the conclusion that she is likely telling the truth about her monkey claim. My gut instinct is to be skeptical and I remain unconvinced. I don't know very much about feral children and how likely a claim like that is to be true.

I'd be interested to see what some folks here that may be familiar with this story or the history of feral children in general may have to say.
 
dmaker said:
I saw this documentary recently: https://natgeotv.com/uk/woman-raised-by-monkeys

I had never heard of Marina Chapman prior to watching this show. It was interesting but felt biased toward her claim being true in my opinion. But it left me wondering.

Her claim is that she was snatched from her home at the age of 5 and abandoned in the jungle ( that part is not really explained well) and basically taught how to survive for 5 years by capuchin monkeys. She revealed her presence to some random people in the jungle when she was 10 and then was sold into slavery for another X number of years.

This particular show in my opinion deliberately leads you to the conclusion that she is likely telling the truth about her monkey claim. My gut instinct is to be skeptical and I remain unconvinced. I don't know very much about feral children and how likely a claim like that is to be true.

I'd be interested to see what some folks here that may be familiar with this story or the history of feral children in general may have to say.
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The fact that she said she was five lends a little credibility to it. Had she said she was still a baby, it would be totally implausible...she would likely never have learned to talk, if she even survived.

I would bet that if there were any truth to it, she would have survived by hanging around the general vicinity of the monkeys and eating their leftovers. I doubt the monkeys would have raised her.
 
dmaker said:
I saw this documentary recently: https://natgeotv.com/uk/woman-raised-by-monkeys
.....
I'd be interested to see what some folks here that may be familiar with this story or the history of feral children in general may have to say.
Click to expand...

There seem to be quite a few newspaper reports about her, some quite skeptical. She says some reports about her were incorrect or exaggerated; she says she wasn't "raised" by capuchin monkeys, but that she learned by watching them and scavenging from them, and that she was always larger than them. But she says she remembers being kidnapped in front of other children -- which means witnesses would have been able to report it -- and she says the kidnappers just left her in the woods, which doesn't seem very kidnapper-like. She also says that she adopted the habit of walking on all fours, which I would think would be really uncomfortable for a child who has learned to walk normally, and that the first humans she saw were hunters who grabbed her and sold her to a brothel, which I guess is plausible but really hard to believe (and to stomach if true). She says she escaped and worked as a housekeeper for a Mafia family.

Even in a third-world country, there must be records or memories of children disappearing. But it sounds like a great story, even if it's not all true.
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/apr/13/marina-chapman-monkeys
 
Bob001 said:
Even in a third-world country, there must be records or memories of children disappearing
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You'd think that but Dean Corll's murders back in the 70s showed that at least prior to computerised records a supprising number of people could go missing without there being much to show for it.
 
When I was doing expeditions to remote upper Amazon tributaries I came across children about 8 to 10 who lived at seasonal camps of the different jungle tribes. I stayed overnight at one of them and came away with the understanding they (two kids in that case) just wanted to be there instead of with the main group further downriver. But they had huts, stockpiles of food, knew various tactics for catching fish, using blowguns, curare darts, etc.

After five years she would have a virtual library of food collection/survival tactics and be the world's foremost expert on how these monkeys communicate. Any one of us could think up the grooming and banana dropping without ever having set foot in the jungle. The kids I met could run seminars in how to make a blowgun, which plants to collect and how to prepare them to produce a poison they use for fishing, etc. Think about any place you lived from age 5-10 and how much information you would have on all the different places in your neighborhood, the stores, etc. These kids could travel for miles either by canoe or by footpaths to the other camps.

The most unbelievable aspect beyond the vagueness and common-knowledge bluffing is the claim she saw hunters but blew them off for five years, preferring sleeping on the ground in the rain and starving. This was more likely just a typical abandoned child of an impoverished or war-torn village that became a prostitute/street urchin and now sees a way to make money with this preposterous story.
 
I wonder if she just treated the monkeys like pets. It's easy to imagine a lonely child anthropomorphising her little forest friends.

Assuming, as always, that there's actually anything to the story at all. She wouldn't be the first to make up stories about being abandoned as a child and being protected by animals.
 
I am calling total BS on this.
And,frankly,Edgar Rice Burroughs "Tarzan Of The Apes" is a much better piece of fiction about a human child being raised by Apes.
 
Yeah, plausibility zero on this one.

It's easy to distinguish children genuinely abandoned in the jungle at an early age from fabulists. The real ones are small sad piles of bones.
 
Gosh,golly and geewhiz. Tarzan was fiction? Whoda thunk it? What about Mowgli? Sheena?
Ok, silliness aside, Highly unlikely story. Consider that whilst there are relatively abundant food sources in the jungle if you know where to find them. There is also an abundance of critters that will eat you if you don't know how to avoid them. Like that pretty spotted kitty up in the tree.
 
She talks about eating in the jungle but her repeated specificity is about eating bananas that the monkeys would drop as they foraged. This is unrealistic as (human) edible bananas are rare in the forest and would be uncommon away from villages and farms. Most of what capuchins are eating up in the canopy wouldn't be something a kid would decide to eat even if it fell in their lap.

What this woman did was made up a story and took the most pedestrian and clichéd idea of what a wild monkey would eat and then said that she ate that too. In reality any wild monkeys would flee from her and she would have just died in the jungle. It's a big lie.
 
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William Parcher said:
She talks about eating in the jungle but her repeated specificity is about eating bananas that the monkeys would drop as they foraged. This is unrealistic as (human) edible bananas are rare in the forest and would be uncommon away from villages and farms. Most of what capuchins are eating up in the canopy wouldn't be something a kid would decide to eat even if it fell in their lap.

What this woman did was made up a story and took the most pedestrian and clichéd idea of what a wild monkey would eat and then said that she ate that too. In reality any wild monkeys would flee from her and she would have just died in the jungle. It's a big lie.
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Right.

Bananas are grown in plots where jungle denizens practice rotational slash and burn agriculture. The bananas ripen in bunches that are not far off the ground. There are two types, one they call platano, which I didn't like, and requires cooking. The other is the sweet banana we are more familiar with but they are much smaller than what we buy in the store.

There wouldn't be any need for monkeys to do her banana harvesting. If they were there at all, and ripe, she would be taking bunches of fifty or more herself. A troupe of monkeys invading a banana plot would be shot and eaten. I shot some myself hunting down there, and they flee from people.

Not only was her pedestrian story terribly cliché, but it demonstrates why she was rejected so many times before finding a producer that was willing to front a story that is so easily seen through.
 
Has anyone seen the NatGeo episode on her - I've only read of it and the stuff that's cited is always in breathless supportive articles, not the least bit skeptical.

Why would they take her back to Colombia to find the monkeys or a similar troop and have her on talk radio looking for her natural parents and not interview the family that "adopted" her and took her to Bradford?

Supposedly the narrative is that she was enslaved by a mafia family and a kindly neighbor woman befriended her and helped her escape. Said woman had a number of her own children, one of whom adopted Marina and it was with the children of this family (of rich textile merchants) that she traveled to Bradford,... as the nanny for the kids. Uh, okay... so not so much adopted as "Cinderella", then. But surely this extended family of rich textile merchants hasn't been wiped out by the plague and some of them could at least verify that part of the tale?

But there are quotes from primatologists (sic) that say that she knows a good deal about the monkeys she's referencing, so it's likely she was raised someplace where they were common.

Is it just me or does anyone else think she missed the boat on the title of the book? It should've been "I Was Traded to a Brothel for a Parrot".
 
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