Marina Chapman – Raised by Monkeys

This is one of the more interesting survival stories and has even inspired its own movie. Marina Chapman was around the age of 5 when she was taken from her village in Columbia, and she was too young to have learned its name.

Her family had moved there from England sometime before Maria was born, and she knew nothing of her native country. However, when she was 5 years old, some people came into her village and took her with them. She was too young to understand anything in detail at the time and can only remember that the people who took her just let her go a short while later somewhere in the jungle.

She spent the next few days walking through the trees and terrified the whole time. The chances of a 5-year-old surviving in the jungle alone are pretty much zero, but as Maria walked through the trees, she noticed groups of Capuchin monkeys living together in families.

(A Capuchin monkey)

Not being scared of them combined with having no idea what else to do, she spent the next few days following a group of them around, which led her to water sources and wild fruit and nuts. She copied everything she could do from the monkeys and after some time they took a liking to her.

She spent the next few years living as one of them, accepted by the whole pack. She would even climb trees with them and gather wild foods they led her to. Since she was only 5 years old she knew of nothing else and learned how to survive from a group of monkeys.

One of the most amazing things about her story is that she didn’t get injured. A 5-year-old climbing trees with a load of monkeys in an area where infection can spread very quickly from an open wound, and nothing happened to her.

Unfortunately, this is where her story takes a sad turn, as one day when she was around the age of 10, some hunters discovered her and took her with them, later selling her to a brothel in Cúcuta. After running away from her new prison, she spent some time living on the street until she was again taken and became a slave to one of the local mafia families.

One of her neighbors, a woman known only as Maruja saved her from her dire situation and officially adopted her when she was about 14. Maruja sent Maria to live with one of her daughters in Bogata and since the family had ties to England through trade, later sent Maria to work as a nanny in Bradford, England.

From here Maria met a scientist in Bradford and ended up marrying him, she currently still lives in Bradford with her husband and 2 children, and apparently still likes to spend time in trees.