The myth of Romulus and Remus tells of two abandoned twins, who after being rescued and raised by a she-wolf, would go on to lay the foundations of the Roman Empire. The motif of humans of reared by wild animals has been re-iterated time and time again in folklore. In Greco-Roman myth alone, beasts served as the adoptive parents of Telephus, son of Hercules, Paris of Troy and even an infant Zeus. Similar tales are told in the mythologies of ancient Ireland, China, India, and Egypt, to name but a few.

Yet for all the fantastical elements of such stories, real life occurrences of cast off infants being taken in by animals have been documented. The first recorded case occurred in 1344, when a “wolf boy” was captured in German principality of Hesse.

Nearly seven centuries later, in 1920, reality and myth would converge yet again when two girls were rescued from a wolf’s den outside Midapore, India. The so-called “wolf twins’” liberator, the Reverend RAJ Singh, was drawn to the spot by a story circulating amongst the townspeople of “manush-baghas” (man-beasts) roaming the countryside. After being relocated the Reverend’s orphanage, the pre-pubescent girls, whom Singh named Kamala and Amala, stayed true to their upbringing by running on all fours, howling and refusing all food except meat.

Within a year, Amala, the younger of the two and little more than a toddler, had died; her older sister would go on to walk upright and learn a precious few English phrases before dying at the approximate age of 18 a decade later. Though the origin of the girls’ peculiar circumstances has remained a mystery since, their story was anticipated around the turn of the century by two rousing successes in popular fiction: Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book and Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan series of novels.

Unlike their immediate forbearers in the public’s consciousness, however, Kamala and Amala were undoubtedly real. From the 1950s onwards, the prevailing theory has suggested they were, in fact, autistic or otherwise mentally challenged, rather than truly feral. Meanwhile, other scholars took offense to that notion. After observing the “gazelle boy” of the Spanish Sahara in the 1970s, French anthropologist Jean-Claude Armen wrote: “How could a retarded child, even though ‘aided’ by animals, continue to exist the harsh environment of the desert?”

The answer to that question will, in all likelihood, never be known for certain. Every so often, however, new stories of children living in the wild crop up from remote regions of the globe, and, unlike their fictional counterparts of Mowgli and Tarzan, they almost never feature a happy ending.

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