Word: baboons
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...many years sporadic stories have come out of South Africa about a wild boy caught in the Koonap district in 1903 while traveling with a tribe of baboons. His captors were members of the Cape police. Last year Professor Raymond Arthur Dart of the University of Witwatersrand, discoverer of the celebrated fossil apeman named Australopithecus, queried the district police about the Baboon Boy. There was no written record of his finding, and the man who had caught him, Lance Sergeant Charles Holsen, had died; but another policeman who knew Holsen remembered his story, and this checked with the version previously...
Sergeant Holsen and another policeman were riding patrol one day when they sighted a troop of baboons. The men took a few pot shots with their revolvers and the apes fled. One, scuttling on all fours like the rest, lagged behind. Captured, he proved to be a black native boy, 12 to 14 years old. Like a baboon, he chattered, jerked and nodded his head, scratched his body with his forefinger. He had a nervous, baboon-like grin. His quadrupedal gait had caused an abnormal overdevelopment of his haunches...
...police turned the Baboon Boy over to a mental hospital at Grahamstown. Hospital officials soon decided that, although he could speak no human language, the boy was of normal intelligence, that all he needed was training. They gave him to a farmer named George Smith, who named him Lucas...
Today the Baboon Boy is about 50. He still has no clear idea of time, cannot write, retains some of his apish facial and bodily mannerisms. He has to be reminded to start any task. But once started, he works steadily until the job is done...