Woman Raised By Monkeys, National
Geographic: Review - an incredible tale that
masked a childhood of unspeakable trauma .....,,,In April of this year, Marina Chapman, a
sixtysomething grandmother from Bradford,
published an autobiography in which she made
an astonishing claim. She said she had been
kidnapped from her family home in Colombia at
the age of five and abandoned in the jungle, where she was taken in and raised by a group of
capuchin monkeys. Instead of just smiling and
nodding politely, like many of the Breakfast TV
interviewers did, National Geographic made Woman Raised By Monkeys, a documentary in which their cameras accompanied Marina on a
trip to Colombia and attempted to investigate the
veracity of her claims. The psychologist suspected false memory
syndrome; the primatologist doubted whether
capuchin monkeys could form such close bonds;
but the forensic anthropologist found evidence
of childhood malnutrition in Marina’s bones,
which appeared to corroborate her story. Through all the prodding, probing and
provoking, Marina stuck doggedly to her truth:
“To be honest I don’t care. I don’t care, because I
can’t prove. It’s just difficult to prove stuff.” Unusually, the mystery at the heart of this
documentary seemed sure to remain, even if
Marina’s story was definitively debunked. As
local history expert Kevin Howlett pointed out,
her childhood took place during La Violencia, a
time of great suffering, especially in rural Columbia. Amid such upheaval it would not have
been unusual for the welfare of a child to be
overlooked. If Marina’s life story was an invented
memory, what more terrible trauma might her
brain be struggling to suppress? And what could
be worse than the abandonment and abuse she did recall? Soon, the question of whether Marina was a
loveably eccentric granny or a money-grubbing
con artist ceased to be so pressing. It became
obvious that this woman was at least speaking the
emotional truth about her childhood; and those
objective facts which were corroborated were wretched enough to evoke our pity all on their
own. Ultimately, there was little in the way of
conclusive evidence re: the monkeys – but in one
sense, thankfully, Marina already has her happy
ending: a loving, human family in Bradford to call
her own.