How realistic is the story of Tarzan?
If you think there’s a lot of unrealistic aspects to the story of Tarzan, you’d be right.
However, a human baby being successfully raised by an ape is not one of them (in the book he’s raised by a fictional species called the Mangani, in the movies it’s often gorillas).
Children raised by wild or semi-wild animals are actually surprisingly common (or at least far more common than you’d expect).
They’re usually referred to as “feral children”.
There have been confirmed recorded cases of human children being raised by gazelles, ostriches, bears, sheep, cattle, monkeys, pumas, wolves, dogs, and chimpanzees.
In the case of the chimpanzees the boy was raised from 6 months old to age 2 (when he was discovered by humans), so an infant Tarzan being successfully raised by another great ape would by no means be unprecedented.
Side note: it would seem that in a lot of cases with feral children, they tend to be children who were abandoned by their human parents due to having extreme mental/physical disabilities, and were subsequently found and cared for by their non-human parents.
In a number of recorded cases of children raised by wolves, they were children orphaned during World War II.
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Did You Know, tarzan, fiction book, Little known facts
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