Russian Family Lived Alone in Siberia for 40 Years
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I am almost 95% sure this was posted before, but I cannot find it. The article lists as being updated but I am not sure what has changed.
Maybe @Gorge with his mad searching skills can find the original.
Anyway, an interesting article.
This Russian Family Lived Alone in the Siberian Wilderness for 40 Years, Unaware of World War II or the Moon Landing
In 1978, Soviet geologists stumbled upon a family of five in the taiga. They had been cut off from almost all human contact since fleeing religious persecution in 1936
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The Lykov children knew there were places called cities where humans lived crammed together in tall buildings. They had heard there were countries other than Russia. But such concepts were no more than abstractions to them. Their only reading matter was prayer books and an ancient family Bible. Akulina had taught her children to read and write using sharpened birch sticks dipped into honeysuckle juice as pen and ink. When Agafia was later shown a video of a horse on the geologists’ television set, she recognized it from her mother’s stories. “A steed!” she exclaimed. “Papa, a steed!”
But if the family’s isolation was hard to grasp, the unmitigated harshness of their lives was not. Traveling to the Lykov homestead on foot was astonishingly arduous, as Peskov would later learn firsthand. On his first visit to the Lykovs in the 1980s, the writer—who would appoint himself the family’s chief chronicler—noted that “we traversed 250 kilometers [155 miles] without seeing a single human dwelling!”
Isolation made survival in the wilderness close to impossible. Dependent solely on their own resources, the Lykovs struggled to replace the few things they had brought into the taiga with them. They fashioned birch-bark galoshes in place of shoes. Clothes were patched and repatched until they fell apart, then replaced with hemp cloth grown from seed.
The Lykovs had carried a crude spinning wheel and, incredibly, the components of a loom into the taiga with them. A couple of kettles served them well for many years, but when rust finally overcame them, the only replacements they could fashion came from birch bark. Since these could not be placed in a fire, it became far harder to cook. By the time the Lykovs were discovered, their staple diet was potato patties mixed with ground rye and hemp seeds.
