Featured Image Credit: Twitter/UNILAD
Topics: Animals, Parenting, World News
Niamh Spence
A woman's story of how she grew up in the jungle and was surrounded by monkeys has revealed how she survived.
In 1954, in a remote South American village, a four-year-old girl was abducted and then abandoned deep in the Colombian rainforest. She managed to survive despite spending several years alone in the jungle, alongside a troop of capuchin monkeys for company.
Copying everything they did, including how they got food, is how she survived until she was found at ten years old.
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Speaking to UNILAD, Marina told her story as she revealed what it was like growing up with the monkeys and how she learned to survive by getting fruit and food for them.
She explained: "I didn't know what to eat except the water. And I noticed the monkeys used to eat things. They kept eating something and I keep watching where they getting this food and it took me days to find out where they getting the food."
See her interview here:
She continued: "Except one of them was a very good one, He used to go when some Indian people had fallen asleep, and they used to hear the sound of people falling asleep.
"And he went in their room, very quiet, and he got a lot of foods out of these rooms with huge amounts of fruit. And it used to carry so much that he drop it. And that was the first time I came out and found a banana or other things.
"And I pick it up quickly, but you better move quickly because if you don't, they take it away quickly. So I learned to eat as fast as I could, always."
During her time with them, she says she learnt to recognise certain noises, as well as finding food to eat, saying, "I had to learn to recognise the sounds.
"The screechy one, you have to really be careful, you have to hide away.
"Many sounds mean something. The 'danger' one is the louder one, and then the whistle one is the 'food' one.
"And each sound means different things, but it took me a while to get used to it, I just learned from watching what they were doing every time I heard the sound."
Marina's story doesn't just describe her exceptional journey of survival at four years old, in her book: 'The Girl with No Name: The Incredible True Story of a Child Raised by Monkeys', she also details how she was later found at ten years old by hunters, sold to a brothel, before she later escaped and lived life on the streets of Columbia.
Her book, which was published in 2013, details her extraordinary upbringing and her remarkable story. From her abduction by two men from a child-trafficking gang, aged just 4, to being dumped in the jungle and left alone to fend for herself.