Children 13, 9, 4, and 1 found alive in jungle 40 days after plane crash | Hacker News Reader

Children 13, 9, 4, and 1 found alive in jungle 40 days after plane crash

washingtonpost.com

76 pointsraldi24 comments

I'm not surprised. Lord of the Flies was always a misanthropic fantasy fueled on Western dog eat dog-ideologies, our modern ideologies take this weird contemporary "kids are useless little fragile eggs" approach. Kids are neither as evil nor as helpless as our culture makes them.

I think it was David Graeber (I'll have to go look for it)= who once recounted the story of islander children getting lost on a boat and washing up on the shore of a small island. They were there a few weeks. They found chickens and captured them, scavenged fruits, and even remembered from their families (islander, after all) how to do small farming. They were absolutely fine, without any dystopian violence to be found.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-...

this is it! yes, thank you. 15 months, even.

I haven’t read it in forever, but I believe Lord of the Flies was intended to be some kind of allegory for society? It is absolutely not a literal prediction of what would or should happen to a group of children left on an island…

"our culture" ? there are 15 year old males with the size and muscles of adults, and their 14 year old girls starting to make babies.. Its not uncommon or stereotyping to say it, it is measurably true. You did not have to go to school with "kids" like that did you? Daily aggression is common, reading skills low, zero interest in math is common. The males that survive to adulthood can be grandfathers by 45 easily. I mean "I had five kids with three women, I never married any of them" says the 45 year self-described grandfather guy on the park bench with new shoes and a very relaxed attitude. That is his direct quote, I did not say that, he did.

Literate people live in a bubble and that is not "our" society either?

The youngest was actually an 11-months old baby that spent their first birthday in the jungle. On one hand I am surprised that they managed to take care of the baby for that long, on the other hand this is a comment from a Western man weakened by modern society while those are indigenous kids, with a keener instinct and knowledge of nature than we give them credit for.

Put on a remote island, any of these kids will probably survive longer than a fully grown man like me.

That said, I'm happy to know they have been found and can be returned to their families; reading their story made my day brighter. There is always so much doom and gloom on the news these days.

Here's a longer article with more detail and pictures from the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/10/colombian-chil...

If the weather isn't too harsh and there's enough water and fruit or plants around then it's actually less hard to survive than you might think (the tricky bit is knowing what is edible, but you've got about 2 weeks to experiment).

In the right conditions it's easier to survive than many assume. To be honest with statements like "their survival is a sign of a knowledge and relationship with the natural environment of life, which is learned from the mother’s womb and practiced from a very early age" I think there's a lot of "native fetishism" and woo-woo thinking going on here. In this case the kids apparently also ate food drops, and were malnourished when found.

I don't want to come of as too cynical or dismissive, because of course it's an amazing story! The real miracle is that they survived the plane crash at all, and the survival is more "amazing story" than "amazing miracle".

A Colombian woman I know said her mother, who lived in the Amazon for a few years, had to learn what an anaconda smelled like, to avoid it. Because imagine trying to run away from something in the jungle.

I wonder if kids are actually better at surviving than adults in those situations.

Especially young babies, they are very chubby for a reason.

We have to remember that although surviving 40 days without a parent is extreme, it’s probably pretty common in our history.

Your mean the crash or the wild life? I believe children are worse at both.

On the other hand, they need to find less fruits to survive ... maybe adults need to eat to much to survive in improvised conditions? Like, it is way easier to find a small amount of fruits?

Also what is the starting point. An overweight or obese person who isn't doing lot of hard work during period and have enough water could probably survive a long time with just some supply of vitamins and nutrients.

Bobby Sands died after 66 days of hunger strike, and he was of average weight; others lasted about the same time (± a few days). You can survive for a long time without food if need be, but you also won't be able to do much once starvation kicks in.

This man survived 26 years alone in the jungle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_of_the_Hole

The kids are indigenous and knew how to find food. Kids from the city would probably not be able to survive this long...

Wow, this is amazing! I wouldn't survive even one week alone in the jungle. I hope they will recover soon.

Can't even imagine. Surviving a plane crash plus 40 days in the jungle.

What happened to children 2-3, 5-8 and 10-12?

I would guess there was none. A plane doesn't stock up on people by age. It could also be that they died in the crash like the adults did.. I prefer the former.

I'm #1!

I think GP was making a joke implying those were numeric identifiers for the children rather than their age, and that the identifiers had to be sequential.

Kinda like https://www.hornfans.com/threads/the-ol-chickens-in-the-scho...

They don't want to be found, vastly preferring life in the outdoors over being cooped in school all day.

So many prime children!

> They were eventually found about 3.5 kilometers, or 2.1 miles, from the site of the initial incident, according to the Colombian Air Force.

It’s crazy how dense and tricky the jungle is. The kids were around 2 miles from the crash and it took a massive search effort 40 days to find them.

https://archive.ph/TmKMm

Little Lord of the Flies moment right there…

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