Four children found alive in Amazon 40 days after plane crash | Hacker News Reader

Four children found alive in Amazon 40 days after plane crash

bbc.com

231 pointssjcsjc63 comments

I hope they can still find Wilson, the rescue dog. Its tracks led the rescuers to the children. https://www.elpais.com.co/colombia/el-perro-wilson-se-mantie...

They just need to send in Tom Hanks to walk around and call for him.

That's concerning. I do hope they find Wilson (if that's his name). He's the actual hero

I have a soft spot for dogs with that sort of look.

Probably eaten by the children.

Finally since good news :)

Surprised that a 13 years old was able to take care of 3 small children in a jungle full of snakes and jaguars for 40 days. How was he able to keep the toddler alive? What do you feed someone that young in a jungle??

A one year old eats almost anything you give to them.

They’ll put anything you want in their mouth, but they’re just as well masters in spitting it out. Feeding 1 year olds is fun though, I give you that :P

I might be wrong, but I'd imagine a truly hungry 1 year old might manage to eat the food rather than starving.

It isn’t a matter of preference, they might not have gotten to the point where they realise it is food, or sates hunger.

And several things you don't :)

The cheetah is well known for its speed but the fastest land mammal is a toddler that was just asked “what is in your mouth?”

They found the baby bottle quite late. Maybe they managed to salvage some milk or formula from the plane.

The word „harvest“ is a particularly awkward choice given the fate of their mother…

> The word „harvest“ is a particularly awkward choice given the fate of their mother…

The verb used is (now? Perhaps it was edited) "salvage".

It looks like it's a place where plants fruit all year round, plus the BBC article said that they are members of a local indigenous group and might have known what was edible.

Also the rescue mission and the air force was leaving humanitarian packs here and there with food and essentials, but am not sure if they found anything of that while they were lost

You shouldn't be, 13 year olds have complex reasoning and the physical capability. 14 year olds used to be expected to fight wars.

I'd be surprised if a 30yo could keep a 1, 4, and 9 alive in the jungle for 40 days.

A 30yo with no experience in the outdoors, maybe

Big difference between a 30 year old westerner who’s never been more than 500m from a paved highway and is afraid of spiders and a 13-year-old indigenous child who grew up in the jungle

I do believe we are in agreement, yes

Ah yes, our species has always lived in air conditioned houses

A few 14 year olds have always fought in wars but when was this common or expected?

Here is a good historical reference from a western viewpoint.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_children_in_the_m...

I am less familiar with other regions of the world but understand it to be common place in some of them to this day.

The repeated use of the phrase that children were "used by all sides" is concerning because there were many countries that used no children except those that got in by pretending to be older.

Just a few generations ago. If you were 14 in parts of europe during wwii theres a good chance you were in some army or a rag tag band of partisans. Probably a lot of 14 year olds took up arms against the US in wars since if I had to guess.

Iran systematically employed 12-16 year olds en masse for the purposes of clearing minefields and drawing Iraqi fire. Perhaps 50,000 Iranian children were sacrificed in this manner. Iraq regularly responded to these child-wave tactics by deploying mustard gas.

Definitely not a normal 13 year old. Taking care of a 1 year old in ideal conditions is already a challenge (even for an adult!), but doing so in the Amazon for over a month is a different ballgame. Also, the older siblings’ mental state must have been all over the place.

What do you mean by normal? Having an adolescence centered around indulgence and freedom from responsibility was not the norm anywhere, historically, and is not the norm in many places today. Waiting until adulthood to learn practical skills (whatever those might be) is a little weird, if you think about it.

“Normal” as in, if you take a random 13 year old off the street and throw them into the Amazon with their younger siblings, they wouldn’t be able to keep a 1 year old alive for a month.

I’m not talking about history. I’m talking about the current state of the world.

Its not likely a random 33 year old would fare better to be honest

Current state of whose world? At 13 many of us had been intimately involved in raising infants and toddlers for years. It's not surprising that the 13-year-old in question is a girl.

She was able to do it in the Amazon because that's an environment she knows. Many, many others may not be able to do it in the Amazon specifically, but would be able to do so in a wilderness that they know.

Not your world - the world, i.e., reality. I’m not sure how I could have been any clearer about this.

I mean, right now what I'm reading from you is that all the teenagers today who could in fact keep an infant sibling alive in a wilderness environment they're familiar with are not part of reality, which is probably not your intention. So there's room enough for more clarity

I read a bunch of your comments and you seem like a very erudite person. Is there a way I can contact you?

I appreciate that. You can find me on Discord with the name AbuSnood#6321

Thanks, I sent you a friend request on Discord!

Literally the age of any main character in a Shonen anime for these reasons.

I think the reason for this being the age of most Shonen main characters is a bit more pragmatic than that - it is simply around the age of the target audience.

P.S. No, I am not insinuating that shonen is strictly for middle schoolers, and that no one else could enjoy it. It is just the target audience for the genre, in general, is middle school boys. Like, even the name shonen itself translates literally to "boys' comics", and is officially listed as an editorial category targeting adolescent boys.

She*

SHE. The two elder sisters kept the two younger ones alive. They knew what to eat in the jungle and used some of the randomly dropped emergency kits.

> Surprised that a 13 years old was able to take care of 3 small children in a jungle full of snakes and jaguars for 40 days

FTA: "The children belong to the Huitoto indigenous group."

I.e. they're used to living on the land. Snakes are a concern if you're unwary in the jungle, but if you are somewhat aware of your surroundings you'll be OK. Jaguars are probably a different story, but I guess luckily they weren't in the territory of any animals.

Well Jaguars are very limited in numbers. So of falling risk to be eaten by one of them is low. If it would be high, then there are to many and hence they would decline due to lack of food soon. Plus human is not in their hunting scheme and rather offsetting smell.

> She said the eldest of the four siblings was used to looking after the other three when their mother was at work, and that this helped them survive in the jungle.

> "She gave them flour and cassava bread, any fruit in the bush, they know what they must consume," Ms Valencia said in footage obtained by EVN.

The children belong to the Huitoto indigenous group, who inhabit Colombia's Amazon región.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witoto

Why?

In English common law, traditionally 7 is the age of reason, 14 the age of an adult, and 21 the age of majority. We'd have 14 year olds off to sea, etc.

I suspect (but haven't checked) this comes from some biblical rules.

Remember that people can generally breed by 14 (even now, some girls go through pubity around 10 or 11), though a lot of western cultures now outlaw it.

One thing I feel is missing from the article is how brutal the conditions (for the kids and the rescue team) must have been. Extreme heat and humidity are no joke.

> Extreme heat and humidity are no joke.

I don't think that applies - actually they probably had close to ideal conditions for survival, it is possible to live naked without discomfort, and some tribes do.

In what we call "temperate" climates they might have died of exposure.

Also the emotional headwinds of mourning the death of their mother.

I don't know about extreme heat. I have been to Colombia and there are very different climates. I am not sure exactly where they were, but it is probable that the temperature there was more warm with lots of rain.

> The bodies of the three adults were found at the crash site by the army, but it appeared that the children had escaped the wreckage and wandered into the rainforest to find help.

PSA I’m no expert but as a kid I was taught to stay where you were if you got lost. And this seems to demonstrate that.

I was vaguely tracking this through Reddit for a while, and I thought the consensus was that they falsely claimed they found the children and it turned out to be a big political lie. Glad to hear it finally happened.

Who’s they? Surely if politicians claimed they found them, I’d be in the news?

They had claimed they were found before this, but they retracted it. This time they did find them.

Edit: I believe the president is the one that tweeted it the first time, and he retracted.

"The president came under criticism last month when a tweet published on his account mistakenly announced that the children had been found.

He erased the tweet the next day saying that the information - which his office had been given by Colombia's child welfare agency - could not be confirmed." quote from the article this thread is about.

From reading this article, it sounded like they found the general area where they were, but it took a while to actually find them because they kept moving

If true, this is a great demonstration of the advice to stay put when lost in the wilderness.

There's another article linked at the bottom of that article that talks about how the president had mistakenly claimed they'd been found a month ago, and had to retract it. Maybe that's what you're remembering.

There's much food around in a forest, from fruit, insects, plants. What's important is to figure which one are edible, and avoid injuries

A child was abandoned in the colombian jungle at the age of 4 and lived in the jungle, raised by monkeys, for 5 years.

https://allthatsinteresting.com/marina-chapman

Note the skepticism of experts.

As far as indigenous people are concerned,the jungle is a grocery store and a 13 year old would know what's in season an where to look for it. I don't think the kids had anything to hunt with; so, no meat.

Anyone find out how far the children wandered from the crash site?

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