The Danish Bear Boy

The Danish Bear Boy is yet another boy about which there is scant information. Lucilio Vaninin, garrotted by the Inquisition in 1619, had, in a pre-evolutionary discussion of the origin of the human race, made the following footnote (translated by Bendysche in The Anthropological Treatises of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach):

A man of credit assured me that there was found in Denmark, a young man of about fourteen or fifteen years old, who had lived in the woods with bears, and who could not be distinguished from them but by his shape. They took him and learned him to speak; he said then, that he could remember nothing but only since the time they took him from amongst the bears.

So far, I haven't been able to find any more about the Bear Boy of Denmark, which is not surprising. A Danish reader writes to tell me that bears became extinct in Denmark in about 3,000 BCE.

The Danish Bear Boy
Date found: c1600
Location: Danmark
Animals: bears