Imagine living through the entire 20th century without ever knowing World War II happened. Imagine hiding so deep in the wilderness that your family sees no other human being for 42 years. This is the story of the Lykov family, who vanished into the Siberian taiga in 1936.

This episode unpacks a survival story that shatters our understanding of human endurance. Driven by religious persecution under Stalin, the Old Believer family carved out an existence 160 miles from the nearest settlement, surviving on a single potato strain and homemade hemp clothing. We explore the biology, theology, and sheer will behind their isolation, and the devastating consequences when it was finally broken in 1978.

• Why the Old Believers viewed the Soviet state as the literal manifestation of the Antichrist
• How the mother Akulina starved herself to death in 1961 to feed her children
• The two children born in the wild for whom cities and machines were essentially myths
• Why three of the four children died rapidly after contact, from pneumonia and kidney failure
• How sole survivor Agafia still lives in the taiga today, refusing to leave permanently