71-year-old woman who spent her entire life in the wilderness airlifted hospital for help

Agafya Lykova is the last remaining member of a Russian family that took to the woods after her father’s brother was shot by Stalinist soldiers in 1936. As members of a breakaway sect of the Russian Orthodox church, Lykova’s family was subject to harassment and persecution, and so decided to flee far from Stalin’s grasp.

Her early life was barbarically difficult. She grew up without metal, pots or cutlery, and often had nothing to eat but what she could catch in temperatures that plummeted down to minus 40 degrees Celsius.

For the first 35 years of her life, Agafya had no contact with anyone outside her family.

It was only in 1978 that a group of geologists accidentally stumbled across the family, with scientists reporting that Agafya spoke a strange language, ‘distorted by a lifetime of isolation’.

Tuleyev, who frequently sends Agytha care packages with food and warm clothing, also provided her with a satellite phone for emergencies.

This week, after 70 years that have seen the deaths of her siblings and parents, famines caused by severe weather, and attacks by hungry animals- she finally 

needed to use that emergency option.