In 1978, Russian geologists journeyed to a remote location in the Siberian wilderness, but instead of discovering precious mineral resources, they uncovered a family of six who had been living undetected for forty years.

Karp Lykov and his family were Old Believers, members of a fundamentalist Russian Orthodox sect who had long been persecuted in the Soviet Union. During the Bolshevik Revolution, many Old Believer communities fled to Siberia to escape religious persecution, and the Lykovs were among them. In 1936, a Communist patrol shot Lykov's brother right in front of him, so he gathered up his wife and two young children and fled into the forest.

Taking just their meager possessions and some seeds, they progressively moved further and further from society until they were about one hundred miles from the border of Mongolia. The couple bore two more children, and the family of six lived off of whatever they could grow and forage. They were often hungry, and it wasn't until one of their sons reached adulthood that they were able to start trapping and hunting prey to add protein to their diets. Still, they were severely malnourished, and the family's mother died of starvation in 1961 after giving her share of food to her children.

The family had no idea that things like the moon landing or World War II had even happened. They were fascinated by small things like the cellophane on a package. Over time the younger children had developed a strange dialect that outsiders could barely recognize as Russian. After the geologists made contact, the family slowly began to trust them, but the deeply religious family always refused to leave their isolated home. Eventually, they started to accept small gifts of salt and other precious foods that they had lived without for so many years.

Just a few short years after making contact, three of the four children had died from kidney failure due to complications from their years of malnutrition. One son died from pneumonia, but adamently refused medical attention, saying, "A man lives for howsoever God grants."

The father died in 1988. Agafia Lykova, the last remaining family member, continues to live there alone. She is almost seventy and has never set foot outside of her homestead.