The real life "Lord of the Flies" has a much happier ending

It may not surprise anyone to hear that the most basic plot points of Lord of the Flies have actually happened.

That said, in at least one real-life instance of a shipwreck marooning youngsters on an island, the results were anything but bloody.

Historian Rutger Bregman, like many of us, read William Golding’s novel as a teenager.

But the more he learned about Golding, the more he wondered how much of the author’s own personality colored his conclusion that shipwrecked kids would turn on each other so viciously.

Bregman’s musings gradually led him to investigate whether such a situation had happened, and he did stumble upon one case from 1977 — with a much less gruesome ending.

He writes about this discovery in his upcoming book, Humankind, an excerpt from which was adapted in the Guardian.