Field Museum of Natural Sciences Chicago lions are cannibals. The mystery behind the attacks on people by lions from Tsavo has been revealed. The mystery of the century has been solved. Cannibals of Tsavo

We remember these lions well from the film “Ghost and the Darkness” (1996), that’s what they were called, “Ghost” and “Darkness”. 119 years ago, these two huge faceless cannibals were hunting railway workers in the Tsavo region of Kenya. Over the course of nine months in 1898, lions killed at least 35 people, and according to other sources as many as 135 people. And the question of why lions became addicted to the taste of human flesh remained the subject of many speculations and prejudices.

Also known as the Tsavo Lions (Tsavo Man-Eaters), this pair of animals hunted at night until they were shot and killed in December 1898 by an engineer railway Colonel John Henry Patterson. In the decades that followed, the public became fascinated by stories of ferocious lions, which first appeared in newspaper articles and books (one story was written by Patterson himself in 1907: "The Man-Eaters of Tsavo") and then in films.

It was previously assumed that severe hunger drove lions to eat people. However, recent analysis of the remains of two man-eaters that became part of the collection of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago provides new insight into what drove the Tsavo lions to kill and eat people. The discoveries described in the new study provide another explanation: the reason lies in the teeth and jaws, which made it painful for the animals to hunt their usual big catch consisting of herbivores.

For most lions, people are usually far from their feeding habits. Big cats typically feed on large herbivores such as zebras, buffalos and antelopes. And rather than viewing humans as potential food, lions tend to avoid people entirely, study co-author Bruce Patterson, curator of mammals at the Field Museum of Natural History, told Live Science.

But something pushed the Tsavo lions to attack people, which was pretty fair game, Patterson said.

Lions rely heavily on their teeth to grab and strangle an animal or sever its windpipe. Because of this constant use about 40 percent African lions There are dental injuries, reports a 2003 study co-authored by Bruce Patterson and DeSantis.

Tsavo lions have trouble using their mouths, so grasping and holding a zebra or buffalo would be, if not impossible, excruciatingly painful.

Photo. Tsavo cannibals at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago

To unravel an age-old mystery, the study's authors examined evidence of lions' behavior from their preserved teeth. Microscopic wear patterns can tell scientists about the animals' feeding habits, especially during the last weeks of life, and these lions' teeth did not show signs of wear associated with gnawing on large, heavy bones, the scientists wrote in the study.

Hypotheses proposed in the past have centered on lions developing a taste for human flesh, perhaps because their usual prey died from drought or disease. But if lions hunted humans out of desperation, hungry cats would likely be cracking open human bones to get the last morsel of food from these gruesome dishes, Patterson said. And tooth samples showed they left bones alone, so the Tsavo lions were probably not motivated by a lack of more suitable prey, he added.

A more likely explanation is that the ominously named "Ghost" and "Darkness" began hunting humans because the weakness of their mouths prevented them from catching larger, stronger animals, the study's author writes.

The reasons for the attacks lie in their mouths
Previous findings first presented to the American Society of Mammalogists in 2000, according to New Scientist, indicated that one of the Tsavo lions was missing three lower incisors, had a broken canine, and had a significant abscess in the surrounding tissue at the root of another tooth. The second lion also had a damaged mouth, a broken upper tooth and exposed pulp.

As for the first lion, pressure on the abscess would result in unbearable pain, which provided more than sufficient motivation for the animal to abandon large, strong prey and switch to ordinary people, Patterson said. In fact, chemical analysis conducted in another, earlier study published in 2009 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that the lion with the abscess consumed more human prey than its partner. Moreover, after the first lion was shot in 1898 (the second lion was killed two weeks later), attacks on people stopped, Patterson noted.

Almost 120 years after the life of the cannibals came to an abrupt end, interest in their terrible habits still persists and has fueled the scientific community to uncover the mystery of these lions. But if not for their preserved remains, which John Patterson sold to the Museum as trophy pelts in 1924, today's explanations of their habits would be little more than speculation, Bruce Patterson said.

“If it weren't for the samples, there would be no way to resolve these issues. Almost 120 years later, we can tell not only what these lions ate, but we can figure out the differences between these lions by studying their skins and skulls,” he said.

"A lot of scientific evidence can be built on the preserved specimens," Patterson added. “I have another 230,000 pieces in the Museum’s collection and they all have their own story to tell.”

Scientists appear to have uncovered the mystery of why history's most famous "man-eating lions" developed a taste for human flesh, even though 119 years have passed since they hunted humans. Researchers may have discovered the reason why lions hunt bipedal predators.

Cannibals of Tsavo

Despite their considerable capabilities, lions very rarely kill people unless provoked. However, several representatives of this species received the nickname “man-eaters” because they began to attack people. Their victims were mainly women.
When two lions began hunting workers who were building a railway in Tsavo, Kenya, they even attracted the attention of the British Parliament, not to mention their popularity among directors who made three films about them.

Teeth analysis

When the lions were finally killed, their bodies were sent to the Field Museum in Chicago for preservation. Now scientists are again interested in the history of these animals. It turned out that one lion from the pair suffered from an infection that developed at the root of the fang. Except bad mood caused by constant pain, this damage could make it difficult for the animal to hunt, scientists suspect.
Lions typically use their fangs to capture prey, such as zebras or wildebeest, and strangle them. However, this lion would have a hard time dealing with a large prey that was fighting for its life. It's much easier to catch people.

The second killer lion had a broken tooth. While this probably did not stop him from hunting, he may have started chasing people "for company" with his partner. Isotope analysis of the fur of these lions shows that, while humans made up about 30 percent of the first lion's diet in its recent years, in the diet of the second they occupied only 13 percent.

Reasons for hunting people

Dr. Bruce Peterson, curator of the Field Museum and author of the new study, published the results in Scientific Reports, which provides evidence that the Zambian lion that killed six people in 1991 also had serious problems with teeth. This suggests that dental problems may be a common reason why lions prey on humans.

Previously it was thought that lions may have hunted people due to severe drought, which reduced the number of wild prey. However, Patterson and the study's first co-author, Dr. Larissa Desantis of Vanderbilt University, found that the teeth of the Tsavo lions did not show signs of wear associated with chewing animal bones, as typically occurs when food supplies are low.

Patterson says healthy lions rarely attack humans because they are smart and understand that humans can be dangerous. Zebras can deal a fatal blow to lions, but if a predator does manage to catch one, the rest of the herd will not kill it out of revenge. People, as a rule, begin to take revenge. When lions hunt people, it most often happens on a moonless night, even though unarmed people would be easy prey in daylight.

A study conducted by Dr. Jalian Peterhans and Thomas Gnosk of the Field Museum in Chicago found that the legend of the man-eating lions “Ghost and Darkness,” which allegedly killed 135 workers in 1898, was greatly exaggerated, especially in the wake of the Hollywood film. In fact, lions did not kill that many people, and lion cannibalism was associated with a whole series of circumstances superimposed on each other. In addition, scientists have found that the tendency to cannibalism was passed on to lions from generation to generation.

The scientists' initial goal was to dispel the long-standing myth about a pair of man-eating lions, whose skeletons are included in the museum's collection. Later they found out many more interesting things about the reasons that forced the lions to take such actions.

Legend has it that in 1898, two male lions killed 135 workers building a bridge near Tsavo, in Kenya. The attack, which lasted more than nine months, halted construction of the railway between Lake Victoria and Mombasa. Lviv was called “Ghost and Darkness”, and Hollywood even made a movie based on this legend, which is called that way.

The lions were subsequently hunted down and killed by Lieutenant John Patterson, an English engineer who wrote his famous account of the incident in a book entitled The Man-Eaters of Tsavo. The killed lions were later sent to the museum as trophies.

Two American researchers found that this myth was partly true, but they also uncovered evidence that lions and other big cats Africa repeatedly hunted prey people under conditions that most often arose artificially and were created by the people themselves. It is also noteworthy that felines seem to pass on their habits and dietary preferences to their offspring.

"Lions are social animals, capable of passing on traditions from one generation to the next," said Peterhans, an associate professor of natural history at Roosevelt University.

A careful analysis of Patterson's diaries revealed that only 28 railroad workers were actually killed by lions.

The death toll increased to 135 over the years as the story of the man-eating lions grew and became popular among the Tsavo people. Perhaps any workers who died for unknown reasons or went missing were counted among those killed by lions. Many workers were afraid of lions and secretly left the construction site. Later, their comrades made assumptions that they were eaten by the “Ghost and the Darkness”. A hollywood movie only added heat to the fire, and the legend turned into reality, which was given serious significance and the fact that 2 lions killed 135 people was considered true.

Gnosk and Peterhans uncovered the story of the real killing of people by lions. The “Ghost and Darkness” lions have been killing construction workers for several years, not so long short time, as follows from the film. Moreover, outbreaks of aggressiveness of lions were associated with the beginning of construction, when people invaded their habitat.

The widespread death of the Tsavo people from smallpox and famine in the 19th century (it is estimated that more than 80,000 people died), the corpses of which lay openly along the entire construction route, ensured that the lions formed a sustainable diet of readily available human meat.

As a result, there are many of these factors, including a shortage of lions in their usual prey due to the fact that its quantity has decreased due to its extermination by people. And due to the disintegration of the primes due to the death of many of its members from starvation, the usual hunt for prey became more and more difficult. Lions could no longer catch single herbivores and switched to more accessible human meat.

This lion behavior was passed down from generation to generation, including tricks such as not attacking the same village twice in a row. Ultimately, the researchers uncovered reports of three more generations of man-eating lions in Tanzania in the 1930s and 1940s. Cannibalism among lions stopped only when all members of the primes were exterminated.

Isolated cases of cannibalism still occur in Africa today. For example, in December 2002 alone in Malawi, according to BBC reports, lions killed 9 people. The region is currently in a state of drought, forcing wildlife migrate in search of food.

The famous man-eating lions of Tsavo, which killed more than 130 railway workers in Kenya in the early 20th century, did not kill people for lack of food, but for pleasure or because of the ease of hunting humans, paleontologists say in a paper published in the journal Scientific Reports.

"It appears that hunting humans was not a last resort measure for the lions; it simply made their lives easier. Our data shows that these man-eating lions did not completely consume the carcasses of the animals and people they caught. It seems that the humans simply served as a pleasant addition to their already varied diet. In turn, anthropological evidence indicates that in Tsavo people were eaten not only by lions, but also by leopards and other big cats,” says Larisa DeSantis from Vanderbilt University in Nashville (USA).

This story dates back to 1898, when the British colonial authorities decided to connect their colonies in eastern Africa with a giant railway stretching along the coast Indian Ocean. In March, its builders, Hindu workers brought to Africa and their white “sahibs,” faced another natural obstacle - the Tsavo River, a bridge over which they spent the next nine months building.

Throughout this time, the railroad workers were terrorized by a pair of local lions, whose boldness and insolence often went so far as to literally drag the workers out of their tents and eat them alive at the edge of the camp. The first attempts to scare off the predators using fire and barriers of thorny bushes failed, and they continued to attack the expedition members.

As a result of this, workers began to desert the camp en masse, which forced the British to organize a hunt for the “Tsavo killers.” Man-eating lions turned out to be unexpectedly cunning and elusive prey for John Patterson, an imperial army colonel and leader of the expedition, and only in early December 1898 did he manage to waylay and shoot one of the two lions, and 20 days later kill the second predator.

Ghost and Darkness. Man-eating lions from Tsavo, reproduction at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago

During this time, lions managed to end the lives of 137 workers and British military personnel, which forced many naturalists of the time and modern scientists to discuss the reasons for this behavior. Lions, and especially males, at that time were considered rather cowardly predators who did not attack people and large cats if there were escape routes and other food sources.

According to DeSantis, such ideas led most researchers to assume that the lions attacked the workers due to hunger - this was supported by the fact that the local population of herbivores was greatly reduced due to the plague epidemic and a series of fires. DeSantis and her colleague Bruce Patterson, the namesake of the colonel at the Chicago Field Museum of History, where the remains of the lions are kept, have been trying for 10 years to prove that this was not so.

Safari for the "king of beasts"

Initially, Patterson believed that lions hunted people not because of a lack of food, but because their fangs were broken. This idea was met with a barrage of criticism from the scientific community, as Colonel Patterson himself noted that the tusk of one lion broke on the barrel of his rifle at the moment the animal lay in wait and jumped on him. However, Patterson and DeSantis continued to study the teeth of the Tsavo Killers, this time using modern paleontological methods.

The enamel of the teeth of all animals, as scientists explain, is covered with a peculiar “pattern” of microscopic scratches and cracks. The shape and size of these scratches, and how they are distributed, directly depends on the type of food that their owner ate. Accordingly, if the lions were starving, then their teeth should contain traces of chewed bones, which predators were forced to eat when there was a lack of food.

Guided by this idea, paleontologists compared the scratch patterns on the enamel of lions from Tsavo with the teeth of ordinary zoo lions that are fed soft food, hyenas that eat carrion and bones, and the man-eating lion from Mfuwe in Zambia, which killed at least six local residents in 1991.

"Although eyewitnesses often reported 'crunching bones' on the outskirts of the camp, we found no signs of damage to the enamel on the teeth of the Tsavo lions consistent with bone eating. Moreover, the pattern of scratches on their teeth is most similar to that , which is found on the teeth of lions in zoos that are fed beef tenderloin or pieces of horse meat," DeSantis said.

Accordingly, we can say that these lions did not suffer from hunger and did not hunt people for gastronomic reasons. Scientists speculate that lions simply liked relatively abundant and easy prey, which required much less effort to catch than hunting zebras or cattle.

According to Patterson, such findings partially speak in favor of his old theory about dental problems in lions - in order to kill a person, a lion did not have to bite through his neck arteries, which was problematic to do without fangs or with bad teeth when hunting large herbivores animals. According to him, the lion from Mfuwe also had similar problems with teeth and jaws. Therefore, we can expect that the controversy surrounding the Tsave cannibals will flare up with renewed vigor.

Fear has big eyes, and with the help of Hollywood cinema, as practice shows, they can be enlarged many times over. Opinion polls have shown that after the release of Steven Spielberg's film Jaws, the US population was gripped by the fear of being eaten by sharks. Respondents believed that this is one of the main reasons for the death of Americans, when in fact the chance of dying in the mouth of a shark is negligible.

The story of the Kenyan man-eating lions developed in much the same way. Several films contributed to making this story as scary as possible, including The Ghost and the Darkness (1996) with Michael Douglas and Val Kilmer.

More than 100 years after those events, scientists have debunked the myth of the formidable killers by analyzing their remains stored at the Natural History Museum in Chicago. The results of the study are being published this week. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Man-eating lions hunted railway construction workers in Kenya in 1898. They were killed by Lieutenant Colonel of the British Army John Patterson. He stated that during the nine months of his fight against predators, they ate 135 people. However, the Uganda Railway Company denied these data: its representatives believed that only 28 people died. Patterson donated the remains of the animals to the Chicago Museum in 1924 - before that, lion skins served as carpets in his home.

A. Lieutenant Colonel Paterson with the man-eating lion he killed December 9, 1898; B. The jaws of this lion - its lower right canine is broken and part of the incisors is missing; S. Second Man-Eating Lion (killed December 29, 1898); D. His jaw with a broken upper left first molar // PNAS

Modern research showed that railroad workers were more accurate in their assessments than military personnel.

In fact, the lions (called Ghost and Darkness in the film) ate about 35 people between them.

In order to obtain the result, scientists conducted an isotopic analysis of the animal remains, in particular, the content of stable isotopes of carbon and nitrogen in the skins. The content of these elements reflects the diet of animals. For comparison, the content of these elements in the tissues of humans and modern Kenyan lions was also determined. The analysis was carried out both in bone tissue and in animal hair. Bone tissue provides information about the diet “averaged” over the entire life of the animal, and fur provides “fingerprints” of the last few months of life.

Skulls used for analysis of nitrogen and carbon content//PNAS

Analyzing the data obtained, scientists confirmed that these lions began to actively feed on people only a few months before death - the ratio of carbon and nitrogen isotopes in the tissues of their fur and bones was too different. This difference, as well as a comparison of these figures with elemental analysis of the tissues of modern lions and humans, allowed scientists to quantify the number of people eaten. One of the lions ate approximately 24 people, while the second only 11. The error of the method used, however, is very large. Theoretically, the lower estimate for the number of people eaten is four, the upper estimate is 72. Either way, this number is less than a hundred, and rumors about the large number of victims of deadly predators are clearly exaggerated. Scientists still stick to the figure of 35, since it is close to the official data of the Ugandan Railway Company. Despite the fact that the animals hunted together, they did not share the prey, as can be seen from the different composition of the tissues of the two animals. Hunting together is important for lions when attacking large animals such as buffalo. The man is too small and slow for one lion to handle.

Joint hunting of humans suggests that man-eating lions were not the best of the breed.

They did not start hunting people out of a good life; they were also not the strongest and bravest animals. On the contrary, they were weaker and could no longer hunt the types of prey they were more familiar with. In addition, the dry summer of that year devastated the savannas and reduced the number of herbivores that were common food for lions.

Ghost and Darkness also suffered from gum and dental diseases, and one of them had a damaged jaw. All these circumstances prompted the lions to choose easy prey, which would not run far and was easier to chew - people.