Ghost and Darkness is a bloodthirsty legend in Kenya. Two from Tsavo: a colonial story that smoothly turns into a terrible fairy tale Cannibal Lions in the Chicago Museum
MOSCOW, April 19 - RIA Novosti. The famous man-eating lions from Tsavo, who killed over 130 railway workers in Kenya in the early 20th century, killed people not for lack of food, but for pleasure or because of the ease of hunting a person, paleontologists say in an article published in the journal scientific reports.
“It seems that hunting a man was not a measure of last resort for lions, it simply made life easier for them. Our data show that these man-eating lions did not completely eat the carcasses of animals and people they caught. It seems that people simply served as a pleasant addition to their already varied diet.In turn, anthropological data indicate that in Tsavo people were eaten not only by lions, but also by leopards and other big cats", - says Larisa DeSantis (Larisa DeSantis) from Vanderbilt University in Nashville (USA).
Dark Heart of Africa
This story begins in 1898, when the British colonial authorities conceived to connect their colonies in East Africa with a giant railway that stretched along the coast indian ocean. In March, its builders, Indian workers brought to Africa and their white "sahibs", faced another natural barrier - the Tsavo River, a bridge across which they built for the next nine months.
Throughout this time, the railroad workers were terrorized by a pair of local lions, whose boldness and audacity often reached the point that they literally dragged workers out of their tents and ate them alive on the edge of the camp. The first attempts to scare off the predators with fire and thorny bushes failed, and they continued to attack the expedition members.
As a result of this, the workers began to desert en masse from the camp, which forced the British to organize a hunt for the "killers from Tsavo". Man-eating lions turned out to be unexpectedly cunning and elusive prey for John Patterson, an imperial army colonel and expedition leader, and only in early December 1898 did he manage to ambush and shoot one of the two lions, and 20 days later kill the second predator.
During this time, the lions managed to end the lives of 137 workers and British soldiers, which led many naturalists of that time and modern scientists to discuss the reasons for such behavior. Lions, and especially males, at that time were considered rather cowardly predators that did not attack people and large cats in the presence of retreat routes and other sources of food.
According to DeSantis, such ideas led most researchers to assume that lions attacked workers because of hunger - in favor of this was the fact that the local population of herbivores was greatly reduced due to a plague epidemic and a series of fires. DeSantis and her colleague Bruce Patterson, the namesake of a colonel at the Chicago Field Museum of History, which houses the remains of lions, have been trying for 10 years to prove that this was not so.
Safari for the "king of beasts"
Initially, Patterson believed that lions preyed on people not because of a lack of food, but because their fangs were broken. This idea was met with a flurry 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 when 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 kind of "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 there should be traces of gnawed bones on their teeth, which the predators were forced to eat with a lack of food.
With this idea in mind, paleontologists have compared the scratch patterns on the enamel of the Tsavo lions with the teeth of normal zoo lions fed soft food, carrion and bone-eating hyenas, and a man-eating lion from Mfuwe in Zambia that killed at least six local residents in 1991.
“Despite the fact that eyewitnesses often reported “crunching bones” heard on the outskirts of the camp, we did not find evidence of damage to the enamel on the teeth of the lions from Tsavo, characteristic of eating bones. Moreover, the pattern of scratches on their teeth is most similar to that , which is found on the teeth of lions in zoos who are fed beef tenderloin or pieces of horse meat," says DeSantis.
Accordingly, we can say that these lions did not suffer from hunger and did not hunt people for gastronomic reasons. Scientists suggest that the lions simply liked the fairly numerous and easy prey, the capture of which required much less effort than hunting zebras or cattle.
According to Patterson, such findings partly 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 cervical arteries, which was problematic to do without fangs or with bad teeth when hunting large herbivores. animals. Similar problems with teeth and jaws, he said, had a lion from Mfuwe. Therefore, we can expect that the disputes around the cannibals from Tsave will flare up with renewed vigor.
We well remember these lions from the film "Ghost and Darkness" (1996), that's what they were called, "Ghost" and "Darkness". 119 years ago, these two huge, faceless cannibals hunted railway workers in the Tsavo region of Kenya. Within 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 much speculation and prejudice.
Also known as the Tsavo lions (man-eaters of Tsavo), this pair of animals hunted at night until they were shot and killed in December 1898 by railroad engineer Colonel John Henry Patterson. In the decades that followed, the public was fascinated by tales of ferocious lions, first appearing in newspaper articles and books (one story was written by Patterson himself in 1907: "The Cannibals of Tsavo") and then in movies.
Previously, it was assumed that severe hunger pushed the lions to eat people. However, a recent analysis of the remains of two cannibals that have become part of the collection of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago provides a new interpretation of what caused the Tsavo lions to kill and eat people. The findings, described in a new study, offer a different explanation: the reason lies in the teeth and jaws, because of which it was painful for animals to hunt their usual big booty made up of herbivores.
For most lions, humans are usually far removed from their eating habits. Big cats usually feed on large herbivores such as zebras, buffaloes, and antelopes. And instead of viewing humans as potential food, lions tend to avoid humans entirely, study co-author Bruce Patterson, curator of mammals at the Field Museum of Natural History, told Live Science.
But something spurred the Tsavo lions to attack humans, which was pretty fair game, Patterson said.
Lions rely heavily on their teeth to grab and suffocate an animal or rip open its windpipe. Because of this permanent use about 40 percent African lions there are dental injuries, according to a 2003 study by Bruce Patterson and co-authored by DeSantis.
The Tsavo lions had trouble using their mouths, so grabbing and holding a zebra or a buffalo would be excruciatingly painful, if not impossible.
A photo. Tsavo cannibals at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago
To unravel the age-old mystery, the study authors looked at evidence of lions' behavior from their preserved teeth. Microscopic wear patterns can tell scientists about the animals' eating habits, especially during the last weeks of life, and these lions' teeth showed no signs of wear associated with chewing on large, heavy bones, the scientists wrote in the study.
Hypotheses proposed in the past have been that lions developed a taste for human flesh, perhaps because their usual prey died from drought or disease. But if lions were preying on humans out of desperation, hungry cats would likely be cracking open human bones to get their last meal of those gruesome meals, 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 their infirmity to herd prevented them from catching larger, stronger animals, the author of the study writes.
The reasons for the attacks lie in their mouths
Previous results, first presented to the American Society of Mammologists in 2000, according to the 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 tissues 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 gave more than enough motivation for the animal to abandon the big strong prey and switch to ordinary people Patterson said. In fact, chemical analysis from another, earlier study published in 2009 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that a lion with an abscess consumed more human prey than its partner. What's more, after the first lion was shot in 1898 (the second lion was killed two weeks later), attacks on people stopped, Patterson noted.
Nearly 120 years after the life of the cannibals ended abruptly, interest in their terrible habits has continued to this day and fueled the scientific community to unravel the mystery of these lions. But were it not for their preserved remains, which John Patterson sold to the Museum as trophy skins in 1924, today's explanations of their habits would be nothing more than speculation, said Bruce Patterson.
“If not for the samples, there would be no way to resolve these issues. Nearly 120 years later, not only can we tell what these lions ate, but we can figure out the differences between these lions by examining their skins and skulls,” he said.
“A lot of scientific evidence can be built on surviving specimens,” Patterson added. “I have another 230,000 pieces in the Museum’s collection and they all have their own story to tell.”
The famous man-eating lions from Tsavo, who killed over 130 railway workers in Kenya in the early 20th century, killed people not for lack of food, but for pleasure or because of the ease of hunting a person, paleontologists say in an article published in the journal scientific reports.
“It seems that hunting a man was not a measure of last resort for lions, it simply made life easier for them. Our data show that these man-eating lions did not completely eat the carcasses of animals and people they caught. It seems that people simply served as a pleasant addition to their already varied diet. In turn, anthropological data indicate 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).
The story begins in 1898, when the colonial authorities of Britain decided to connect their colonies in East Africa with a giant railway that stretched along the shores of the Indian Ocean. In March, its builders, the Indian laborers brought to Africa and their white Sahibs, encountered another natural barrier - the Tsavo River, a bridge across which they built for the next nine months.
Throughout this time, the railroad workers were terrorized by a pair of local lions, whose boldness and audacity often reached the point that they literally dragged workers out of their tents and ate them alive on the edge of the camp. The first attempts to scare off the predators with fire and thorny bushes failed, and they continued to attack the expedition members.
As a result of this, the workers began to desert en masse from the camp, which forced the British to organize a hunt for the "killers from Tsavo". Man-eating lions turned out to be unexpectedly cunning and elusive prey for John Patterson, an imperial army colonel and expedition leader, and only in early December 1898 did he manage to ambush 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, the lions managed to end the lives of 137 workers and British soldiers, which led many naturalists of that time and modern scientists to discuss the reasons for such behavior. Lions, and especially males, at that time were considered rather cowardly predators that did not attack people and large cats in the presence of retreat routes and other sources of food.
According to DeSantis, such ideas led most researchers to assume that the lions attacked the workers because of hunger - in favor of this was the fact that the local population of herbivores was greatly reduced due to the plague and a series of fires. DeSantis and her colleague Bruce Patterson, the namesake of a colonel at the Chicago Field Museum of History, which houses the remains of lions, have been trying for 10 years to prove that this was not so.
Safari for the "king of beasts"
Initially, Patterson believed that lions preyed on people not because of a lack of food, but because their fangs were broken. This idea was met with a flurry 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 when 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 kind of "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 there should be traces of gnawed bones on their teeth, which the predators were forced to eat with a lack of food.
With this in mind, paleontologists have compared the scratch patterns on the enamel of the Tsavo lions to the teeth of normal zoo lions fed soft food, carrion and bone-eating hyenas, and the man-eating lion from Mfuwe in Zambia, which killed at least six natives in 1991. .
“Despite the fact that eyewitnesses often reported “crunching bones” heard on the outskirts of the camp, we did not find evidence of damage to the enamel on the teeth of the lions from Tsavo, characteristic of eating bones. Moreover, the pattern of scratches on their teeth is most similar to that , which is found on the teeth of lions in zoos who are fed beef tenderloin or pieces of horse meat," says DeSantis.
Accordingly, we can say that these lions did not suffer from hunger and did not hunt people for gastronomic reasons. Scientists suggest that the lions simply liked the fairly numerous and easy prey, the capture of which required much less effort than hunting zebras or cattle.
According to Patterson, such findings partially support his old theory about dental problems in lions - in order to kill a person, a lion did not have to bite through his cervical arteries, which was problematic to do without fangs or with bad teeth when hunting large herbivores. animals. Similar problems with teeth and jaws, he said, had a lion from Mfuwe. Therefore, we can expect that the disputes around the cannibals from Tsave will flare up with renewed vigor.
Fear has big eyes, and by means 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, while in reality the chance of dying in the mouth of a shark is negligible.
The history of the Kenyan man-eating lions developed in approximately the same way. Several films contributed to making this story as scary as possible, including The Ghost and the Dark (1996) with Michael Douglas and Val Kilmer.
More than 100 years after those events, scientists have debunked the myth of formidable killers by analyzing their remains stored in the Museum of Natural History in Chicago. The results of the study are published this week Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Man-eating lions preyed on railroad workers in Kenya in 1898. They were killed by Lieutenant Colonel John Patterson of the British Army. He stated that in the nine months of his struggle with predators, they ate 135 people. However, the Ugandan Railway Company denied this information: its representatives believed that only 28 people were killed. Patterson donated the remains of the animals to the Chicago Museum in 1924 - before that, the skins of lions served as carpets in his house.
A. Lieutenant Colonel Paterson with a man-eating lion he killed on December 9, 1898; B. Jaws of this lion - his right lower 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 the railroad workers were more accurate in their estimates than the military.
In fact, the lions (who were called Ghost and Darkness in the film) ate about 35 people for two.
In order to get the result, the scientists conducted an isotope analysis of the remains of animals, 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 tissues and in the animal's fur. Bone tissues provide information about the "averaged" diet throughout the life of the animal, and wool - "fingerprints" of the last few months of life.
Skulls used for nitrogen and carbon analysis//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 numbers with elemental analysis of tissues from modern lions and humans, allowed scientists to quantify the number of people eaten. One of the lions ate about 24 people, while the second - only 11. The error of the method used, however, is very large. Theoretically, the lower estimate of the number eaten is four, the upper estimate is 72. Anyway, 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 number 35, as it is close to the official figures of the Uganda Railway Company. Despite the fact that the animals hunted together, they did not share prey, as can be seen from the different composition of the tissues of the two animals. Joint hunting is important for lions when attacking large animals, such as buffaloes. Man is too small and slow for a single lion to take him down.
Joint hunting for a man suggests that man-eating lions were not the best representatives of the breed.
They took up hunting people not from a good life, they were also not the strongest and most courageous animals. On the contrary, they were weaker and could no longer hunt the types of prey more familiar to them. In addition, the dry summer of that year devastated the savannas and reduced the number of herbivores that were a common food for lions.
Ghost and Dark also suffered from gum disease and teeth, and one of them had a broken jaw. All these circumstances prompted the lions to choose easy prey, which does not run far and is easier to chew - people.
Horror stories about cannibals, which are usually used to frighten children or adult cinematic masterpieces from Hollywood, are most often the fruit of natural human fear, rich imagination, or an attempt to “play on the nerves” of a particularly impressionable audience. But some of them are really based on real facts, in particular, as this story about the legendary killer lions in
"Crown of Creation" vs. "King of Beasts"
In 1898, England began building a bridge across the Tsavo River as part of the rail link between Kenya and Uganda. Thousands of Indian workers were brought in for this purpose, as well as local Africans. The project was led by Lieutenant Colonel John Henry Patterson: at the age of 32 he was already an experienced tiger hunter and had just arrived from service in India. The construction of the bridge began in March, and almost immediately the number of workers began to dwindle.
The reason for the disappearance of people was ... two adult lions! Predators approached the camp of workers and literally pulled them out of the tents, eating them alive. Despite the attempts of people to protect themselves with the help of fires and the erection of fences from thorny bushes, the number of victims of man-eating lions grew catastrophically.
For 9 months construction works on the Tsavo River, according to Patterson, about 135 people disappeared, while the Ugandan Railway Company claimed only 28 missing. Predators that terrified people got nicknames Ghost and Darkness, for the locals they were the personification of the spirit that impedes the activities of whites in foreign territory. But what is the true clue to such a terrible and unnatural behavior of the Kenyan man-eating lions?
Killing is the only way to survive
Perhaps this story would have forever remained a legend, shrouded in rumors and mystical conjectures, if Patterson had not been able to shoot dangerous predators. Frightened to death, workers fled the bridge site by the hundreds, so the project was halted. It took Lieutenant Colonel Patterson more than one week to lure the lions into a trap: the first was killed by him on December 9, 1898, and the next only on December 29 (according to Patterson, he had to fire at least 10 bullets into him).
The killed animals impressed no less than the bloodthirstiness during life: the body length of each was almost 3 meters from the muzzle to the tip of the tail! It took the strength of 8 adult men to transport the carcass. It was also surprising that the lions were devoid of a mane, which is completely uncharacteristic for males. Animal skins for a long time served as carpet in Patterson's house. In 1907, his book "Cannibals from Tsavo" was published. In 1924, Patterson sold the trophies to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.
Only in 2009 did scientists manage to reliably find out how many victims the "Kenyan cannibals". Using the method of isotope analysis of the bones and hair of lions, they found that the predators did eat human meat, but, however, not throughout their lives, but only a few months before death. The victims of one lion were approximately 24 people, the second - only 11. And the main thing that became clear as a result of the study: it was not a mysterious animal that pushed the animals to this Magic power, but quite understandable biological reasons.
Killer lions hunted people not because of their strength and bloodthirstiness, but on the contrary - from weakness and hopelessness. The drought that reigned in the savannah for several years deprived the predators of their natural food - herbivorous mammals, including buffaloes. In addition, a pair of man-eating lions were found to have jaw disorders and dental disease, injuries that prevented them from hunting stronger prey.
There is also a version that the cannibalism of Tsavo lions is genetically transmitted from generation to generation, because caravans of driven slaves passed in this region of Africa for a long time, whose bodies could well become habitual food for lion prides. In Kenya and Tanzania, to this day, cases of lion attacks on local residents are recorded.
The story of the Kenyan man-eating lions formed the basis of several films, the most popular of which is "Ghost and Darkness" 1996 starring Val Kilmer and Michael Douglas.
Going to Kenya, you should not be afraid or turn to astrologers. An organized trip accompanied by experienced raging guides makes scary situations almost impossible. However, every tourist should definitely be careful and clearly follow the rules of conduct on safaris, walks and camps.
Ghost and Darkness - a bloodthirsty legend of Kenya updated: April 18, 2019 by: Amazing World!