Field Lions Museum of Natural History. Cannibals from Tsavo

A study conducted by Dr. Jalian Peterhans and Thomas Gnosk of the Field Museum in Chicago found that the legend of 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 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 people for prey 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”. And the Hollywood film 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 killed the construction workers over several years, and not in such a short time as the film suggested. 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.

Scientists seem to have solved 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 big booty who was fighting for her 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 last 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 findings in Scientific Reports, which provides evidence that the Zambian lion that killed six people in 1991 also had serious dental problems. 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 study 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.

Over nine long months in 1898, two lions are said to have killed at least a hundred people in Kenya. People couldn't do anything about them. They seemed invulnerable, and only death stopped them.

Do you believe that animals can be serial killers? This is hard to believe, because animals are guided by instincts, and not by anger or thirst for profit. But two lions, nicknamed “The Men of Tsavo,” completely changed the idea of ​​what animals are capable of.

From March to December 1898, two male lions killed, according to various sources, from 31 to 100 people during the construction of a railway bridge connecting Kenya with Uganda. An unusual feature of these lions was that they lacked manes, although both were males. These lions specifically hunted down and killed their victims. The number of people they killed is incredibly high. But the most amazing and terrible thing in this story is that the lions did not kill because they were hungry. They killed because they liked it.

The British Empire began a project to build a railway bridge across the Tsavo River in Kenya to link Kenya with Uganda. The project, which began in March 1898, was led by Lieutenant Colonel John Henry Patterson.

Shortly after construction began, workers began reporting two lions roaming around their camp in search of prey. In the end, the lions pulled one Indian worker right out of his tent in the middle of the night and ate him.

This attack was followed by many others. The workers tried various methods to get rid of the lions. They lit large fires to scare away the lions from their camp, but to no avail. They built a fence of thorny bushes (boma), confident that this would keep the animals out, a ploy that would certainly have worked if the animals involved were ordinary animals. The lions that had tasted human flesh now avoided all obstacles, they jumped over thorny bushes or crawled under, not paying attention to the scratches that remained on their skin.

Superstitious Indian workers called the Lions “Ghost and Darkness”, and began to leave their jobs. Filled with horror, they returned to their hometowns. Construction of the railway bridge stopped completely. And then Colonel Patterson realized that the time had come to take serious action.

Patterson set traps to catch the lions. He used goats as bait, but the lions turned out to be so smart that they easily bypassed all the traps, while they managed to eat the goats. Then Patterson installed observation platforms on the treetops and stayed overnight on them, ambushing the lions.

After several unsuccessful attempts to shoot the lions, Patterson finally managed to kill one of the lions on December 9, 1898. His first shot only managed to wound the lion, but when the lion returned to camp that night, he was hit again. At dawn the lion was found dead, not far from the place where the bullet overtook him.

The lion was huge! From nose to tail, it reached a length of almost three meters; only eight adult men were able to carry it back to the camp. And although the half-colonel managed to win, Patterson realized that there was still one lion left, and he too must be stopped.

This took Patterson another 20 days. He killed the second lion on December 29. Patterson said he shot it at least nine times before the lion died. Death overtook the lion as it clung to a tree, trying to get Patterson. As word spread that the lions had been killed, the work crews returned to work and the bridge was completed.

Most likely, the lions killed between 28 and 31 people in total, but Colonel Patterson stated that they were responsible for 135 human lives.

Patterson skinned the lions and used their skins as floor mats. In 1924, he sold them to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago for $5,000. The lions' skins were in terrible condition. Experts restored them, and now the carcasses of these animals are on display in the museum. Lion skulls are located nearby.

Exhibition Ghost and Darkness at the Field Museum

In 2009, a team of scientists from the Field Museum and the University of California, Santa Cruz, examined the isotopic composition of lion bones and hair. They found that the first lion ate eleven people, and the second - twenty-four. One of the authors of the study, Field Museum curator Bruce Patterson (no relation to D.H. Patterson), stated: “The rather outlandish statements that Colonel Patterson made in his book can now be largely refuted,” while another author, Nathaniel Dominy, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of California, said: "Our evidence tells us the number of people eaten, but not the number of people killed."

The story of the Tsavo cannibals became the basis for the films Bwana Devil (1952), Killers of Kilimanjaro (1959) and The Ghost and the Darkness (1996). In the last film, the role of Patterson was played by Val Kilmer, and the lions were named Ghost and Darkness.

Ghost and Darkness - a bloodthirsty legend of Kenya updated: April 18, 2019 by: Amazing-world!

MOSCOW, April 19 - RIA Novosti. The famous man-eating lions of Tsavo, which killed more than 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 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 "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).

Dark Heart of Africa

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 railway workers were terrorized by a pair of local lions, whose courage and insolence often reached the point that they literally they dragged the workers out of their tents and ate 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.

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, not attacking 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 the lions hunted people not because of a lack of food, but because their fangs were broken. This idea was met with a storm of criticism from scientific community, since 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 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 the Tsavo lions 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, characteristic of 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.