Story
First lion killed
Second lion killed
In March 1898, construction began on a permanent bridge across the Tsavo River, a section of the Uganda Railway. Construction was directed by John Henry Patterson. For more than nine months, from March to December, workers were attacked by two man-eating lions. Workers, trying to protect themselves from the lions, built fences of thorny bushes (boma) around the tents, but they did not help. Because of the attacks, hundreds of workers left Tsavo and construction was suspended. On December 9, 1898, Patterson managed to shoot the first lion. On December 29, the second lion was also killed.
Both lions differed from the others in that they did not have a mane, although they were males. The length of both lions from the tip of the nose to the tip of the tail was about nine feet (three meters).
In 1907, Patterson's book "Cannibals of Tsavo" was published ( The Man-eaters of Tsavo; Russian translation of individual chapters published in the almanac "On land and at sea", 1962). In 1924, Patterson sold the lion skins to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. The lions were stuffed into stuffed animals, which are still exhibited in the museum.
On the number of victims, Patterson reported different information. In a 1907 book, he wrote that twenty-eight Indian laborers were killed by lions, and the number of Africans killed is unknown. In a pamphlet written in 1925 for the Field Museum, he gave a different number of those killed - one hundred and thirty-five.
In 2007, a spokesman for the National Museum of Kenya stated that the lion remains should be returned to Kenya as they are an important part of Kenyan history. In 2009, Kenya's minister of culture and heritage, William Ole Ntimama, made a similar announcement.
Research
The museum keeps the lions under the numbers FMNH 23970 and FMNH 23969. In 2009, a team of scientists from the Field Museum and the University of California at Santa Cruz investigated the isotopic composition of the bones and hair of lions. They found out 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. G. Patterson), stated: “The rather ridiculous statements that Colonel Patterson made in his book can now be largely refuted,” while another author, Associate professor of anthropology at the University of California, Nathaniel Dominy, said: "Our evidence speaks of the number of people eaten, but not the number of people killed."
Possible reasons why lions became cannibals are as follows:
- The epizootic of rinderpest, which reduced the number of normal prey, which forced the lions to seek new prey;
- The habit of eating the corpses of people in the Tsavo region, through which many slave caravans passed from the hinterland to the Indian Ocean;
- Cremation of Indian workers, after which lions rummaged through the remains;
- Dental problems that prevented lions from hunting normal prey;
- Damaged jaw of the first lion.
To the cinema
Patterson's book became the basis for the films Bwana Devil (1952), Killers of Kilimanjaro (1959) and Ghost and Darkness (1996). In the latter film, the role of Patterson was played by Val Kilmer, and the lions were named Ghost and Darkness.
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 Uganda Railway Company denied this information: its representatives believed that only 28 people died. 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.
Modern research has shown 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 hair. Bone tissues provide information about the "averaged" diet throughout the life of the animal, and wool - "fingerprints" of the last few months of life.
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.
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 went so far as to literally drag workers out of their tents and eat 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, colonel of the imperial army and leader of the expedition, 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.
A FEW WORDS ABOUT PATTERSON'S BOOK "MAN-EATERS FROM TSAVO"
THE BOOK of the English engineer James Patterson gained international fame at the beginning of our century. It went through several editions and was translated into many European languages (it was not translated into Russian). The book "Cannibals from Tsavo" tells about the construction of the railway in East Africa. It contains incidentally essays on the nature and ethnography of Kenya and stories about the author's hunting adventures. However, it was not these, albeit vividly written, but still amateurish information that led to the wide popularity of the book. Its central core is the story of the struggle with two cannibal lions, who interrupted the construction of an important bridge and slowed down the entire construction of the road. It was this story of a great tragedy and outstanding human courage that made Patterson's book a document of a courageous struggle with nature, a document that has not lost its interest for subsequent generations, including our Soviet readers, who know how to appreciate resilience, courage and selfless work.
Therefore, from the entire book, only the chapters that tell about Patterson's struggle with man-eating lions were selected, all other parts were omitted as obsolete. Perhaps lovers of the history of African exploration and ethnography will complain about this choice and consider that the book should be translated in full. However, it seems to me that the interest of the dramatic central part of the book cannot be compared with the fragmentary and random observations of the author on the ethnography and nature of Kenya at the end of the last century. That is why in our collection for the general reader we have limited ourselves to chapters on the fight against man-eating lions.
The story "Cannibals of Tsavo" echoes the wonderful books written by Jim Corbett about Indian cannibal tigers written forty years later. The books involuntarily draw attention to the huge number of people who died from tigers and cannibal leopards, and the complete helplessness of the population in front of a terrible predator. Entire areas were abandoned by people, fairs were empty, life on the roads was dying down, logging was stopped. Patterson paints a very similar picture of the construction of the railroad. Only two man-eating lions appear in the construction area, and thousands of workers live in constant horror, work is disorganized and even completely interrupted. This similarity between the stories of Corbett and Patterson is not accidental. The construction of the railway was carried out by Indian workers brought to Africa. They preserved in Africa the characteristic features of the life of the Indian people, including the religious aversion to the killing of any animal. Passivity and submission to the predestination of fate are also characteristic of the main religions of India - Brahmin and Buddhist.
It is safe to say that under other conditions, man-eating animals could not be so rampant. Their life would be very short and the number of victims incomparably smaller. And it's not just the lack of firearms. If the engineer, Patterson, had not been here, instead of him, warriors from the Maasai tribe would have dealt with the cannibals with their spears.
So, two man-eating lions roamed a small piece of India, transferred to Africa, in full force of their Asian counterparts. But there is a significant difference between Jim Corbett and engineer James Patterson. Corbett was a born hunter, a native of India, and the places in which he hunted cannibals were familiar to him, like a room in his own home. This man, of whose unparalleled courage there can be no doubt, went out to fight against the cannibals, armed with an excellent knowledge of the jungle and the habits of animals, which gave him more than a quarter of a century of acquaintance with them.
Engineer Patterson took on the same task in a foreign country he barely knew, and his hunting experience was no match for Jim Corbett's. Of course, some experienced travelers will say, the tiger is more dangerous than the lion! The answer to this is that Patterson did not have such sophisticated weapons, electric lights and magnesium flashes as Corbett possessed. Young self-confidence and courage, and maybe even luck, saved the engineer Patterson and helped him emerge victorious. It is enough to read the exciting pages about his duty on a hastily knocked together low platform, in impenetrable darkness, one on one with a cannibal, to understand that this struggle was not always equal and that a clear advantage was on the side of cannibal lions.
I am convinced that our readers will take with interest this story of the great courage of a man who managed to save the lives of many ordinary people - Indian workers, whom he treated with unfailing respect, as well as his hunting companions - the indigenous people of Africa.
Professor I. A. Efremov
ARRIVAL TO CAVO
NOON March 1, 1898 found me aboard a ship entering the narrow and rather dangerous harbor of Mombasa, a port on the east coast of Africa. The city is located on the island of the same name, separated from the mainland by a very narrow strait, which forms the harbor. As our ship slowly turned around near the quaint old Portuguese fortress built more than three centuries ago, I was more and more amazed at the unusual beauty of the landscape that gradually unfolded before me. Contrary to expectations, everything around looked fresh and blooming. The ancient city basked in the sparkling rays of the sun, lazily reflected in the still sea; flat roofs and dazzling white walls of houses looked dreamily between the swaying trunks of slender coconut palms, huge baobabs and sprawling mango trees, and the dark green, densely forested hills and slopes of the mainland served as an expressive backdrop for this beautiful and unexpected picture for me.
