Scientists seem to have unraveled the mystery of why the most famous "man-eating lions" in history fell in love with the taste of human flesh, even though 119 years have passed since they hunted people. Researchers may have discovered the reason why lions hunt bipedal predators.
Cannibals from Tsavo
Despite their considerable capabilities, lions very rarely kill people unless they are provoked. However, several members of this species have earned the nickname "cannibals" as they have begun to attack humans. Their victims were mostly women. 
When two lions began preying on workers who were building a railway in Tsavo, Kenya, they even attracted the attention of the British Parliament, not to mention popularity among the 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 of the pair suffered from an infection that developed in the root of the canine. In addition to a bad mood caused by constant pain, this damage could make it difficult for the animal to hunt, scientists suspect. 
Lions usually use their fangs to grab prey such as zebras or wildebeest and suffocate them. However, it would be difficult for this lion to cope with large prey that fought for its life. People are much easier to catch.
The second killer lion had a broken tooth. While this probably didn't stop him from hunting, he may have started chasing people "for company" with his partner. An isotopic analysis of the fur of these lions shows that while humans made up about 30 percent of the first lion's diet in his final years, they made up only 13 percent of the second lion's diet. 
Reasons for hunting people
Dr. Bruce Peterson, Field Museum curator and author of the new study, has published his findings in Science Reports, which provide 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 lions prey on humans.
Previously, it was thought that lions may have preyed on humans due to severe drought, which reduced the number of wild prey. However, Patterson and the first co-author of the study, 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 is usually the case 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 deliver a fatal blow to lions, but if a predator does manage to catch one of them, the rest of the herd will not kill it out of revenge. People, as a rule, begin to take revenge. When lions prey on people, it most often happens on a moonless night, despite the fact that unarmed people would be easy prey in daylight.
) in 1898, during the construction of the Uganda Railway.
Story
In March 1898, construction began on a permanent bridge across the Tsavo River, a section of the Uganda Railway. John Henry Patterson supervised the construction. 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 The Man-eaters of Tsavo was published; Russian translation of individual chapters was published in the almanac On land and on the 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."
“... It seems that human hunting 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 the animals and people they caught. It appears that people were simply serving as a welcome 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 ... "
Larissa DeSantis says L arisa D eSantis from Vanderbilt University in Nashville (USA).
Dark Heart of Africa
This story begins in 1898 year, when the colonial authorities of Britain decided to connect their colonies in East Africa with a giant railway stretching along the shores of the Indian Ocean. In March, its builders, the Indian laborers brought to Africa, and their whites "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 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, the workers began to desert en masse from the camp, which forced the British to hunt for "killers from Tsavo". Man-eating lions turned out to be unexpectedly cunning and elusive prey for John Patterson, colonel in the imperial army and leader of the expedition, and only in early December 1898 year he managed to lie in wait and shoot one of the two lions, and after 20 days to kill the second predator.
During this time, the lions managed to end the life 137 workers and British military personnel, which led many naturalists of the 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 number of herbivores was greatly reduced due to a plague epidemic and a series of fires.
DeSantis and her colleague Bruce Patterson, the colonel's namesake at the Chicago Field Museum of History, which houses the remains of lions, have already 10 years trying to prove that it 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 teeth. "killers from Tsavo" using modern paleontological methods this time.
The enamel of the teeth of all animals, as scientists explain, is covered with a peculiar "pattern" from 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 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 the man-eating lion from Mfuwe in Zambia, which killed at least six local residents in 1991 year.
“... Despite the fact that eyewitnesses often reported “crunching of bones” heard on the outskirts of the camp, we did not find traces 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 on the teeth of lions in zoos, which are fed beef tenderloin or pieces of horsemeat ... "
DeSantis says.
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.
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? It's hard to believe, because animals are driven by instincts, not anger or greed. But two lions, dubbed the “People of Tsavo,” completely changed the idea of what animals are capable of.
From March to December 1898, two male lions killed between 31 and 100 people, according to various sources, during the construction of a railway bridge connecting Kenya with Uganda. An unusual feature of these lions was that they lacked a mane, although both were male. These lions specifically hunted down and killed their victims. The number of people killed by them 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 that two lions were roaming around their camp looking for prey. In the end, the lions dragged one Indian worker right out of the 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 the lions away from their camp, but to no avail. They built a fence out of thorny bushes (boma) in the belief that this would deter the animals, and such a ploy would certainly work if it was about ordinary animals. Lions that had tasted human flesh now avoided all obstacles, they jumped over thorny bushes or crawled from below, ignoring the scratches that remained on their skin.
Superstitious Indian workers named the Lions "Ghost and Darkness" and began to leave their jobs. Terrified, they returned to their hometowns. The construction of the railway bridge was completely stopped. And then Colonel Patterson realized that it was time to take serious action.
Patterson set up traps to catch the lions. He used goats as bait, but the lions were so smart that they easily bypassed all the traps, while they managed to eat the goats. Then Patterson set up observation decks on the tops of trees and stayed overnight on them, arranging ambushes for lions.
After several unsuccessful attempts to shoot the lions, Patterson finally managed to kill one of the lions on December 9, 1898. With the first shot, he only managed to wound the lion, but when the lion returned to the 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 could carry it back to the camp. And although the colonel managed to win half the victory, Patterson understood that there was one more lion left, and he, too, needed to be stopped.
It took Patterson another 20 days. He killed the second lion on December 29th. Patterson claimed to have shot him at least nine times before the lion died. Death overtook the lion when he clung to a tree, trying to get Patterson. When word spread that the lions had been killed, the work crews returned to work and the bridge was completed.
Most likely, the lions killed a total of 28 to 31 people, but Colonel Patterson stated that they accounted 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 skins of the lions were in a terrible state. Specialists restored them, and now the carcasses of these animals are on display at the museum. Skulls of lions are located nearby.
Exhibit Ghost and Darkness at the Field Museum
In 2009, a team of scientists from the Field Museum and the University of California at Santa Cruz examined the isotopic composition of lion bones and hair. 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."
The story of the cannibals from Tsavo became the basis for the films Bwana Devil (1952), Killers of Kilimanjaro (1959) and The Ghost and the Darkness (1996). In the last film, Patterson was played by Val Kilmer, and the lions were named Ghost and Darkness.
In 1898, Britain began building a railway bridge over the Tsavo River in Kenya. Over the next nine months, the construction workers became the constant target of two killer lions. The predators were distinguished by their large size (more than three meters in length) and, like many lions in the Tsavo region, the absence of a mane. At first, the lions attacked the workers at night, dragging people from the tents into the thicket and devouring them there. However, soon the predators lost their fear so much that they devoured the victims right next to the tents. The size, ferocity and cunning of the two killer lions were so great that many locals believed the predators were demons trying to drive out the British invaders, and hundreds of railway workers left the construction site. As a result, the construction of the bridge was curtailed - no one wanted to become the next victim of the "devil lions". Often lions did not eat their victims, but simply killed for pleasure. Because of this, the lions received speaking names: Ghost and Darkness, hunters were repeatedly sent to search for and capture them, but the lions each time managed to evade persecution. Everyone noted that there was something diabolical and mystical in them.
John Henry Patterson, the chief engineer in charge of the railroad bridge, decided to kill the raptors: in December 1989, he shot one of two lions and killed the other two weeks later. By this time, the lions had killed about 140 people.
During their wanderings across the savannah, Patterson and Remington found a stinking cave where human remains were rotting. Some organs were simply bitten, and something was not touched at all. From this they deduced that lions hunted not only for food, but also for the thrill.
While they were looking for them, they never met the lions face to face, but often heard their rapid breathing or a dull roar. In the darkness, because of the grass, they sometimes noticed the glare of cat's eyes, but they quickly disappeared. The lions came quite close to the hunters, but people understood this only after some time. At some points, according to Patterson and Remington, it seemed to them that they were being hunted for them.
The situation escalated. A couple of men realized that this was not just a hunt, but a race to the bottom. The killing of the lions was to end the bloodshed that had begun nine months earlier. After unsuccessful attempts, the first lion was killed on December 9, 1898. Twenty days later, the second was also defeated. Later, the hunter told how even 9 shots did not stop the beast. “At the last moment, he tried to attack me. I'm lucky!" Patterson recalled.
This cave exists to this day, and although human bones were seized, local residents claim that human remains can still be found inside. This fact seems very strange, considering that ordinary lions do not equip their own den. Today, the remains of two famous killer lions are kept in a museum in Chicago, although the Kenyan authorities have already expressed their intention to build a museum entirely dedicated to predators and their prey. The size of the lions was also noteworthy: the first of the lions was 3 meters long (from the nose to the tip of the tail). It was so heavy that it took 8 people to carry it to the camp.
edited news Oliana - 4-12-2015, 09:22
