Field Museum of Natural History lions cannibals. Two from Tsavo: a colonial story that smoothly turns into a scary tale

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 story unfolded in much the same way. Kenyan man-eating lions. 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 debunked the myth of formidable killers by analyzing their remains stored in the museum. 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 builders railway 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 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 hair. bone tissue give 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 figures with the data of elemental analysis of tissues 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 different composition tissues of 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.

The joint hunt for a man suggests that man-eating lions were not the best representatives breeds.

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.

) 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 the representative National Museum Kenya said 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."

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 the new study, offer a different explanation: the reason lies in the teeth and jaws, which made it painful for the animals to hunt their usual large prey, consisting 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. This constant use causes about 40 percent of African lions to have dental injuries, according to a 2003 study by Bruce Patterson and 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.

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 could tell scientists about the eating habits of animals, especially during recent weeks of life, and the teeth of these lions showed no signs of wear associated with chewing on large, heavy bones, the scientists write 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 American Society mammologists in 2000, according to the New Scientist, testified that one of the lions from Tsavo was missing three lower incisors, had a broken canine, and there was 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 provided more than enough motivation for the animal to give up 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.”

Joke:
Ernest Hemingway was once asked: “Is it true that if you carry a torch in front of you, then the lion will never attack you?”
The writer replied, "It depends on how fast you carry the torch."

The reasons why felines dare to attack bipeds were convincingly described by Jim Corbett. This English hunter became famous as a successful exterminator of the most dangerous cannibal cats that ran rampant in India in the first half of the 20th century.

So, Corbett argued that in the vast majority of cases, predators become cannibals "for health reasons", when they can no longer hunt for their usual food. In nine cases out of ten, the causes are injuries, and in the tenth, the old age of the beast. Let us recall at least the famous tiger Sherkhan from "Mowgli", who bore the nickname "Langri" ("lame").

The "medical card" of the cannibal can be very diverse. These are wounds received from hunters, and broken teeth and jaws, and even porcupine quills that remain in the bodies of careless predators. Usually such an "incompetent" kills his first person by accident, and then gets a taste.

Peter Paul Rubens; commons.wikimedia.org

Jim Corbett "The Kumaon Cannibals":
“A relatively young Muktesar cannibal tigress lost an eye when she met a porcupine, about 50 needles from one to nine inches long stuck into her forearm and armpit of her right front paw.
...While she was lying in the thick grass, licking her wounds and suffering from hunger, some woman decided to mow just this grass to feed her cow. At first, the tigress did not pay attention to her, but when the woman was very close to her, the beast jumped and struck - the blow fell on the woman's skull. ... Without touching the corpse, the tigress hobbled over a mile and hid in a small hole under a fallen tree. Two days later, a man came there to chop wood, and the tigress killed him too. He fell across the trunk, and as the tigress tore his back with her claws, the smell of blood, apparently for the first time, inspired her with the idea that she could satisfy her hunger with human meat. ... A day later, she "deliberately" and without any reason killed her third victim. Since that time, she has become a real cannibal and, before she was destroyed, she managed to kill 24 people.

Addicted to human flesh may appear in predators after they have tasted human corpses - especially in times of war and epidemics.

Rarely (but it also happens) quite healthy animals enter the path of cannibalism. For example, in the Ganges Delta there is a tiger reserve Sundarbans. It is full of impenetrable mangroves, where tigers feel at ease and lead with impunity. It is believed that every fourth tiger of the Sundarbans is a potential cannibal.

The risk of "cannibalism" increases and when predators appear in their usual places of residence a large number of of people. It is for this reason (and not at all because of their innate peacefulness) that Amur tigers are considered less dangerous than Bengal tigers (it’s just that the population density in Primorsky Krai is much lower than in India, and there are fewer tigers themselves).

A clear confirmation of the above is the history cannibals from Tsavo. Tsavo is a district in Kenya and the river of the same name. In the 19th century, it was a rather wild and deserted place. But in 1898, they began to build a bridge for the railway, designed to connect Mombasa with Nairobi. English engineers brought several thousand Indians for "dirty" work. No sooner had the construction begun than the workers began to disappear one by one. It turned out that a pair of man-eating lions laid eyes on easy prey. Soon they became so bold that they began to kill people right at their tents. Neither bonfires nor barbed wire fences helped ...

The lion's "terror" lasted 9 months. Seeing that the workers began to scatter, Chief Engineer- John Patterson - decided to put an end to this. He managed to kill two lions, one of which turned out to be almost three meters long (it took 8 people to carry the carcass to the camp). Interestingly, although the lions were male, they did not have a mane. Today, stuffed cannibals from Tsavo can be seen at the Museum of Natural History in Chicago.

Mikedk9109; commons.wikimedia.org

Patterson wrote a book about his feat, based on which was filmed in 1996 Feature Film"Ghost and Darkness". True, the writer did not escape the "fisherman's syndrome", and from edition to edition the number of victims of lions grew (at first he wrote about 28 killed workers, then about 135) ...

The following famous cannibals fell already at the hands of the aforementioned Jim Corbett.

The first trophy of the hunter was Champawat tigress- extremely cunning and daring cannibal. First, she terrorized the population of Nepal, where she sent about 200 people to the next world. When the authorities raided her, enlisting the help of ... the army, the tigress moved to the neighboring region of India - Kumaon, where she continued to kill, bringing the number to 436 people. The predator without fear went straight into the settlements, but the hunters were not given into the hands. Only in 1907, Corbett managed to track down and shoot the Champawat cannibal, following the bloody trail of a murdered 16-year-old girl. Examination of the tigress confirmed the hunter's theory - the predator turned out to be a "disabled person" with two broken fangs.

For this feat, the local people almost declared Corbett a saint, and a cement slab was placed at the site of the murder of the cannibal.

While hunting for a tigress, the hunter heard about another cannibal who hunted in the Kumaon region - the so-called. leopard from panhard, who killed about (think!) 400 people before being shot by Corbett in 1910.

Despite this terrible "record", another victim of Corbett is more famous - leopard from Rudraprayag who managed to kill 125 people between 1918 and 1926. The predator chose the path along which the Indian pilgrims walked, so he had no problems with food. The leopard could not be killed for so long that the local population declared him an elusive and invulnerable demon, cleaner than Jack the Ripper. It was not until May 2, 1926 that Jim Corbett proved that this was not the case.

Here is how the hunter himself described the physical condition of the beast he killed:

“The teeth are worn and yellow, one canine is broken.
Wounds - one fresh bullet wound in the right shoulder; one old bullet wound in the pad of the left hind leg; part of a toe and one claw are missing on the same foot; several deep and partially healed head wounds; one deep and partially healed wound on the right hind leg; several partially healed tail wounds; one partially healed wound on the knee joint of the left hind leg.

Another famous cannibal shot by Corbett was Chaugar tigress from the already mentioned district of Kumaon. The hunt for her was long, so for the period 1926−30. The predator managed to kill 64 people. It is interesting that at first the tigress robbed herself, and then “dragged her grown son into criminal activity”.

You can learn more about all these cases from Corbett's wonderful books The Kumaon Cannibals and The Leopard of Rudraprayag.

As for Africa, the most famous after the lions of Tsavo was the cannibal pride, which hunted in the vicinity of the Tanzanian city Njombe and killed about 1500 people!

The local population believed that this was the revenge of the shaman, who was "fired from his post." Even after the hunter George Rush killed 15 predators and the killings stopped, the locals believed that they owed their salvation to the same shaman, who was quickly "reinstated" ...

What conclusions can be drawn from the above? Yes, the most banal. Of course, large felines at an open meeting with a person prefer to retreat - after all, it is better to attack a buffalo than to become a desirable target for hunters.

Nevertheless, wild predators are not the good-natured Tiger from " winnie the pooh". Yes, even tamed ones need an eye and an eye so that it doesn’t work out, as in a well-known joke: "The trainer drank, the tigers turned sour".

At the time of all Soviet people I was shocked by the tragedy that occurred in the Berberov family, who kept two lions, King I and King II, in a city apartment (!) Lions quickly became celebrities - starred in films (King I was the hero " Incredible adventures Italians in Russia"), they were written about in books and newspapers.

The idyll ended in 1980, when a fit of rage rolled over King II. The lion rushed at Nina Berberova and tore her back. Her 14-year-old son tried to stop the beast and was killed...

In general, you need to be careful with wild animals. Otherwise, there may be completely comic-tragic cases.

B. Grzimek "The Serengeti must not die":
"…here is how it was. The hunter shot the lion, and was just about to put his foot on the dead animal to take a picture, when the “dead” lion jumped up and tore it apart. It turned out that he was still alive. "White hunter" (white hunter - S.K.), who accompanied the guest, was deprived of his job for five years because of this incident.