Man-eating lions at the Chicago Museum. Two from Tsavo: a colonial tale that smoothly turns into a terrible fairy tale. “Crown of Creation” vs. “King of Beasts”

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 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 the 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).

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 railroad workers were terrorized by a pair of local lions, whose boldness and insolence often went so far as to literally drag the workers out of their tents and eat 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 barrage 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 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.

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

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. 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 normal. 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 decks 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 last movie the role of Patterson was played by Val Kilmer, and the lions were named Ghost and Darkness.

In 1898, Britain began construction of a railway bridge over the Tsavo River in Kenya. Over the next nine months, construction workers became a constant target of attacks by 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, by the absence of a mane. At first, the lions attacked the workers at night, dragging people from their tents into the thicket and devouring them there. However, soon the predators lost so much fear that they devoured their victims right next to the tents. Such was the size, ferocity and cunning of the two killer lions that many locals believed the predators were demons trying to drive out the British invaders, and railway workers walked away from the construction site in the hundreds. As a result, the construction of the bridge was curtailed - no one wanted to become the next victim of the “devilish 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 managed to escape pursuit each time. Everyone noted that there was something devilish and mystical about them.

John Henry Patterson, the chief engineer responsible for the construction of the railway bridge, decided to kill the predators: in December 1989, he shot one of the two lions, and two weeks later he killed the second. By this time, the lions had killed about 140 people.
During their wanderings through the savannah, Patterson and Remington found a fetid cave where human remains were rotting. Some organs were simply bitten, while others were not touched at all. From this they concluded 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 they often heard their rapid breathing or dull roar. In the darkness, because of the grass, they sometimes noticed the glare of the 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 moments, according to Patterson and Remington, it seemed to them that they were being hunted.

The situation became tense. A couple of men realized that this was not just a hunt, but a race for survival. The killing of the lions was intended 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 one was 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 still exists today, and although human bones have been removed, local residents claim that human remains can still be found inside. This fact seems very strange, considering that ordinary lions do not make their own den. Today, the remains of the two famous killer lions are kept in a museum in Chicago, although Kenyan authorities have already expressed their intention to build a museum entirely dedicated to the predators and their victims. The size of the lions was also notable: the first of the lions was 3 meters long (from nose to tip of tail). It was so heavy that it took 8 people to carry it to the camp.

edited news Olyana - 4-12-2015, 09:22

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 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 the "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).

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 shores of the 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 railroad workers were terrorized by a pair of local lions, whose boldness and insolence often went so far as to literally drag the workers out of their tents and eat 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.

Ghost and Darkness. Man-eating lions from Tsavo, reproduction at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago

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 barrage 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 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.