Ghost and darkness lions cannibals in the museum. The mystery behind the attacks on people by lions from Tsavo has been revealed. The mystery of the century has been solved. Dark Heart of Africa

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 "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 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.

Fear has big eyes, and with the help 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 leading causes of death for Americans, when in fact the chance of dying in the mouth of a shark is negligible.

The story of the Kenyan man-eating lions developed in much the same way. Several films contributed to making this story as scary as possible, including The Ghost and the Darkness (1996) with Michael Douglas and Val Kilmer.

More than 100 years after those events, scientists have debunked the myth of the formidable killers by analyzing their remains stored at the Natural History Museum in Chicago. The results of the study are being published this week. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Man-eating lions hunted railway construction workers in Kenya in 1898. They were killed by Lieutenant Colonel of the British Army John Patterson. He stated that during the nine months of his fight against predators, they ate 135 people. However, the Uganda Railway Company denied these data: its representatives believed that only 28 people died. Patterson donated the remains of the animals to the Chicago Museum in 1924 - before that, lion skins served as carpets in his house.

A. Lieutenant Colonel Paterson with the man-eating lion he killed December 9, 1898; B. The jaws of this lion - its lower right canine is broken and part of the incisors is missing; S. Second Man-Eating Lion (killed December 29, 1898); D. His jaw with a broken upper left first molar // PNAS

Modern research showed that railroad workers were more accurate in their assessments than military personnel.

In fact, the lions (called Ghost and Darkness in the film) ate about 35 people between them.

In order to obtain the result, scientists conducted an isotopic analysis of the animal remains, 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 tissue and in animal hair. Bone tissue provides information about the diet “averaged” over the entire life of the animal, and fur provides “fingerprints” of the last few months of life.

Skulls used for analysis of nitrogen and carbon content//PNAS

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 tissue elemental analysis data modern lions and humans allowed scientists to quantify the number of people eaten. One of the lions ate approximately 24 people, while the second only 11. The error of the method used, however, is very large. Theoretically, the lower estimate for the number of people eaten is four, the upper estimate is 72. Either way, this number is less than one hundred, and rumors about the large number of victims of deadly predators are clearly exaggerated. Scientists still stick to the figure of 35, since it is close to the official data of the Uganda Railway Company. Despite the fact that the animals hunted together, they did not share the prey, as can be seen from the different composition of the tissues of the two animals. Hunting together is important for lions when attacking large animals such as buffalo. The man is too small and slow for one lion to handle.

Joint hunting of humans suggests that man-eating lions were not the best of the breed.

They did not start hunting people out of a good life; they were also not the strongest and bravest animals. On the contrary, they were weaker and could no longer hunt the types of prey they were more familiar with. In addition, the dry summer of that year devastated the savannas and reduced the number of herbivores that were common food for lions.

The Ghost and the Darkness also suffered from diseases of the gums and teeth, and one of them had a damaged jaw. All these circumstances prompted the lions to choose easy prey that would not run far and was easier to chew - people.

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 of the 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 in Africa repeatedly hunted human prey under conditions that were most often man-made and created by humans 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”. A hollywood movie 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. Lions “Ghost and Darkness” have been killing builders for several years, and not so long a short time, as follows from the film. Moreover, outbreaks of aggressiveness of lions were associated with the beginning of construction, when people invaded their habitat.

Widespread deaths of the Tsavo people from smallpox and famine in the 19th century (according to different estimates more than 80,000 people died), whose corpses 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.

We remember these lions well from the film “Ghost and the Darkness” (1996), that’s what they were called, “Ghost” and “Darkness”. 119 years ago, these two huge faceless cannibals were hunting railway workers in the Tsavo region of Kenya. Over the course of 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 many speculations and prejudices.

Also known as the Tsavo Lions (Tsavo Man-Eaters), this pair of animals hunted at night until they were shot and killed in December 1898 by railway engineer Colonel John Henry Patterson. In the decades that followed, the public became fascinated by stories of ferocious lions, which first appeared in newspaper articles and books (one story was written by Patterson himself in 1907: "The Man-Eaters of Tsavo") and then in films.

It was previously assumed that severe hunger drove lions to eat people. However, recent analysis of the remains of two man-eaters that became part of the collection of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago provides new insight into what drove the Tsavo lions to kill and eat people. The discoveries described in the new study provide another explanation: the reason lies in the teeth and jaws, which made it painful for the animals to hunt their usual big catch consisting of herbivores.

For most lions, people are usually far from their feeding habits. Big cats They usually feed on large herbivores such as zebras, buffalos and antelopes. And rather than viewing humans as potential food, lions tend to avoid people entirely, study co-author Bruce Patterson, curator of mammals at the Field Museum of Natural History, told Live Science.

But something pushed the Tsavo lions to attack people, which was pretty fair game, Patterson said.

Lions rely heavily on their teeth to grab and strangle an animal or sever its windpipe. Because of this constant use about 40 percent African lions There are dental injuries, reports a 2003 study co-authored by Bruce Patterson and DeSantis.

Tsavo lions have trouble using their mouths, so grasping and holding a zebra or buffalo would be, if not impossible, excruciatingly painful.

Photo. Tsavo cannibals at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago

To unravel an age-old mystery, the study's authors examined evidence of lions' behavior from their preserved teeth. Microscopic wear patterns can tell scientists about animals' eating habits, especially during last weeks life, and these lions' teeth did not show signs of wear associated with gnawing on large, heavy bones, the scientists wrote in the study.

Hypotheses proposed in the past have centered on lions developing a taste for human flesh, perhaps because their usual prey died from drought or disease. But if lions hunted humans out of desperation, hungry cats would likely be cracking open human bones to get the last morsel of food from these gruesome dishes, 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 the weakness of their mouths prevented them from catching larger, stronger animals, the study's author writes.

The reasons for the attacks lie in their mouths
Previous findings first presented to the American Society of Mammalogists in 2000, according to New Scientist, indicated that one of the Tsavo lions was missing three lower incisors, had a broken canine, and had a significant abscess in the surrounding tissue at the root of another tooth. The second lion's mouth was also damaged, broken upper tooth and the pulp is exposed.

In the case of the first lion, pressure on the abscess would result in unbearable pain, providing more than enough motivation for the animal to abandon large, strong prey and switch to ordinary people, Patterson said. Actually chemical analysis spent in another, more early research, published in 2009 in the journal Proceedings National Academy Sciences, showed that a lion with an abscess consumed more human prey than its partner. Moreover, after the first lion was shot in 1898 (the second lion was killed two weeks later), attacks on people stopped, Patterson noted.

Almost 120 years after the life of the cannibals came to an abrupt end, interest in their terrible habits still persists and has fueled the scientific community to uncover the mystery of these lions. But if not for their preserved remains, which John Patterson sold to the Museum as trophy pelts in 1924, today's explanations of their habits would be little more than speculation, Bruce Patterson said.

“If it weren't for the samples, there would be no way to resolve these issues. Almost 120 years later, we can tell not only what these lions ate, but we can figure out the differences between these lions by studying their skins and skulls,” he said.

"A lot of scientific evidence can be built on the preserved specimens," Patterson added. “I have another 230,000 pieces in the Museum’s collection and they all have their own story to tell.”

We cut down forests, we dug ditches,
In the evenings lions approached us...
(N. Gumilev)

I don’t have a funny bedtime story for you. There is a terrible one. And not exactly a fairy tale...

In Chicago, the Museum of Natural History has a perennially popular display case. It contains two stuffed felines and several photographs.

These two lions are males, although they do not have manes. In Kenya, where they are from, in national park Tsavo, there are still such lions, maneless and with little hair...
At the very end of the 19th century, these two stalled the construction of the Ugandan railway for several weeks. However, perhaps the hunter, by whose grace they now stand in the museum, added something in his memories of those events;) And even more so, a lot was added in Hollywood by the creators of the Oscar-winning film “The Ghost and the Darkness” based on these very memories.
However, it is true that a bloody drama during the construction of the railway took place.

Construction of the Uganda Railway began in 1896. And the episode that interests us happened in 1898 in a place called Tsavo. I'm not fluent in Swahili, and I can't confirm (or deny) whether "Tsavo" actually means something like a lost place in that language. But to the engineer Ronald Preston who led the work on the road construction, this place seemed like paradise. It was where the railway approached the river, across which it was necessary to build a railway bridge, that it all began. (“Dad, who built this railway?”... The British, baby. That is, of course, the rails were laid by local Indian workers brought to the construction site African people were not eager to cooperate. However, Preston managed to persuade some of them). Workers began disappearing from the camp at night. However, the secret was revealed quickly, the traces were painfully obvious - a man-eating lion had appeared near the camp.
They tried to watch for the lion. Unsuccessfully. Fences made of thorny bushes were built around the tents:

As it turned out, the lions (apparently there were two of them) made their way through them perfectly, dragging their prey with them.

A temporary bridge was erected across the Tsavo River:

To build a permanent bridge, engineer John Henry Paterson arrived in Tsavo in March 1898, and wrote a best-selling book about his adventures in Africa.

Colonel Paterson

Paterson at the tent (left, with a gun). It looks bad, but I don’t have another Paterson for you :(

And this is where things get interesting. The fact is that there is a story about the events in Tsavo, belonging to Preston. So, Paterson’s notes with this story in some places coincide verbatim (even though Preston is talking about himself, and Paterson is talking about himself). So understand what was there and who plagiarized what from whom...

One way or another, from March to December 1898, with varying degrees of intensity and varying success, lions raided the railroad construction camp.

Workers on the construction of the railway in Tsavo

They simply snatched some out of their tents at night.

The tent of one of the predators' victims (I think the one in the foreground on the right)

Workers from the construction site began to run away. However, perhaps it was not only the killer lions, but also the character of Paterson - it seems that the workers who were extracting stone for the construction of the bridge even wanted to kill the stern boss...

They tried to catch the cannibal creatures different ways. One day they built a trap:

The trap was divided into two parts by a lattice - in the far one sat the “bait” with a gun. The lion fell into a trap, but the poor fellow, who served as the “bait,” got scared when the lion tried to paw him through the bars, opened indiscriminate fire and, instead of shooting the lion, shot off the lock of the slammed cage... The lion escaped.
Paterson built an observation platform on a tree where the predator could not climb:

Paterson with the first killed lion:

Second killed lion

The fearless British officer took the skins as trophies, and for a long time they lay in his house, serving as carpets. And in 1924, when Paterson needed money, he sold it to the Field Museum in Chicago. The lion skins were in poor condition. It took a lot of work for the taxidermist to put them in order and make decent stuffed animals (by the way, this may be why the lions in the window look smaller than they really were).

Museum taxidermist at work:

Cannibals from Tsavo on display at the Field Museum in 1925

The railway bridge across Tsavo was successfully built, and in 1901 the entire railway line was ready - it went from Mombasa, on the ocean coast, to Port Florence (Kisumbu, on Lake Victoria), named after Florence, Preston’s wife, former with him in Africa for the entire five years while the railway was being built...
And in 1907, Paterson wrote his famous book (by the way, selected chapters from it, dedicated specifically to the hunt for man-eating lions, were translated into Russian). And Colonel Paterson came out all around a hero, saving the workers from the cannibals who killed 140 people. However...
Scientists who examined the stuffed lions say that in fact one of them ate 24 people, and the second - 11. That is, the victims of the lions shot by Paterson in reality were no more than thirty-five. What are 140 victims? The colonel's hunting boast? Maybe so. Maybe not.
Paterson claimed to have discovered a lions' den littered with human bones. This place was lost, but not so long ago, researchers from the same Natural History Museum discovered it again and identified it from a photograph taken by Paterson (it had hardly changed in a hundred years, but, of course, there were no bones there anymore). Apparently, in fact, this was previously the burial place of one of the African tribes - lions do not put bones in a corner in a hole...
In addition, it is known that in fact, with the killing of the lions from Tsavo, the attacks of predators on the railway did not stop - aggressive lions came to the stations (not to mention the fact that they were encountered at railway It was possible not only with a lion, but also with equally aggressive rhinoceroses, and even elephants).
So maybe there really were one hundred and forty victims? Maybe these lions ate 35 workers, and the rest of the hundred were eaten by others? For there is no evidence that there were only two lions...

And in Tsavo now national park. You can go there on a safari, look at maneless lions and listen to the story of how the British built a railway bridge...