Stuffed lions ghost and darkness. Two from Tsavo: a colonial tale that smoothly turns into a terrible fairy tale

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 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.

Ghost and Darkness. Man-eating lions from Tsavo, reproduction in the Field Museum 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.

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(not translated into Russian). The book "The Cannibals of Tsavo" tells about the construction railway V East Africa. It contains incidentally sketches of the nature and ethnography of Kenya and stories about the hunting adventures of the author. However, it was not this, albeit lively written, but still amateurish information that determined the wide popularity of the book. Its central core is the story of the fight with two man-eating lions, who interrupted the construction of an important bridge and slowed down the entire construction of the road. It was this story of 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 perseverance, courage and selfless work.

Therefore, from the entire book, only the chapters telling about Patterson’s struggle with man-eating lions were selected, all other parts were omitted as outdated. Perhaps lovers of the history of African exploration and ethnography will complain about this choice and feel that the book should have been translated in full. However, it seems to me that the interest of the dramatic central part of the book cannot be compared with the author's fragmentary and random observations of the ethnography and nature of Kenya at the end of the last century. That is why in our collection for the general reader we limited ourselves to only chapters on the fight against man-eating lions.

The story “The Man-Eaters of Tsavo” echoes Jim Corbett’s wonderful books about Indian man-eating tigers, written forty years later. In the books, one involuntarily draws attention to the huge number of people who died from tigers and man-eating leopards, and the complete helplessness of the population in front of the terrible predator. Entire areas were abandoned by people, fairs emptied, life on the roads came to a standstill, logging stopped. Patterson paints a very similar picture on the construction of the railroad. Just two man-eating lions appear in the construction area, and thousands of workers live in constant terror, work is disorganized and even completely interrupted. This similarity between Corbett's and Patterson's stories is no coincidence. The construction of the railway was carried out by Indian workers brought to Africa. They saved in Africa character traits way of life of the Indian people, including religious aversion to killing any animal. Passivity and submission to the predetermination of fate are also characteristic of the main religions of India - Brahman 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, warriors from the Maasai tribe would have dealt with the cannibals with their spears.

So, two man-eating lions roamed on a small piece of India, transferred to Africa, in full force their Asian colleagues. 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, barely familiar to him, and his hunting experience could not be compared with that of Jim Corbett. Of course, some experienced travelers will say, a tiger is more dangerous than a lion! The answer to this can be that Patterson did not have such advanced weapons, electric lights and magnesium flashes as Corbett possessed. Young self-confidence and courage, and maybe even luck, saved engineer Patterson and helped him emerge victorious. It is enough to read the fascinating pages about his duty on a hastily put together low platform, in impenetrable darkness, one on one with the cannibal, to understand that this struggle was not always equal and that a clear advantage was on the side of the man-eating lions.

I am convinced that our readers will receive with interest this story about the great courage of a man who managed to save the lives of many ordinary people - Indian workers, whom he treated with constant respect, as well as his hunting companions - the indigenous inhabitants of Africa.

Professor I. A. Efremov

ARRIVAL IN TSAVO

THE AFTERNOON of March 1, 1898, found me on board a ship entering the narrow and rather dangerous harbor of Mombasa, a port on the east coast of Africa. The city is located on an island of the same name, separated from the mainland by a very narrow strait, which forms the harbour. As our boat 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. Ancient city basked in the sparkling rays of the sun, lazily reflected in the motionless sea; flat roofs and the dazzling white walls of the houses looked dreamily through the swaying trunks of slender coconut palms, huge baobabs and spreading mango trees, and the dark green hills and slopes of the mainland covered with dense forest served as an expressive backdrop for this beautiful and unexpected picture for me.

“... It seems that hunting humans was not a measure of last resort for lions, it simply made their life easier. Our data shows that these man-eating lions did not completely consume the carcasses of the animals and people they captured. It appears to have simply served as a welcome addition to people's already varied diets. 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 ( 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 eastern Africa with a giant railway stretching along the shores of the Indian Ocean. In March, its builders, Indian workers brought to Africa and their white “sahibs”, faced another natural obstacle - the Tsavo River, a bridge over which they built over the next nine months.

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, colonel of the imperial army and leader of the expedition, and only in early December 1898 year he managed to waylay and shoot one of the two lions, and after 20 days to kill the second predator.

During this time, the lions managed to end their lives 137 workers and British military personnel, which led 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.

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 already 10 for years they have been trying 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 teeth “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" 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 their teeth should contain traces of chewed bones, which predators were forced to eat when there was a lack of food.

“... Despite the fact that eyewitnesses often reported “crunching of bones” heard on the outskirts of the camp, we did not find any signs of damage to the enamel on the teeth of the Tsavo lions, characteristic of eating bones. Moreover, the pattern of scratches on their teeth is most similar to that found on the teeth of lions in zoos that 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 lions simply liked fairly numerous and easy prey, which required much less effort to catch than hunting zebras or cattle.

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.

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. The size, ferocity and cunning of the two killer lions were so great that many local residents the predators were seen as demons trying to drive out the British invaders, and railroad workers walked out of construction 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 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 thrills.

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

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 findings 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 large prey, which consisted 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, approximately 40 percent of African lions have 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 eating habits animals, especially during the last weeks of 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 also had a damaged mouth, a broken upper tooth and exposed pulp.

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. 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 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.”