We cut wood, we dug ditches,
Lions came up to us in the evenings...
(N. Gumilyov)

I don't have a funny bedtime story for you. There is a terrible one. And it's not really a fairy tale...

In Chicago, the Museum of Natural History has an ever-popular display case. It contains two stuffed animals of the cat breed and several photographs.

These two lions are males, although they do not have manes. In Kenya, where they come from, in the Tsavo National Park, such lions are still found, maneless and short-haired ...
At the very end of the 19th century, these two stalled the construction of the Ugandan railway for several weeks. However, it is possible that the hunter, by whose grace they are now in the museum, added something in his memoirs about those events;) And even more so, the creators of the Oscar-winning film "Ghost and Darkness" based on these very memories added a lot in Hollywood.
However, the fact that a bloody drama took place during the construction of the railway is pure truth.

The construction of the Uganda Railway began in 1896. And the episode of interest to us happened in 1898 in a place called Tsavo. I am not strong in Swahili, and I cannot confirm (or deny) whether "Tsavo" in this language really means something like a black hole. But engineer Ronald Preston, who was in charge of the construction of the road, found this place to be heavenly. It was exactly where the railway approached the river through which it was necessary to build a railway bridge that everything began. (“Daddy, who built this railway?” ... The British, baby. That is, of course, the Indian workers brought to the construction site laid the rails - the local African residents were not eager to cooperate. However, Preston managed to persuade some of them) . Workers began to disappear from the camp at night. However, the secret was quickly revealed, the traces were painfully obvious - a man-eating lion wound up near the camp.
They tried to catch the lion. Unsuccessfully. Around the tents they built fences from thorny bushes:

As it turned out, the lions (there were, apparently, 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 in March 1898, engineer John Henry Paterson arrived in Tsavo, who wrote a best-selling book about his adventures in Africa.

Colonel Paterson

Paterson at the tent (left, with a gun). It’s hard to see, but I don’t have another Paterson for you :(

And here comes the fun. The fact is that there is a story about the events in Tsavo, which belongs to Preston. So, Paterson's notes with this story in some places coincide verbatim (even though Preston talks about himself, and Paterson - 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, the lions raided the camp of the railroad builders.

Workers on the construction of the railway in Tsavo

Some of them were simply stolen at night right from the tents.

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

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

They tried to catch cannibalistic creatures in different ways. Once they built a trap:

The trap was divided into two parts by a grate - in the far part there was a "bait" with a gun. The lion fell into a trap, but the poor fellow, who served as "bait", was frightened when the lion tried to reach him with his paw through the bars, opened indiscriminate firing 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 a predator could not climb:

Paterson with the first lion killed:

Second lion killed

The fearless British officer took the skins as trophies, and for a long time they lay at his house, performing the function of carpets. And in 1924, when Paterson needed money, he sold it to the Field Museum in Chicago. The skins of the lions were in a deplorable state. 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, the former with him in Africa all five years, while the railway was being built ...
And in 1907, Paterson wrote his famous book (by the way, selected chapters from it, devoted specifically to hunting cannibal lions, were translated into Russian). And Colonel Paterson came out around the hero, who saved 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 lion's den littered with human bones. This place was lost, but not so long ago, researchers from the same Museum of Natural History rediscovered it and identified it from a photograph taken by Paterson (it has hardly changed in a hundred years, but, of course, there were no bones there anymore). Apparently, in fact, it used to be 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 lions from Tsavo, the raids of predators on the railway did not stop - aggressive lions came to the stations (not to mention the fact that it was possible to meet on the railway not only with a lion, but also with no less aggressive rhinos, and even elephants).
So maybe there really were one hundred and forty victims? Maybe these lions ate 35 workers, and others ate the rest of the hundred? For there is no evidence that there were only two lions...

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

MOSCOW, April 19 - RIA Novosti. The famous man-eating lions from Tsavo, who killed over 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 a person, paleontologists say in an article published in the journal scientific reports.

“It seems that hunting a man 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 animals and people they caught. It seems that people simply served as a pleasant 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,” says Larisa DeSantis from Vanderbilt University in Nashville (USA).

Dark Heart of Africa

The story begins in 1898, when the colonial authorities of Britain decided to connect their colonies in East Africa with a giant railway that stretched along the shores of the Indian Ocean. In March, its builders, Indian workers brought to Africa and their white "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 of this, the workers began to desert en masse from the camp, which forced the British to organize a hunt for the "killers from Tsavo". Man-eating lions turned out to be unexpectedly cunning and elusive prey for John Patterson, an imperial army colonel and expedition leader, and only in early December 1898 did he manage to ambush and shoot one of the two lions, and 20 days later kill the second predator.

During this time, the lions managed to end the lives of 137 workers and British soldiers, which led many naturalists of that 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 lions attacked workers because of hunger - in favor of this was the fact that the local population of herbivores was greatly reduced due to a plague epidemic and a series of fires. DeSantis and her colleague Bruce Patterson, the namesake of a colonel at the Chicago Field Museum of History, which houses the remains of lions, have been trying for 10 years to prove that this 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 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 kind of "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 there should be traces of gnawed bones on their teeth, which the predators were forced to eat with a lack of food.

With this in mind, paleontologists have compared the scratch patterns on the enamel of the Tsavo lions to 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 natives in 1991. .

“Despite the fact that eyewitnesses often reported “crunching bones” heard on the outskirts of the camp, we did not find evidence 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 , which is found on the teeth of lions in zoos who 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 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.

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 later years, they only accounted for 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.

The famous man-eating lions from Tsavo, who killed over 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 a person, paleontologists say in an article published in the journal scientific reports.

“It seems that hunting a man 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 animals and people they caught. It seems that people simply served as a pleasant 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,” says Larisa DeSantis from Vanderbilt University in Nashville (USA).

The story begins in 1898, when the colonial authorities of Britain decided to connect their colonies in East Africa with a giant railway that stretched along the shores of the Indian Ocean. In March, its builders, the Indian laborers brought to Africa and their white Sahibs, encountered 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 of this, the workers began to desert en masse from the camp, which forced the British to organize a hunt for the "killers from Tsavo". Man-eating lions turned out to be unexpectedly cunning and elusive prey for John Patterson, an imperial army colonel and expedition leader, and only in early December 1898 did he manage to ambush 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, the lions managed to end the lives of 137 workers and British soldiers, which led many naturalists of that 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 population of herbivores was greatly reduced due to the plague and a series of fires. DeSantis and her colleague Bruce Patterson, the namesake of a colonel at the Chicago Field Museum of History, which houses the remains of lions, have been trying for 10 years to prove that this 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 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 kind of "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 there should be traces of gnawed bones on their teeth, which the predators were forced to eat with a lack of food.

With this in mind, paleontologists have compared the scratch patterns on the enamel of the Tsavo lions to 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 natives in 1991. .

“Despite the fact that eyewitnesses often reported “crunching bones” heard on the outskirts of the camp, we did not find evidence 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 , which is found on the teeth of lions in zoos who 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 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 partially support 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.

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

More than 100 years after those events, scientists have debunked the myth of formidable killers by analyzing their remains stored in the Museum of 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 railroad workers in Kenya in 1898. They were able to be killed by a lieutenant colonel in the British Army. He stated that in the nine months of his struggle with predators, they ate 135 people. However, the Ugandan Railway Company denied this information: its representatives believed that only 28 people were killed. 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.

A. Lieutenant Colonel Paterson with a man-eating lion he killed on December 9, 1898; B. Jaws of this lion - his right lower 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 has shown 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 fur. Bone tissues provide information about the "averaged" diet throughout the life of the animal, and wool - "fingerprints" of the last few months of life.

Skulls used for nitrogen and carbon analysis//PNAS

Analyzing the data obtained, the 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 comparing these numbers with elemental analysis data from modern lion and human tissues, 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 the different composition of the tissues of the 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.

Joint hunting for a man suggests that man-eating lions were not the best representatives of the breed.

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.