Ghost and darkness lions are cannibals. The mystery behind the Tsavo lion attacks on people has been revealed.

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 Africa repeatedly hunted people for prey under conditions that most often arose artificially and were created by the people 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.

The widespread death of the Tsavo people from smallpox and famine in the 19th century (it is estimated that more than 80,000 people died), the corpses of which 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.

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 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.

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. Unusual feature The peculiarity 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 platforms on the treetops and stayed overnight on them, ambushing the lions.

After several unsuccessful attempts shoot the lions, Patterson eventually managed to kill one of the lions, 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.

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...
In the very late XIX century, the 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.

Ugandan railway construction 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, from to varying degrees With intensity and varying success, the lions raided the camp of the railroad builders.

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 on the railway it was possible to meet not only a lion, but also no less 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...

Scientists seem to have solved the mystery of why history's most famous "man-eating lions" developed a taste for human flesh, even though 119 years have passed since they hunted humans. Researchers may have discovered the reason why lions hunt bipedal predators.

Cannibals of Tsavo

Despite their considerable capabilities, lions very rarely kill people unless provoked. However, several representatives of this species received the nickname “man-eaters” because they began to attack people. Their victims were mainly women.
When two lions began hunting workers who were building a railway in Tsavo, Kenya, they attracted the attention of even British Parliament, not to mention their popularity among 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 from the pair suffered from an infection that developed at the root of the fang. Except bad mood caused by constant pain, this damage could make it difficult for the animal to hunt, scientists suspect.
Lions typically use their fangs to capture prey, such as zebras or wildebeest, and strangle them. However, this lion would have a hard time dealing with a large prey that was fighting for its life. It's much easier to catch people.

The second killer lion had a broken tooth. While this probably did not stop him from hunting, he may have started chasing people "for company" with his partner. Isotope analysis of the fur of these lions shows that, while humans made up about 30 percent of the first lion's diet in its last years, in the diet of the second they occupied only 13 percent.

Reasons for hunting people

Dr. Bruce Peterson, curator of the Field Museum and author of the new study, published the findings in Scientific Reports, which provides evidence that the Zambian lion that killed six people in 1991 also had serious dental problems. This suggests that dental problems may be common cause lions hunting people.

Previously, it was thought that lions may have hunted people due to severe drought, which reduced the number of wild prey. However, Patterson and study co-author 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 typically occurs 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 deal a fatal blow to lions, but if a predator does manage to catch one, the rest of the herd will not kill it out of revenge. People, as a rule, begin to take revenge. When lions hunt people, it most often happens on a moonless night, even though unarmed people would be easy prey in daylight.