The film is historical how lions kill people. Ghost and Darkness is a bloodthirsty legend in Kenya. "Crown of Creation" vs. "King of Beasts"

In 1898, Britain began building a railway bridge over the Tsavo River in Kenya. Over the next nine months, the construction workers became the constant target of 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, the absence of a mane. At first, the lions attacked the workers at night, dragging people from the tents into the thicket and devouring them there. However, soon the predators lost their fear so much that they devoured the victims right next to the tents. The size, ferocity and cunning of the two killer lions were so great that many locals believed the predators were demons trying to drive out the British invaders, and hundreds of railway workers left the construction site. As a result, the construction of the bridge was curtailed - no one wanted to become the next victim of the "devil lions". Often lions did not eat their victims, but simply killed for pleasure. Because of this, the lions got talking names: Ghost and Darkness, hunters were repeatedly sent to search for and capture them, but the lions each time managed to evade persecution. Everyone noted that there was something diabolical and mystical in them.

John Henry Patterson, the chief engineer in charge of the railroad bridge, decided to kill the raptors: in December 1989, he shot one of two lions and killed the other two weeks later. By this time, the lions had killed about 140 people.
During their wanderings across the savannah, Patterson and Remington found a stinking cave where human remains were rotting. Some organs were simply bitten, and something was not touched at all. From this they deduced that lions hunted not only for food, but also for the thrill.

While they were looking for them, they never met the lions face to face, but often heard their rapid breathing or a dull roar. In the darkness, because of the grass, they sometimes noticed the glare of 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 points, according to Patterson and Remington, it seemed to them that they were being hunted for them.

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

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

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 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 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 Michael Douglas and 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 killed by Lieutenant Colonel british army John Patterson. He stated that in the nine months of his struggle with predators, they ate 135 people. However, the Uganda Railway Company denied this information: its representatives believed that only 28 people died. 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 showed 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, 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 numbers with elemental analysis of tissues from modern lions and humans, 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 Darkness also suffered from gum and dental disease, 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.

We well remember these lions from the film "Ghost and Darkness" (1996), that's what they were called, "Ghost" and "Darkness". 119 years ago, these two huge, faceless cannibals hunted railroad workers in the Tsavo region of Kenya. Within 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 much speculation and prejudice.

Also known as the Tsavo lions (cannibals of Tsavo), this pair of animals hunted at night until they were shot and killed in December 1898 by railroad engineer Colonel John Henry Patterson. In the decades that followed, the public was fascinated by tales of ferocious lions, first appearing in newspaper articles and books (one story was written by Patterson himself in 1907: "The Cannibals of Tsavo") and then in movies.

Previously, it was assumed that severe hunger pushed the lions to eat people. However, a recent analysis of the remains of two cannibals that have become part of the collection of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago provides a new interpretation of what caused the Tsavo lions to kill and eat people. The findings, described in the new study, offer a different explanation: the reason lies in the teeth and jaws, which made it painful for the animals to hunt their usual large prey, consisting of herbivores.

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

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

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

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

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

To unravel the age-old mystery, the study authors looked at evidence of lions' behavior from their preserved teeth. Microscopic wear patterns can tell scientists about the animals' eating habits, especially during the last weeks of life, and these lions' teeth showed no signs of wear associated with chewing on large, heavy bones, the scientists wrote in the study.

Hypotheses proposed in the past have been that lions developed a taste for human flesh, perhaps because their usual prey died from drought or disease. But if lions were preying on humans out of desperation, hungry cats would likely be cracking open human bones to get their last meal of those gruesome meals, 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 their infirmity to herd prevented them from catching larger, stronger animals, the author of the study writes.

The reasons for the attacks lie in their mouths
Previous results, first presented to the American Society of Mammologists in 2000, according to the 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 tissues at the root of another tooth. The second lion also had a damaged mouth, a broken upper tooth and exposed pulp.

As for the first lion, the pressure on the abscess would result in unbearable pain, which provided more than enough motivation for the animal to give up 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 were it not for their preserved remains, which John Patterson sold to the Museum as trophy skins in 1924, today's explanations of their habits would be nothing more than speculation, said Bruce Patterson.

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

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

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 (Larisa DeSantis) from Vanderbilt University in Nashville (USA).

This story begins in 1898, when the British colonial authorities conceived to connect their colonies in East Africa with a giant railway that stretched along the coast 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, colonel of the imperial army and leader of the expedition, 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 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 idea in mind, paleontologists have compared the scratch patterns on the enamel of the Tsavo lions with the teeth of normal zoo lions fed soft food, carrion and bone-eating hyenas, and a man-eating lion from Mfuwe in Zambia that killed at least six local residents 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.

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 national park Tsavo, there are still such lions, 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 the cannibalistic creatures 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", got frightened when the lion tried to get it 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 they met on railway it was possible 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 in Tsavo now 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...