It was the year 1898 when Lieutenant Colonel John Henry Patterson hunted two lions that, between March and December of that year, had attacked and killed a total of 35 workers involved in the construction of the Kenya-Uganda railway line in Tsavo. (Kenya).
Their attacks earned these felines the nickname “Tsavo’s man-eaters” , and their fame even reached Hollywood, where they inspired several films, including The Demons of the Night (1996), in which Val Kilmer played John. H. Patterson.
But what led these two predators, both males, to attack humans? Among the hypotheses handled it was said that they made men their prey because, due to a drought that affected the area and an epidemic that had reduced the local fauna , they did not have the usual prey.
However, according to Scientific Reports magazine, a study carried out by Bruce Patterson, of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago –where they keep the two dissected specimens–, and Larisa DeSantis, of Vanderbilt University (Nashville, USA). .), would point out that the key to why these two felines attacked the men would be found in their teeth . If they showed a lot of wear and tear from the act of gnawing on bones, it would be a sign that, given the shortage of prey, they had even eaten whole corpses instead of fresh meat.
A centennial case
“It is difficult to understand the motivations of animals that lived more than a hundred years ago, but the scientific specimens that we preserve allow us to do that,” explains Patterson, who is not related to the lieutenant colonel who killed the lions. The fact that the museum conserves these predators allows them to be studied with current technology , and that is what they have done.
To do this, they created molds of the cats’ teeth and then examined the microscopic wear of these in 3D. But, in one of these predators, the person responsible for the majority of human deaths – as established through chemical analysis of bones and skin in a previous study -, instead of looking at the surfaces of the worn teeth that would be expected on a bone-based diet, the researchers found just the opposite.
This lion suffered from an abscess on the tip of the root of one of his canines: a painful infection that would have made it impossible for him to hunt normally like the rest of his fellows. “Lions typically use their jaws to grab prey, such as zebras and wildebeest, to suffocate them,” Paterson notes. But with those dental problems, he needed easier prey to catch, like humans.
“It’s very rare for lions to attack people, but it is catastrophic when they do,” says Patterson. “When a large and dangerous predator suffers a disability, there is a real danger to this type of behavior: because no animal will starve if it has a choice, ” he says.
Imagen: The Field Museum
