Tsavo lions ate 35 people, not 135
Jeremy Hancemongabay.com
November 02, 2009
 The stuffed Tsavo lions at the Chicago Field Museum. Photo by: Jeffrey Jung. |
"This has been a historical puzzle for years, and the discrepancy is now finally being addressed," said Nathaniel J. Dominy, an associate professor of anthropology at University of California—Santa Curz. "We can imagine that the railroad company might have had reasons to want to minimize the number of victims, and Patterson might have had reasons to inflate the number. So who do you trust? We're removing all those factors and getting down to data."
To discover just how many people the Tsavo lions killed and ate researchers analyzed samples of hair and bone from each of the lions. Researchers then compared their findings to isotopic signatures of the lions' prey: African ungulates and humans. They found that it was likely that one of the lions ate 11 people, while the other ate 24.
 One of the Tsavo lions after being killed. |
"The idea that the two lions were going in as a team yet exhibiting these dietary preferences has never been seen before or since," said Dominy.
Lions are cooperative hunters when it comes to big game, such as African buffalo, but typically man-eating lions work alone, as humans are small enough for one cat to kill.
The researchers believe that a unique situation brought about the behavior: drought and disease had led to a decline in the lions' normal prey, and it is known that one of the lions suffered from a jaw injury and dental problems making it difficult to hunt in a conventional manner.
 One of the Tsavo lions after being killed. |
While results show just how many people each lion ate, the number of people killed by the pair remains a mystery.
"The railroad company attributed the deaths of 28 Indian nationals to the lions, and Patterson may have reasonably assumed scores of Africans were also killed," said Dominy. "But based on our statistical analysis, there's an outside chance they ate as many as 75 people. Our evidence attests only to the number of people eaten, not the number of people killed."
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