December 18, 2013 • 24 mins
Why did lions in the Tsavo region start to attack humans in the first place? Modern behavioral and scientific research has given us some surprising insights into the causes of the 1898 attacks as well as modern lion attacks in the same area.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from house
stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly from and I'm Tracy D. Wilson. And so
in our last episode, we discussed the incidents that happened
in eighteen ninety in Tsavo, Africa during construction of the
(00:23):
Uganda Railroad. Two lions, who came to be known as
the Ghost in the Darkness because many of the men
and camp believe them to be supernatural, killed in eight
dozens of workers, eventually shutting down work on the bridge
until the pair were killed by Lieutenant Colonel John Patterson,
who was a civil engineer that was hired to work
on the construction projects. So we need to have a
note about names before we go on today. That's that
(00:46):
we're going to be talking a good bit about the
work of a researcher named Bruce Patterson, and he has
no relation to the John Patterson who killed the lions.
So when we refer to Patterson by last name only
in the second part, we are talking about Bruce Patterson,
the researcher. So the first question that comes up in
research when people discuss these lions uh is why did
(01:07):
they develop a taste for human flesh. And there are
a number of possible contributing factors. So one of them
is that there may have been a scarcity of other
food sources in the late eighteen nineties render pest, which
we talked about in a Listener Males segment related to
our episode about smallpox. Turns out smallpox is not the
(01:27):
only illness that mankind has ever eradicated the only human illness.
The render pest really was doing some ravaging of livestock. Yes,
render pest was a very serious live stock disease that
was eradicated in two thousand and eleven, and it might
have been responsible for completely devastating the buffalo population, which
significantly reduced to the prey options of the Savo lions.
(01:52):
And uh smallpox and famine were also ravaging the region
and affecting humans. There was also a slave and ivory
caravans that were traveling the area, and as people would
die of smallpox, famine, or just slaves that would die
of exhaustion on these caravans would drop, the bodies were
(02:12):
usually just left, so this may have easily given these
lions a taste for human flesh. Because corpses were readily available,
and most animals, even hunting animals, will go for the
easiest possible food source. They like to conserve their energy exactly,
which is also going to come up a little bit later.
There's also the same factor that's often part of animals
(02:34):
attacking humans, which is loss of territory. We talked about
that a little bit at the end of the last episode.
As people move into wild areas, the animals that live
and hunt there are displaced or they find that their
entire ecosystem has been unbalanced as a result, and that
often leads to sudden behavioral changes as species try to
adapt to these new conditions. And because there were problems
(02:58):
with lions attacking humans prior to the famous incidents that
were described in Tsavo as part of this bridge building
uh and attacks have continued since then, animal behaviorists have
theorized that man hunting may in fact be a learned
behavior that's been passed down through multiple generations of this
lion group. So there have been many many studies conducted
(03:20):
about the Tsavo lions through the years. In particular, the
team at the Field Museum where the Ghost and the
Darkness live on as taxi Army Displays has been highly
involved in multiple research projects about why these lions do
what they do. Their work has focused mostly on the
lions social grouping, why they don't have mains, the ecological
(03:42):
influences of the area, and even their dental health. And
we're actually gonna talk about dental health first because this
one is really fascinating. There. It's all really fascinating to me.
But this one I had not heard of before. But
there was a study released in two thousand and they
had examined the teeth of both of the lions from
the eight nine incidents, because we have their skulls at
(04:03):
the Field, as well as a third line that the
Field Museum acquired uh as part of its taxidermy display,
and that line killed six people in Mufui, Zambia in
and when they looked at all of these skulls of
these lions, they all had severe dental issues. One of
the Savo lions had severe root tip abscesses. The other
(04:27):
had so much damage and so many missing teeth that
it would have been hard for it to deliver any
kind of killing bite to a one of its typical
prey animals. In the case of the line from Zambia,
there was evidence of chronic jaw infection, and that led
to the examination of the possibility that all of these
lions might have turned to hunting humans because they're much
(04:48):
easier prey than most of the other animals that they
would normally hunt. Yeah, aside from the fact that we're
humans are not as fast. Our skin is saw bite
through paired to a high I was going to say,
we were much softer and more delicate than a will
to be were squichier, It's true. Uh. And this study
actually built on the work of a tiger hunter that
(05:10):
worked in India in the nineteen thirties named Jim Corbett,
and he had put forth this uh, what was called
the infirmity theory about beasts that hunt humans as prey.
So when he was working in the thirties, he was
often hired as a hunter to track and shoot tigers
that targeted villagers in India. And then many of the
cases that Corbett handled after he would uh, you know,
(05:34):
collect his prey, after collect a tiger after it had
been killed, almost all of them had some physical ailment,
and this led him to believe that you know, it
was the old or the injured animals that were going
after humans again because we're easier to catch than uh
normal wild animals. Yeah. It ties into what we were
saying earlier about how even a predator will scavenge things
(05:54):
because it's easier path of least resistance. Yeah, and so
when the animal has less energy to start with, that
makes the easier prey and even more delicious target. So,
since only the skulls of the lions were preserved, all
the rest of the components that make up the taxid
army display at the Field Museum are not original to
(06:16):
the side of the lions, and even the hides are replacements.
Because the originals were damaged by being rugs, researchers don't
really know if the lions had other health issues besides
their bad teeth. Uh. However, there have been studies that
have been conducted on modern quote problem lions in the
Tsavo area. Uh. When these lions are killed by rangers
(06:39):
outside the Tsavo East National Park, Uh, they're collected and
then examined, and these examinations have not supported this theory.
Bruce Patterson, who is uh the macars Are Curator of
Mammals at the Field Museum and his team examined twenty
three of these lions that were known to attack humans,
and less than twenty of them them we're found to
(07:00):
have dental issues, so the majority of them were actually healthy,
young males. Another point of interest is that in conducting
forensic studies of the animals jaws, researchers were able to
retrieve the hair of some of their prey which had
been stuck in their teeth for more than a years,
and none of that hair was human. So it shows
that the lions did also eat other animals. I would
(07:24):
also kind of explain what was going on during the
long lapses in when they weren't attacking, were frequently they
were eating something else. So how we think about that?
Do you want to stop for a second and here
a word from our sponsors, or all right, let's do
it and now back to lions. The next thing that
has been studied a whole lot is a really unique
(07:44):
characteristic of uh the lions in this area, which is
that the males do not grow mains. Prior to modern research,
there had been sighting of these mameless males before, but
it had always been unknown if they were just an
adolescent that had not grown in their main or if
they had a medical problem which would somehow lead to
them not being able to grow this wolf, or that
(08:05):
they had lost it. The Ghost and the Darkness are
estimated to have been between eight and ten years old
when they were killed, and normally a lion's mane would
grow in by the age of five, but neither of
them had a main correct. One had some kind of
tufting which has been seen on lines in this area
where they have had a little whiskey bits of fur,
(08:27):
but it's nothing compared to what you would normally see
like in a Serengetti lion. Uh So, Bruce Patterson and
his colleague Roland Kayes, who is the Senior Scientist of
Zoology at New York State Museum in Albany, set out
to study these lions and their hair growth, and they're
certainly not the only researchers to examine this aspect of
the cats. Scientists are actually still trying to figure out
(08:50):
why any lions grow mains in the first place. It's
kind of an odd thing in terms of hair patterning.
So to lure the lions in caves, played the sound
of a wounded baby buffalo that he had recorded on
an earlier outing and lo and behold, the lions came
right out and they came close enough to the vehicle
for the researchers to be able to see the tiny
(09:11):
nicks and scratches that helped distinguish one animal for another. Yeah,
they were suddenly very interested in the wounded baby buffalo noise.
UH and the team immediately upon getting this spectacularly close
up view. UH noticed a significant difference between the Tavo
lions and their Serengetti counterparts, and it was not about
their hair, even though that's what they had initially gone
(09:33):
primarily to study. UH. Whereas a pride in the Serengetti
would normally have six or seven females and anywhere from
two to four males, Tsavo prides often had seven or
eight females and only a single male. Patterson and Kay's
also observed another unusual behavior that they had never seen
another lion groups, and those are troops of three or
(09:54):
four males living and hunting together outside of a normal
mixed sex tribe. And worth noting is the fact that
the ghost in the Darkness actually fell outside either of
these group behaviors that Patterson and Kay's have witnessed. Uh,
they were two mature males that were hunting together, So
they were older than these young males that they were
finding in groups of four, and they did not seem
(10:16):
to have females with them at all. Patterson and Kay's
theorized that these unusual behaviors and the manlessness trade are
all linked directly to the animals hormones, So their theory
is centered around the idea that the male only groups
are probably immature males who haven't had hormonal peaking. Once
they reach full maturity, they'll probably lose their ability to
(10:39):
tolerate each other, and they'll form their own prides by
attracting females. This theory also includes the idea that the
higher than normal testosterone levels may account for not having manes,
similar to how male pattern baldness is also linked to
high testosterone. Yeah, but they haven't been able to um
(11:00):
conclusively determined if that's the case. Uh, you know, it's
tricky to capture such a beast and test it, ah, man,
would you want to? Well? And because because people's hormones
are not like static things exactly, it's not a constant. Yeah,
you you would have to capture them and test their
hormones repeatedly, and then the act of capturing and testing
(11:24):
would also be a stressor that would influence that it
would be kind of uh. There was one thing that
I read that said that, like, really to get a
full comparison of like a Tsavo lion versus your standard
Sherengetti lion, you would have to somehow capture two as cubs,
take them away from you know, their pride or their
(11:44):
their parents, raise them side by side in identical circumstances,
and then do testing. But it is both difficult and
has a lot of question marks about whether that's a
good thing to do. Also, just as a side note,
I find that the mainless males to look really freaky,
Like like, as a kid, you learned that that male
lions have manes and lionesses do not, that you don't
(12:07):
really think of their bodies being dissimilar other than that,
like that's sort of the key marker that we learned
as little kids. And their bodies actually are pretty different,
and them so huge and muscular, and it's like the
main and other lions is kind of hiding some of that.
They look like thugs, they they're they look just so
(12:28):
they're beady yet the mainless male lines. If you have
not seen their videos, we have them on the website,
and they strike me in a very They're frightening. They're
frightening to me. And at one point, all of this
discussion about the different behaviors from other lions and the
different physical traits leve researchers to suspect that they might
(12:50):
actually be a distinct species, different from other lions, and
that that would explain the mainlessness and these behavior variations.
Unlike the hormone question, genetics proved this to be wrong
pretty easily. Genetic sequencing revealed that Tavo lions are exactly
the same as any other East African lions, so genetically
they should be able to grow mains. There's no DNA
(13:13):
reason for them to be behaving differently. And it's possible,
of course, that the lack of the main is actually
a response to environmental conditions. The thorny terrain of Tsavo
would make a long main inconvenient, and Tsavo is also
lower and warmer climate than the Serengetti, so lions in
this hotter region may simply have adapted without means because
(13:34):
the heat makes that additional hair a huge handicap to
both their comfort and their health. It would make it
really difficult for lions in search of food or mates
to travel long distances because that extra heat generated by
the blanket of their main would cause them to need
more frequent water stops, which are not always available in Tsavo.
There's just not as many opportunities for kind of refreshment.
(13:58):
So it could be entirely just a and environmental adaptation.
Now let's talk about whether they actually ate all those people. Yeah,
this also is a science to the rescue situation. Yeah,
so the famous lions of John H. Patterson's account did
indeed kill and eat people. But the number originally reported
(14:18):
of a hundred and thirty five deaths, which I just
stuns me, that's been reevaluated in recent years. Yeah. Patterson
uh uses that number in his book. And scientists at
you see Santa Cruz examined samples from the Field Museum's
display and they compared isotopes in samples collected from the felines,
(14:41):
bone collagen, and Hairkeratin says, we know what you eat
shows up in your collagen and your hair and your hair. Uh.
They compared that with the ice hoopes that were found
in their normal prey zebra, buffalo, willed the beast, and
they also compared it to the remains of Kenyans from
the nineteen century to get a better idea of what
(15:02):
the animals had actually consumed. So they're basically comparing all
of these tiny eat batty microscopic you know, atomic level
proteins and keratins with all of the other possible things
they could have eaten. And Uh, just in case you're
wondering where those human samples of Kenyons from the nineteenth
century came from. Uh, they actually used material that had
(15:25):
been gathered by anthropologist Louis Leaky during an expedition in
so just a couple of decades after the killings that
were going on as part of the big Ghost in
the Darkness event. So theoretically those canyons would have had
similar diets and their isotopes would be the same as
the ones twenty years prior. Yeah, the same basic process
(15:46):
is what we talked about in our episode about the
cannibalism at Jamestown. When they were trying to figure out
who this person was and where she had come from,
they had looked at the isotopes that remained as a
result of her diet, and in this case, the findings
indicated that one of the lions probably eight twenty four people,
so that would be about half of its diet during
(16:07):
the last months of its life. The other one ate
only about eleven people and seems to favor middle sized
herbivores for the majority of its food. So yeah, quite
a bit short of one. That is still still a
lot of people were still in the dozens. Arena Railroad
Company records indicate that twenty Indian nationals were killed by
(16:28):
the lions, and there was an unknown number of Africans,
so they had shipped in Indian nationals and they had
much better records on them, which is why we know. Uh.
And these records, combined with the data that the UC
Santa Cruz team compiled from doing this isotopic comparison, have
led many to wonder if John Patterson didn't kind of
inflate the number to one thirty five in his book
(16:49):
as sort of a hunter's boast or even a way
just to drum up book sales. Although to me, I
think if you say these lions killed thirty five people,
that's pretty shocking. I don't know why you have to
add a hundred more to it? Well, and then the
editor and me goes Or did somebody just accidentally type
out a one in front of the rest and no
one caught it? I wondered about that too. So many
(17:10):
of the researchers who study the Savo lions have asserted
that this group is no more inherently likely to attack
people than any other lions, but the circumstances just led
to their selection of people as prey, and the humans
love of a good story has continued to put them
forth as this kind of legendarily bloodthirsty man eating pack
(17:33):
uh and the kind of close out on that mindset.
Zoologist Dennis King, who has studied the Savo lions for years,
once told journalist Philip Caputo, quote, people don't want to
give up on mythology. I am so sick of this
man eater business. Patterson has made a hell of a
lot of money off that sort of story. But Tsavo's
lions are no more likely to turn man eater than
(17:55):
lions from elsewhere. So his thing is like, we shouldn't
be demonizing this one group of lions. Yeah, we're kind
of creating the perfect set of circumstances for them to
have developed this taste for humans. Well, the story keeps
reminding me of Jaws. Jaws made sharks be terrifying in
people's minds in a way that they were not before.
(18:17):
This story of these specific lines, Yeah, makes them quite
more terrifying than lions on their own already are being
big apex predators. Yeah. Again, thirty five would have been
fine to be terrifying, especially when you get to the
part where they're just dragging people off in the night. Yeah.
I mean it's scary, and they were genuinely scary. I
(18:39):
don't want to play down the fact that, like, yes,
they really did kill and eat people, and they were
extremely um crafty in the way they went about their hunts,
and they were stalking humans as though they were any
other prey. Uh. But we have to look at the
bigger picture of the circumstantial scenario that they found themselves
in that led them to that behavior. Yeah. Well, and
I don't intend to victim blame by pointing out that
(19:02):
there were there were people in the lion turf, but
that is also a consequence of Yeah, it's a factor.
So that's the scoop on the Tsavo lions, which I
love to read about them. Um, anytime there's a new
behavioral study or research study, I'm always excited. Well, And
(19:22):
I think the last time we got an email from
somebody asking us to talk about them, I remember, like,
we have a hard time answering our email. We have
lots of email that is as yet unanswered. Yeah this
is one. Yeah, this is one where the email came
in and there was this immediate answer for it. It
was like, I totally want to talk about those. I
do because I love that story, and it is one
because I'm crazy animal lady and I really have a
(19:44):
thing for cats obviously, um, but just you know, I
sort of, if I had not gone into my career field,
one of the things I considered was animal behavior. So
it's a little pet zone of mine. Yeah, and they're
just so majestic and beautiful. And I remember the first
time I aw them at the field like kind of
gasped and just they're very quietly and yeah, I can't
(20:05):
help but have sort of a respect and fear at
the same time. It's literal awe. That word has been
kind of turned into something other when people say it's
awesome it means something different than one is an interestingly meant.
They are truly awesome, like they inspire all that. It
made me sad that when I was in Chicago, the
one time that I've been to Chicago, I did not
(20:26):
go to the Field. I went to the Museum of
Science and Industry, which is also also spectacular. But yeah,
I was kind of like, I wish I had managed
to make my trip one more day longer. They have
an entire huge taxidermy wing that's really mind blowing. They've
done such a beautiful job with it. So if you
are into that, highly recommended, The Field is a well,
it's one of my favorite museums. Do you have some
(20:48):
listener mail? Do you? And it's actually similar to the
listener mail we had in our last episode, because it
turns out everyone is related to a Heshan. Maybe not everybody,
but a lot of people are and it's really cool
because they've kept really interesting family record. Uh So this
one comes from our listener Amanda, and she wrote us
on Facebook she said, Hi there, I love listening to
(21:08):
the show, especially during my morning commute. I recently listened
to the Hessian's episode and it triggered a memory of
a genealogy book of my paternal grandmother's family. Johann Schwam
was a Hessian who fought and was captured in the
Battle of Trenton. He was then taken to Lancaster, Pennsylvania,
my hometown, as a prisoner of war, and was sold
basically as an indentured servant to work on a local farm.
(21:30):
Once his service was completed, he made his way to Uh,
the county in Pennsylvania that ended up being where my
grandmother was born. I've also heard the term Hessian used
to describe a group of click or click of rough
hooligan teenage boys. I had never heard it that way,
but I kind of love that. I'll appropriate historical terms
for immediately labeling suppose at times with care. Uh. Yet,
(21:52):
as long as we're not appropriating oppressed minority groups, Yeah, nothing,
that's that seems like a fun and lighthearted nobody gets hurt. Uh.
In the genealogy book, we found that one of Johann's
descendants was a witness to the execution of William Kehoe,
the leader of the Molly McGuire's Possible podcast topic. Uh.
That is a really cool story, Amanda. You don't hear
(22:15):
much about the ones that were sold off as servants.
That's one we did not get very many emails about.
We got a lot more. Yeah, we got a lot more.
You know, my ancestor was ash and he deserted. Or
my ancestor was a Heshan who stayed after the war.
Not so much. Mine was captured and sold a prisoner
of war who was sold into ind injured servitude. But
(22:36):
it seems like it worked out. Hey, service was completed,
he ended up settling in the Lovely area, and that's
how Amanda came to be. So it worked out just fine.
If you would also like to write as you can uh.
We are at History Podcast at Discovery dot com. If
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(22:57):
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If you would like to learn more about a topic
tangentially related to what we talked about today, you can
go to our website type in the word little lion
(23:18):
and you will get an article on how lion taming work. Incidentally, uh,
if you watch any of the movies, particularly the most
recent one that started up Dal Kilmer and Michael Douglas
about the Ghosts in the Darkness, you will notice that
those lions have mains. That's because it is hard to
capture and team a savo lion. The lions working in
Hollywood all have mains. So uh, that is how it's
(23:40):
connected to lion taming. But if you would like to
learn about almost anything else that you can think of,
you should do that at our website, which is how
Stuff Works dot com. For more on this and thousands
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Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from house
stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly from and I'm Tracy D. Wilson. And so
in our last episode, we discussed the incidents that happened
in eighteen ninety in Tsavo, Africa during construction of the
(00:23):
Uganda Railroad. Two lions, who came to be known as
the Ghost in the Darkness because many of the men
and camp believe them to be supernatural, killed in eight
dozens of workers, eventually shutting down work on the bridge
until the pair were killed by Lieutenant Colonel John Patterson,
who was a civil engineer that was hired to work
on the construction projects. So we need to have a
note about names before we go on today. That's that
(00:46):
we're going to be talking a good bit about the
work of a researcher named Bruce Patterson, and he has
no relation to the John Patterson who killed the lions.
So when we refer to Patterson by last name only
in the second part, we are talking about Bruce Patterson,
the researcher. So the first question that comes up in
research when people discuss these lions uh is why did
(01:07):
they develop a taste for human flesh. And there are
a number of possible contributing factors. So one of them
is that there may have been a scarcity of other
food sources in the late eighteen nineties render pest, which
we talked about in a Listener Males segment related to
our episode about smallpox. Turns out smallpox is not the
(01:27):
only illness that mankind has ever eradicated the only human illness.
The render pest really was doing some ravaging of livestock. Yes,
render pest was a very serious live stock disease that
was eradicated in two thousand and eleven, and it might
have been responsible for completely devastating the buffalo population, which
significantly reduced to the prey options of the Savo lions.
(01:52):
And uh smallpox and famine were also ravaging the region
and affecting humans. There was also a slave and ivory
caravans that were traveling the area, and as people would
die of smallpox, famine, or just slaves that would die
of exhaustion on these caravans would drop, the bodies were
(02:12):
usually just left, so this may have easily given these
lions a taste for human flesh. Because corpses were readily available,
and most animals, even hunting animals, will go for the
easiest possible food source. They like to conserve their energy exactly,
which is also going to come up a little bit later.
There's also the same factor that's often part of animals
(02:34):
attacking humans, which is loss of territory. We talked about
that a little bit at the end of the last episode.
As people move into wild areas, the animals that live
and hunt there are displaced or they find that their
entire ecosystem has been unbalanced as a result, and that
often leads to sudden behavioral changes as species try to
adapt to these new conditions. And because there were problems
(02:58):
with lions attacking humans prior to the famous incidents that
were described in Tsavo as part of this bridge building
uh and attacks have continued since then, animal behaviorists have
theorized that man hunting may in fact be a learned
behavior that's been passed down through multiple generations of this
lion group. So there have been many many studies conducted
(03:20):
about the Tsavo lions through the years. In particular, the
team at the Field Museum where the Ghost and the
Darkness live on as taxi Army Displays has been highly
involved in multiple research projects about why these lions do
what they do. Their work has focused mostly on the
lions social grouping, why they don't have mains, the ecological
(03:42):
influences of the area, and even their dental health. And
we're actually gonna talk about dental health first because this
one is really fascinating. There. It's all really fascinating to me.
But this one I had not heard of before. But
there was a study released in two thousand and they
had examined the teeth of both of the lions from
the eight nine incidents, because we have their skulls at
(04:03):
the Field, as well as a third line that the
Field Museum acquired uh as part of its taxidermy display,
and that line killed six people in Mufui, Zambia in
and when they looked at all of these skulls of
these lions, they all had severe dental issues. One of
the Savo lions had severe root tip abscesses. The other
(04:27):
had so much damage and so many missing teeth that
it would have been hard for it to deliver any
kind of killing bite to a one of its typical
prey animals. In the case of the line from Zambia,
there was evidence of chronic jaw infection, and that led
to the examination of the possibility that all of these
lions might have turned to hunting humans because they're much
(04:48):
easier prey than most of the other animals that they
would normally hunt. Yeah, aside from the fact that we're
humans are not as fast. Our skin is saw bite
through paired to a high I was going to say,
we were much softer and more delicate than a will
to be were squichier, It's true. Uh. And this study
actually built on the work of a tiger hunter that
(05:10):
worked in India in the nineteen thirties named Jim Corbett,
and he had put forth this uh, what was called
the infirmity theory about beasts that hunt humans as prey.
So when he was working in the thirties, he was
often hired as a hunter to track and shoot tigers
that targeted villagers in India. And then many of the
cases that Corbett handled after he would uh, you know,
(05:34):
collect his prey, after collect a tiger after it had
been killed, almost all of them had some physical ailment,
and this led him to believe that you know, it
was the old or the injured animals that were going
after humans again because we're easier to catch than uh
normal wild animals. Yeah. It ties into what we were
saying earlier about how even a predator will scavenge things
(05:54):
because it's easier path of least resistance. Yeah, and so
when the animal has less energy to start with, that
makes the easier prey and even more delicious target. So,
since only the skulls of the lions were preserved, all
the rest of the components that make up the taxid
army display at the Field Museum are not original to
(06:16):
the side of the lions, and even the hides are replacements.
Because the originals were damaged by being rugs, researchers don't
really know if the lions had other health issues besides
their bad teeth. Uh. However, there have been studies that
have been conducted on modern quote problem lions in the
Tsavo area. Uh. When these lions are killed by rangers
(06:39):
outside the Tsavo East National Park, Uh, they're collected and
then examined, and these examinations have not supported this theory.
Bruce Patterson, who is uh the macars Are Curator of
Mammals at the Field Museum and his team examined twenty
three of these lions that were known to attack humans,
and less than twenty of them them we're found to
(07:00):
have dental issues, so the majority of them were actually healthy,
young males. Another point of interest is that in conducting
forensic studies of the animals jaws, researchers were able to
retrieve the hair of some of their prey which had
been stuck in their teeth for more than a years,
and none of that hair was human. So it shows
that the lions did also eat other animals. I would
(07:24):
also kind of explain what was going on during the
long lapses in when they weren't attacking, were frequently they
were eating something else. So how we think about that?
Do you want to stop for a second and here
a word from our sponsors, or all right, let's do
it and now back to lions. The next thing that
has been studied a whole lot is a really unique
(07:44):
characteristic of uh the lions in this area, which is
that the males do not grow mains. Prior to modern research,
there had been sighting of these mameless males before, but
it had always been unknown if they were just an
adolescent that had not grown in their main or if
they had a medical problem which would somehow lead to
them not being able to grow this wolf, or that
(08:05):
they had lost it. The Ghost and the Darkness are
estimated to have been between eight and ten years old
when they were killed, and normally a lion's mane would
grow in by the age of five, but neither of
them had a main correct. One had some kind of
tufting which has been seen on lines in this area
where they have had a little whiskey bits of fur,
(08:27):
but it's nothing compared to what you would normally see
like in a Serengetti lion. Uh So, Bruce Patterson and
his colleague Roland Kayes, who is the Senior Scientist of
Zoology at New York State Museum in Albany, set out
to study these lions and their hair growth, and they're
certainly not the only researchers to examine this aspect of
the cats. Scientists are actually still trying to figure out
(08:50):
why any lions grow mains in the first place. It's
kind of an odd thing in terms of hair patterning.
So to lure the lions in caves, played the sound
of a wounded baby buffalo that he had recorded on
an earlier outing and lo and behold, the lions came
right out and they came close enough to the vehicle
for the researchers to be able to see the tiny
(09:11):
nicks and scratches that helped distinguish one animal for another. Yeah,
they were suddenly very interested in the wounded baby buffalo noise.
UH and the team immediately upon getting this spectacularly close
up view. UH noticed a significant difference between the Tavo
lions and their Serengetti counterparts, and it was not about
their hair, even though that's what they had initially gone
(09:33):
primarily to study. UH. Whereas a pride in the Serengetti
would normally have six or seven females and anywhere from
two to four males, Tsavo prides often had seven or
eight females and only a single male. Patterson and Kay's
also observed another unusual behavior that they had never seen
another lion groups, and those are troops of three or
(09:54):
four males living and hunting together outside of a normal
mixed sex tribe. And worth noting is the fact that
the ghost in the Darkness actually fell outside either of
these group behaviors that Patterson and Kay's have witnessed. Uh,
they were two mature males that were hunting together, So
they were older than these young males that they were
finding in groups of four, and they did not seem
(10:16):
to have females with them at all. Patterson and Kay's
theorized that these unusual behaviors and the manlessness trade are
all linked directly to the animals hormones, So their theory
is centered around the idea that the male only groups
are probably immature males who haven't had hormonal peaking. Once
they reach full maturity, they'll probably lose their ability to
(10:39):
tolerate each other, and they'll form their own prides by
attracting females. This theory also includes the idea that the
higher than normal testosterone levels may account for not having manes,
similar to how male pattern baldness is also linked to
high testosterone. Yeah, but they haven't been able to um
(11:00):
conclusively determined if that's the case. Uh, you know, it's
tricky to capture such a beast and test it, ah, man,
would you want to? Well? And because because people's hormones
are not like static things exactly, it's not a constant. Yeah,
you you would have to capture them and test their
hormones repeatedly, and then the act of capturing and testing
(11:24):
would also be a stressor that would influence that it
would be kind of uh. There was one thing that
I read that said that, like, really to get a
full comparison of like a Tsavo lion versus your standard
Sherengetti lion, you would have to somehow capture two as cubs,
take them away from you know, their pride or their
(11:44):
their parents, raise them side by side in identical circumstances,
and then do testing. But it is both difficult and
has a lot of question marks about whether that's a
good thing to do. Also, just as a side note,
I find that the mainless males to look really freaky,
Like like, as a kid, you learned that that male
lions have manes and lionesses do not, that you don't
(12:07):
really think of their bodies being dissimilar other than that,
like that's sort of the key marker that we learned
as little kids. And their bodies actually are pretty different,
and them so huge and muscular, and it's like the
main and other lions is kind of hiding some of that.
They look like thugs, they they're they look just so
(12:28):
they're beady yet the mainless male lines. If you have
not seen their videos, we have them on the website,
and they strike me in a very They're frightening. They're
frightening to me. And at one point, all of this
discussion about the different behaviors from other lions and the
different physical traits leve researchers to suspect that they might
(12:50):
actually be a distinct species, different from other lions, and
that that would explain the mainlessness and these behavior variations.
Unlike the hormone question, genetics proved this to be wrong
pretty easily. Genetic sequencing revealed that Tavo lions are exactly
the same as any other East African lions, so genetically
they should be able to grow mains. There's no DNA
(13:13):
reason for them to be behaving differently. And it's possible,
of course, that the lack of the main is actually
a response to environmental conditions. The thorny terrain of Tsavo
would make a long main inconvenient, and Tsavo is also
lower and warmer climate than the Serengetti, so lions in
this hotter region may simply have adapted without means because
(13:34):
the heat makes that additional hair a huge handicap to
both their comfort and their health. It would make it
really difficult for lions in search of food or mates
to travel long distances because that extra heat generated by
the blanket of their main would cause them to need
more frequent water stops, which are not always available in Tsavo.
There's just not as many opportunities for kind of refreshment.
(13:58):
So it could be entirely just a and environmental adaptation.
Now let's talk about whether they actually ate all those people. Yeah,
this also is a science to the rescue situation. Yeah,
so the famous lions of John H. Patterson's account did
indeed kill and eat people. But the number originally reported
(14:18):
of a hundred and thirty five deaths, which I just
stuns me, that's been reevaluated in recent years. Yeah. Patterson
uh uses that number in his book. And scientists at
you see Santa Cruz examined samples from the Field Museum's
display and they compared isotopes in samples collected from the felines,
(14:41):
bone collagen, and Hairkeratin says, we know what you eat
shows up in your collagen and your hair and your hair. Uh.
They compared that with the ice hoopes that were found
in their normal prey zebra, buffalo, willed the beast, and
they also compared it to the remains of Kenyans from
the nineteen century to get a better idea of what
(15:02):
the animals had actually consumed. So they're basically comparing all
of these tiny eat batty microscopic you know, atomic level
proteins and keratins with all of the other possible things
they could have eaten. And Uh, just in case you're
wondering where those human samples of Kenyons from the nineteenth
century came from. Uh, they actually used material that had
(15:25):
been gathered by anthropologist Louis Leaky during an expedition in
so just a couple of decades after the killings that
were going on as part of the big Ghost in
the Darkness event. So theoretically those canyons would have had
similar diets and their isotopes would be the same as
the ones twenty years prior. Yeah, the same basic process
(15:46):
is what we talked about in our episode about the
cannibalism at Jamestown. When they were trying to figure out
who this person was and where she had come from,
they had looked at the isotopes that remained as a
result of her diet, and in this case, the findings
indicated that one of the lions probably eight twenty four people,
so that would be about half of its diet during
(16:07):
the last months of its life. The other one ate
only about eleven people and seems to favor middle sized
herbivores for the majority of its food. So yeah, quite
a bit short of one. That is still still a
lot of people were still in the dozens. Arena Railroad
Company records indicate that twenty Indian nationals were killed by
(16:28):
the lions, and there was an unknown number of Africans,
so they had shipped in Indian nationals and they had
much better records on them, which is why we know. Uh.
And these records, combined with the data that the UC
Santa Cruz team compiled from doing this isotopic comparison, have
led many to wonder if John Patterson didn't kind of
inflate the number to one thirty five in his book
(16:49):
as sort of a hunter's boast or even a way
just to drum up book sales. Although to me, I
think if you say these lions killed thirty five people,
that's pretty shocking. I don't know why you have to
add a hundred more to it? Well, and then the
editor and me goes Or did somebody just accidentally type
out a one in front of the rest and no
one caught it? I wondered about that too. So many
(17:10):
of the researchers who study the Savo lions have asserted
that this group is no more inherently likely to attack
people than any other lions, but the circumstances just led
to their selection of people as prey, and the humans
love of a good story has continued to put them
forth as this kind of legendarily bloodthirsty man eating pack
(17:33):
uh and the kind of close out on that mindset.
Zoologist Dennis King, who has studied the Savo lions for years,
once told journalist Philip Caputo, quote, people don't want to
give up on mythology. I am so sick of this
man eater business. Patterson has made a hell of a
lot of money off that sort of story. But Tsavo's
lions are no more likely to turn man eater than
(17:55):
lions from elsewhere. So his thing is like, we shouldn't
be demonizing this one group of lions. Yeah, we're kind
of creating the perfect set of circumstances for them to
have developed this taste for humans. Well, the story keeps
reminding me of Jaws. Jaws made sharks be terrifying in
people's minds in a way that they were not before.
(18:17):
This story of these specific lines, Yeah, makes them quite
more terrifying than lions on their own already are being
big apex predators. Yeah. Again, thirty five would have been
fine to be terrifying, especially when you get to the
part where they're just dragging people off in the night. Yeah.
I mean it's scary, and they were genuinely scary. I
(18:39):
don't want to play down the fact that, like, yes,
they really did kill and eat people, and they were
extremely um crafty in the way they went about their hunts,
and they were stalking humans as though they were any
other prey. Uh. But we have to look at the
bigger picture of the circumstantial scenario that they found themselves
in that led them to that behavior. Yeah. Well, and
I don't intend to victim blame by pointing out that
(19:02):
there were there were people in the lion turf, but
that is also a consequence of Yeah, it's a factor.
So that's the scoop on the Tsavo lions, which I
love to read about them. Um, anytime there's a new
behavioral study or research study, I'm always excited. Well, And
(19:22):
I think the last time we got an email from
somebody asking us to talk about them, I remember, like,
we have a hard time answering our email. We have
lots of email that is as yet unanswered. Yeah this
is one. Yeah, this is one where the email came
in and there was this immediate answer for it. It
was like, I totally want to talk about those. I
do because I love that story, and it is one
because I'm crazy animal lady and I really have a
(19:44):
thing for cats obviously, um, but just you know, I
sort of, if I had not gone into my career field,
one of the things I considered was animal behavior. So
it's a little pet zone of mine. Yeah, and they're
just so majestic and beautiful. And I remember the first
time I aw them at the field like kind of
gasped and just they're very quietly and yeah, I can't
(20:05):
help but have sort of a respect and fear at
the same time. It's literal awe. That word has been
kind of turned into something other when people say it's
awesome it means something different than one is an interestingly meant.
They are truly awesome, like they inspire all that. It
made me sad that when I was in Chicago, the
one time that I've been to Chicago, I did not
(20:26):
go to the Field. I went to the Museum of
Science and Industry, which is also also spectacular. But yeah,
I was kind of like, I wish I had managed
to make my trip one more day longer. They have
an entire huge taxidermy wing that's really mind blowing. They've
done such a beautiful job with it. So if you
are into that, highly recommended, The Field is a well,
it's one of my favorite museums. Do you have some
(20:48):
listener mail? Do you? And it's actually similar to the
listener mail we had in our last episode, because it
turns out everyone is related to a Heshan. Maybe not everybody,
but a lot of people are and it's really cool
because they've kept really interesting family record. Uh So this
one comes from our listener Amanda, and she wrote us
on Facebook she said, Hi there, I love listening to
(21:08):
the show, especially during my morning commute. I recently listened
to the Hessian's episode and it triggered a memory of
a genealogy book of my paternal grandmother's family. Johann Schwam
was a Hessian who fought and was captured in the
Battle of Trenton. He was then taken to Lancaster, Pennsylvania,
my hometown, as a prisoner of war, and was sold
basically as an indentured servant to work on a local farm.
(21:30):
Once his service was completed, he made his way to Uh,
the county in Pennsylvania that ended up being where my
grandmother was born. I've also heard the term Hessian used
to describe a group of click or click of rough
hooligan teenage boys. I had never heard it that way,
but I kind of love that. I'll appropriate historical terms
for immediately labeling suppose at times with care. Uh. Yet,
(21:52):
as long as we're not appropriating oppressed minority groups, Yeah, nothing,
that's that seems like a fun and lighthearted nobody gets hurt. Uh.
In the genealogy book, we found that one of Johann's
descendants was a witness to the execution of William Kehoe,
the leader of the Molly McGuire's Possible podcast topic. Uh.
That is a really cool story, Amanda. You don't hear
(22:15):
much about the ones that were sold off as servants.
That's one we did not get very many emails about.
We got a lot more. Yeah, we got a lot more.
You know, my ancestor was ash and he deserted. Or
my ancestor was a Heshan who stayed after the war.
Not so much. Mine was captured and sold a prisoner
of war who was sold into ind injured servitude. But
(22:36):
it seems like it worked out. Hey, service was completed,
he ended up settling in the Lovely area, and that's
how Amanda came to be. So it worked out just fine.
If you would also like to write as you can uh.
We are at History Podcast at Discovery dot com. If
you want to easy email. If you would like to
connect with us on Facebook, you can do so at
(22:57):
Facebook dot com, slash history class. Stuff at missed in
History will get you to us on Twitter. Missed in
History dot Tumbler dot com is our Tumbler address, and
we are also on Pinterest. You can just do a
search for stuff you missed in History class will brand us.
If you would like to learn more about a topic
tangentially related to what we talked about today, you can
go to our website type in the word little lion
(23:18):
and you will get an article on how lion taming work. Incidentally, uh,
if you watch any of the movies, particularly the most
recent one that started up Dal Kilmer and Michael Douglas
about the Ghosts in the Darkness, you will notice that
those lions have mains. That's because it is hard to
capture and team a savo lion. The lions working in
Hollywood all have mains. So uh, that is how it's
(23:40):
connected to lion taming. But if you would like to
learn about almost anything else that you can think of,
you should do that at our website, which is how
Stuff Works dot com. For more on this and thousands
of other topics, is it how stuff Works dot com.
(24:06):
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