In 1898, a pair of lions repeatedly attacked tents in a Kenyan camp, killing at least 28 people. The infamous Tsavo man-eaters were eventually shot to death and their bodies put on display at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History, but now new genomic research reveals the horrifying story their teeth tell.
The Tsavo Lion, immortalized in the 1996 Michael Douglas and Val Kilmer film The Ghost and the Darkness, may have been dead for more than a century, but we… continues to learn from them, and more specifically from the hairs crushed in their mouths. Bones (interestingly, bad teeth may explain why some people are more inclined to eat people than others). This is a great example of how new technology can bring new insights into cold cases, and adds to the already rich use of museum specimens.
“As biotechnology advances, there are unexpected sources of knowledge that we can use to learn about the past, in this case genomics,” Ripan Marhi of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign said in a statement. “Our findings provide information about past lion ecology and diets and the impact of colonization on life and land in this region of Africa.”
Malhi and colleagues set out to innovate a method that would allow them to extract and analyze the DNA stored within these hair samples, and in doing so reconstruct the diets of these infamous lions. We have started. Their study detailed damage to the small teeth of the canines, and the exposed cavities contained prey hair that had accumulated over time.
Genome studies of the Tsavo lions have confirmed that they are likely siblings and, like these lions currently living in the Tsavo region, lack manes.
Image credit: Michael Jeffords and Susan Post
They then extracted DNA from individual hair shafts. It wasn’t perfect, but it was enough to paint some kind of picture of what is part of their diet. The researchers found human DNA as well as giraffe, oryx, waterbuck, wildebeest and zebra DNA, demonstrating that their cannibal status was well earned.
Their cannibalism was notorious, but the fact that wildebeest was on the menu was quite surprising. why? There would have been no wildebeest locally.
Alida de Flamin, also from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said, “This suggests that the Tsavo lion may have traveled further than previously thought, or that wildebeest may have been present in the Tsavo area at the time.” It suggests that.” “The closest grazing area to the wildebeest was more than 50 miles (80 kilometers) from the Tsavo-Ati confluence where the lion was killed in 1898.”
Researchers have not yet finished studying the Tsavo lion. The next step is to examine the compressed hair samples in more detail in the hope that we might be able to differentiate the lions’ dietary preferences based on their age. In addition to demonstrating the potential of genomic research, doing so could provide new insights into historical human-lion conflicts, which could also be applied to specimens older than the Tsavo lion. There is.
“This method could also be used on hairs from broken teeth of more ancient carnivores from hundreds to thousands of years ago,” Malhi added. “(It) opens up new avenues of exploration into the past.”
The study will be published in the journal Current Biology.
