DNA extracted from between the teeth of 2 Kenyan lion specimens from the 1890s shows that the animals ate humans, as well as giraffes and wildebeests.

Kenya’s “man-eater” lions of the 19th century confirmed using DNA

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2024-10-11 23:30:04

DNA extracted from between the teeth of 2 Kenyan lion specimens from the 1890s shows that the animals ate humans, as well as giraffes and wildebeests.

The pair of male lions were dubbed the “Tsavo Man-Eaters” and are thought to have eaten dozens of people, including workers on the Kenya-Uganda railway in the late 19th century. Some estimates suggest they killed more than a hundred people.

Both lions were killed in 1898 by Lieutenant-Colonel John Henry Patterson. He wrote a book about the hunt called The Man-eaters of Tsavo.

In 1924, the lions’ skins were sold to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, US where they are displayed alongside their skulls.

To put the legends to the test, a team of US and Kenyan scientists analysed hairs collected from between the teeth of the pair of big cats. The findings are published in the journal Current Biology.

“As biotechnologies advance, there are unexpected sources of knowledge, in this case genomics, that can be used to inform about the past,” says senior author Ripan Malhi of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in the US. “Our results inform on the ecology and diet of lions in the past as well as on the impacts of colonisation on life and land in this region of Africa.”