For Immediate Release February 7, 2001 Contact: Greg Borzo (312) 665-7100 (For Media Use Only) gborzo@fieldmuseum.org SCIENTIST CHALLENGES LEGEND ABOUT MAN-EATING LIONS An excavation of the infamous Tsavo man-eating lions’ den – and the discovery of ancestral human reburial shrines in the region – has raised a number of questions about the cave den and legends surrounding the lions. Between 1898 and 1899, two ferocious lions ate more than 130 workers, stalling Britain’s construction of a railroad bridge over the Tsavo River in eastern Kenya. It took Lt. Col. John H. Patterson nine months to hunt down and kill both lions. He later claimed to discover the man-eaters’ den in a nearby cave. His story – along with a horrific scene of a cave strewn with human bones and skulls – was portrayed in the film "The Ghost and the Darkness" (Paramount Pictures). Patterson proposed that the lions used this cave as a hideout and den from which they unleashed their reign of terror. But a three-week archaeological excavation of the cave and surrounding areas conducted by scientists from The Field Museum and the National Museums of Kenya uncovered neither human bones nor remnant bone fragments. "Our excavation was designed to recover the most evidence possible and it included areas around the cave where any remains would have been flushed from the cave by floods," says Chapurukha Kusimba, PhD, associate curator of African Anthropology at The Field Museum in Chicago, who led the excavation. "Nevertheless, we didn’t find anything." "Whatever bones that might have been in the cave would have been washed out, but Dr. Kusimba and his team moved small mountains to find evidence of human remains – all to no avail," says Bruce Patterson, PhD, the MacArthur curator of mammals at The Field Museum who participated in the work. (Dr. Patterson is not related to Lt. Col. Patterson.) Although Lt. Col. Patterson took a picture of the cave’s entrance (which Field Museum scientists used to rediscover the cave in 1997), he did not photograph the cave’s interior. "It is curious that Patterson’s graphic description of the cave [in his book] is not accompanied by photographs that would have proven the existence of the bones and revealed which species and body parts were represented," Dr. Patterson agrees. Here’s how Lt. Col. Patterson described the cave den in his 1907 book, The Man-Eaters of Tsavo "I saw on the other side a fearsome-looking cave which seemed to run back for a considerable distance under the rocky bank. Round the entrance and inside the cavern I was thunderstruck to find a number of human bones, with here and there a copper bangle such as the natives wear. Beyond all doubt, the man-eaters’ den! In this manner, and quite by accident, I stumbled upon the lair of these once-dreaded "demons." But Dr. Kusimba’s excavation found nothing fearsome about the cave, which turned out to be quite small. He does say, however, that scavengers or humans could have carried away any bones in the cave. (The excavation was supported by a grant from the Eli Lilly Foundation.) Continue