We know from old texts that new Gladiators Ferght Lions, but physical evidence has been missing so far
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Bid marks on the pelvis of a man who lived in the Roman occupied Britain was probably made by a lion in gladiator fight.
The results give the first physical evidence that people fought for animals in Gladiator Arenas in Europe, says Tim Thompson at Maynooth University in Ireland.
Gladiator Propoles Invioling Wild Cats, Bears, Elephants and other Animals are often described in Roman art and texts. But despite these stories and the hundreds of excavated Roman amphitheate scattered over the old empire, none of the approximately 200 suspected gladiator skeletons that have so far been revealed are clear signs of an animal attack.
During an urban development project in 2004 and 2005, scientists excavated the remains of about a hunting people from the Roman era just outside York, UK – a city originally founded by the novels as Eboracum. Most of the people buried there from the 1st to the 4th century AD, were young men, filled with traumatic injuries and often decapitated.
One of the skeletons wore unusual depression and puncture marks across both hips that scientists thought could be proof of a carnivorous attack.
To find out, Thompson and Hans Colleugue’s 3D scans ran on the old pelvis and compared their findings with scans of fresh bite patterns on the bones of animal bodies – mostly horses – that had been led to lions, leopards, cheetahs and tigers in zoos.
The researchers found that the 10 bite marks on the bones of the suspected gladiator carefully matched those made on horse bones of the Zoo Lions. The similarities included the location of the teeth marks as well as the depth of their marks in the bone after piercing through soft tissue.
Part of the pelvis of a novel man, with a bite mark made of a large cat
Plos one
“We are talking about some very large teeth that go through all these layers of the body,” says Thompson.
Still, the bite was unmixed to be deadly: “It would swing,” he says. But when you go after the killing, lions usually attack their throats.
“What probably happened here is that the individual was knocked down in other ways, and then the lion pulled him away.”
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