We know for ancient texts that Roman gladiators fought against lions, but until now there has been a lack of physical evidence.
Dea Picture Library/The Agostini through Getty Images
The bite marks in the pelvis of a man who lived in Britain of the Roman Cup were probable for a lion in gladiatic combat.
The findings provide the first physical evidence that people fought against animals in Gladiator Arenas in Europe, says Tim Thompson at the University of Maynooth in Ireland.
Gladiators shows involving wild cats, bears, elephants and other animals are frequently described in Roman art and texts. But despite these stories and the hundreds of excavated Roman amphaters scattered throughout the ancient empire, none of the approximately 200 skeletons of suspended gladiators discovered so far have signs of an animal attack.
Duration An urban development project in 2004 and 2005, the scientists excavated the remains of approximately one hundred people from the era of the novel on the outskirts of York, the United Kingdom, originally founded by novels such as Eboracum. Most of the people buried there from the 1st century to ID d. C. They were young men, plagued by traumatic injuries already decapitated.
One of the skeletons carried unusual depressions and puncture marks in both hips, which the researchers thought it could be evidence of a carnivorous attack.
To find out, Thompson and his colleagues made 3D scanning in the old pelvis and compared their findings with scanning of fresh bite patterns in the bones of the body bodies, mostly horses, which had been fed with lions, Gueparhs.
The researchers found that the 10 bite marks in the gadiator’s bones Sated coincided closely with those that the horses of the horses by the lions of the zoo. The similarities included the position of the brands of the teeth, as well as the depth of their marks in the bone after drilling through the soft tissue.
Part of the pelvis or a man of the Roman era, with a bite brand made by a great cat
Plos one
“We are talking about some quite large teeth that go through all these layers of the body,” says Thompson.
So it was unlikely that the bite was fatal: “It would be stingy,” he says. But when killing, the lions generally attack their throat.
“What probably happened here is that the individual was demolished by another medium, and then the lion dragged him.”
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