We know from ancient texts that Roman gladiators fought lions, but physical evidence has been lacking until now
DEA PICTURE LIBRARY/De Agostini via Getty Images
Bite marks on the pelvis of a man who lived in Roman-occupied Britain were probably made by a lion in gladiatorial combat.
The findings provide the first physical evidence that people battled animals in gladiator arenas in Europe, says Tim Thompson at Maynooth University in Ireland.
Gladiator spectacles involving wild cats, bears, elephants, and other animals are frequently described in Roman art and texts. But despite those accounts and the hundreds of excavated Roman amphitheatres scattered across the ancient empire, none of the approximately 200 suspected gladiator skeletons uncovered so far have shown clear signs of an animal attack.
During an urban development project in 2004 and 2005, scientists excavated the remains of about a hundred people from the Roman era just outside York, UK – a city originally founded by the Romans as Eboracum. Most of the people buried there from the 1st to the 4th centuries AD were young men, riddled with traumatic injuries and often decapitated.
One of the skeletons bore unusual depressions and puncture marks across both hips, which researchers thought might be evidence of a carnivore attack.
To find out, Thompson and his colleagues ran 3D scans on the ancient pelvis and compared their findings with scans of fresh bite patterns on the bones of animal carcasses – mostly horses – that had been fed to lions, leopards, cheetahs and tigers in zoos.
The researchers found that the 10 bite marks on the bones of the suspected gladiator closely matched those made on horse bones by zoo lions. Similarities included the position of the teeth marks, as well as the depth of their marks into the bone after piercing through soft tissue.
Part of the pelvis of a Roman-era man, with a bite mark made by a big cat
PLOS One
“We’re talking about some quite big teeth going through all these layers of the body,” says Thompson.
Even so, the bite was unlikely to be fatal: “It would sting,” he says. But when going for the kill, lions usually attack the throat.
“What probably happened here is that the individual got knocked down by some other means, and then the lion dragged him away.”
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