Famous lion diet revealed: DNA shows that people also belonged to their prey
Famous lion diet revealed: DNA shows that people also belonged to their prey
in the broken teeth of Famous lion that were killed in the nineteenth century found hair that offers an insight into their diet-including people 1 .
only a few 2 .
The Tsavo lions were exhibited in the Field Museum in Chicago, and until 2001 thousands of hair from a cave were extracted in one of their teeth. At this point, the researcher and his colleagues were only able to examine the hair under one microscope.
progress in old DNA research
"Research on the old DNA has made great progress," says co-author Ripan S. Malhi, anthropological geneticist at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champay. "You no longer necessarily need a follicle cell on a hair", to to extract and read DNA . "It is possible to do it directly from the hair shaft itself." With the help of these techniques, Malhi and his colleagues have identified hair from giraffes, oryx, waterbose, gnus, zebras and people in the test. Your report was published in Current Biology today.
The Gnus were the biggest surprise. There was no GNUS near the railway warehouse, says co -author Alida de Flamingh, evolutionary biologist at the University of Illinois. The next herds were 90 kilometers away. "Either these lions roam larger areas, or historically there was gnus in the Tsavo region," explains de Flamingh.
Although the researchers could carry out further analyzes to get more information about the human DNA, you have only given minimal details in your published article. The next step will be to "work with the local community and the local institutions," says Malhi. "There may be descendants or a subsequent community that may want such an analysis to be carried out, or not - we just don't know yet."
Graham Kerley, ecologist and lion specialist at the Nelson Mandela University in Gqeberha, South Africa, says that the list of species whose DNA lies in the teeth of the predator is not particularly surprising. For him, the most important knowledge is the importance of preserving biological samples so that they can be re -analyzed at a later date while the tools improve. "When he shot these lions, Patterson had no idea of the incredible information more than a hundred years later," says Kerley.
This is exactly the message that the researchers wanted to convey, explains de Flamingh. "We hope that others will try to apply the methodology developed here to examine the prey or the history of other animals - possibly even further back to extinct species."
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de Flamingh, A. et al. Curr. Biol. Https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2024.09.029 (2024).
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Peterhans, J. C. K. & GNOSKE, T. P. J. East af. Nat. Hist. 90, 1–40 (2001).