I've finally returned from the most recent meeting of the American Society of Mammalogists in New Hampshire. Most of what I was interested in were the nuances of mice and gophers and so forth. Too boring for most to even contemplate.
The other thing that I'm sure would have drawn Artemisians like flies to a lion kill was a paper on the condition of maneating lions from Tsavo, particularly the noted two killers of the turn of the century (1898-99) and a third from Mfuwe in 1991.
Bruce Patterson of the Chicago Natural History Museam (keepers of the Tsavo maneaters) inspected these skulls and gave a paper just for fun. Bruce is really a phylogeographer/systematist and a good one at that. The title of his talk was "The smoking gum: morphological corollaries of man-eating in some African lions (Panthera leo)".
As it turns out, all three were well nourished (not starving lions by any means)
The first lion that was shot as a man-killer in Tsavo was a male of course. From his abstract, the "lower right canine tooth was broken and decayed, with significant pulp exposure. The condition was chronic, as indicated by loss of the adjacent incisors and filling of their alveoli by spongy bone, as well as remodeling of the mandible on the ventral aspect of the canine's root. It would have greatly weakened the force of the "killing grip" lions use to asphyxiate their prey."
The second man-eater from Tsavo "had a fractured left carnassial, missing a portion of the crown of P4. The pulp cavity of this tooth was exposed in two places and the damaged facet was extensively worn. This injury would have been painful, but less incapacitating than that of the first man-eater.
"The Mfuwe lion had an open fistulous lesion in the ventral surface of the right mandibular ramus that would have periodically drained, either externally or into the buccal cavity. Corresponding damage to the opposite (left) glenoid fossa is consistent with trauma inflicted by a massive shock, such as the kick of a large ungulate. This injury would not have precluded normal predatory behavior by the Mfuwe lion. Although all three man-eaters had dental abnormalities, man-eating in each case probably had multiple causes. "
Unfortunately, I could not see the presentation, but I know Bruce pretty well, and got to talk to him later. He told me that basically summed up, that first animal was one hurtin' lion.
This lion, may have, in turn, taught the other to hunt people. By Bruce's calculations, these two animals ate something like 25 kilos of humans per day for as long as they were killing folks (about a year or two I think). For what it is worth, most of the people were killed while sitting, crouched down, or down along the river washing clothes on their knees.
More interestingly, Bruce told me that some grad student had surveyed a large number of lion skulls in scientific collections for tooth damage. Apparently, the canines are the most frequently damaged teeth followed by the carnassials. About 20% (if I recall correctly) had severely broken these teeth. Thus, he suggests that simply getting busted up, was not adequate to explain man-eating as it should be much more common if this were the case. He also speculates that areas where civil or other wars are common and corpses not promptly buried are areas where man-eating becomes common. The connection seems obvious to me.
Bruce has traveled a lot in Africa and all over the globe - always good for a story or twenty.