As a fight to the death reached its end around 1,800 years ago, a victorious lion sank its teeth into a young man’s thigh bone.
Those feline bite marks, preserved on a skeleton interred in northeast England, provide the first physical evidence of a Roman-era battle between a gladiator and a nonhuman animal anywhere in Europe, say forensic anthropologist Timothy Thompson of Maynooth University in Ireland and colleagues.
The man’s remains, which date to between the years 200 and 300, come from what may have been a gladiator cemetery in the Roman city of Eboracum, now called York, the researchers report April 23 in PLOS ONE.
Previous excavations found that most graves there contained men between the ages of 18 and 45, many of whom displayed injuries from violent fights. Diet-related bone chemistry tests indicated that these men had grown up in different parts of the Roman empire, perhaps before entering gladiator training. Most had been decapitated after death, a practice possibly associated with gladiator burials in Roman Britain.
Written records and artworks have documented fights between armed performers and dangerous predators such as lions, leopards and tigers in Roman amphitheaters. Roman records also cite public amphitheater spectacles in which such animals maimed and killed criminals, warfare captives, Christians and others.
Thompson’s team compared digital 3-D images of the bite marks on the Eboracum man with those made by modern animals — including cheetahs, lions, tigers and leopards —feeding on horse carcasses at two wildlife parks in England. The pattern and depth of pits and punctures on the man’s pelvis most closely matched a lion’s bite.
Whether bitten by a lion during a gladiator show or an execution, the man’s wounds indicate that Roman authorities transported animals from as far away as North Africa to Britain for public events, Thompson says. “Our conclusions open up lots of new questions.”
Researchers do not know where animals battled gladiators or slayed designated victims at Eboracum since remnants of a local amphitheater have yet to be found.