Did Roman Gladiators really fight animals? This has the bite tracks to prove it

The animal seems to be outstanding in an old struggle between humans and animals.

Researchers have identified bite tracks, most likely by a lion, on the pool of a man who is buried in a cemetery for old Roman gladiators in England.

This does not seem to be surprising for anyone who studied old Roman texts or has even seen a modern gladiator film, which both represent a society that made men against animals for blood sports.

However, the authors of a new study say that these bite tracks in the old Roman period are actually the first known physical evidence of the human-animal fight.

“In our cultural understanding we certainly have the sense of gladiator fights and that the gladiators fight each other and constantly fought against large animals” How it happens Host Nil Kӧksal.

“In fact, the evidence of this is sparse. This is the first time that we have actually found physical evidence of a body.”

The results were Published in the Journal Plos One.

Who was he and how did he die?

The remains were excavated near the English city of York about 20 years ago or as it was known during the Roman Empire Eboracum.

They belong to a man in the late twenties or early thirties, who lived in the 3rd century AD when Eboracum in the north of the Roman province of Britain was an important city and a military basis.

The researchers suspect that he was a gladiator because he was found on a grave, all of which were killed in the course of several generations, all of which were beheaded shortly before or after their death and contained most of the signs of repeated physical trauma from the fight.

The dentures were found on both hips, says Thompson and struck that, regardless of him, “really somehow packed on this pelvis”.

The “unusual” placement of the bite brand, he says, indicates that it was not the murder.

“I will paint a slightly dark picture of what could have happened to this poor individual,” said Thompson.

The man, he says, was probably already bite during the bloody battle that tore through his meat but did not leave any markings on his bones.

“Then what the lion did was bitten to his hip and pulled this body away … to collect and eat the remains,” he said.

The body was also beheaded, said Thompson, who was cut through the neck by back. This could have been an execution or the grace coup after an injury and defeat in the arena.

“But that’s certainly the last blow that appeared to the body,” said Thompson.

The ancient Romans had “pretty bloody things”.

In order to identify the dentures, Thompson and his colleagues made a 3D model out of it and compared it with bite tracks that were left in a zoo by various large animals.

“Sure, we can say that it is a big cat, a big animal. We think it’s most likely a lion,” he said.

Seth Bernard, professor of old history at the University of Toronto, who was not involved in the study, said that it was really exciting to see physical evidence of a phenomenon that had known literature from literature for a long time.

The role of animals in gladiator battles is well documented.

Gladiator fights were a popular form of entertainment in ancient Rome, and the fighters were most frequently slaves, prisoners and occasionally volunteers.

There are murals and mosaics that represent gladiators in the fight with various predators. Old poets, says Bernard, described, “games in which people think through beast hunts or mythological scenes or pretty bloody things.”

“These are people who, as they know, are killed by large animals on a Tuesday afternoon, if they want to be entertained, prisoners in the amphitheater or slaves who were killed in amphitheater,” said Bernard.

There is also physical evidence of the creatures. In 2022, archaeologists found The bones of bears and big cats in the Colosseum in Rome.

The animals that often hungry to make them more aggressive were also competed against each other and often tied up, said the study co-author John Pearce, a Roman archaeologist at King’s College London.

It wasn’t always a fight. Animals were also used in executions, said Pearce, bound by their victims or otherwise defenseless.

“This is a memory of the spectacle culture that is of central importance in Roman public life,” he said.

The fact that these remains were excavated near York paints an idea of ​​how far and wide the Roman Empire – and thus “the darker sides of Roman culture” – had spread, says Bernard.

“I mean there are not many lions in England,” he said. “The transport of these animals must be quite remarkable and noticeable. There is a lot of logistics that I think about.”

Thompson says that discovery makes him ask what else archaeologists could find among the remains of distant Roman settlements.

“If you have taken a lion from North Africa to York, where else did you take these big animals?” he said. “Maybe we also have to look at some of these other major settlements to prove evidence of Gladiator cemeteries.”