Did Roman gladiators really fight with animals? This one has signs of bite to prove it

In one ancient battle between man and the beast it seems that the beast prevailed the highest.

Scientists identified bitter signs, most likely from the lion, in the pelvis of a man buried on what is considered a cemetery for ancient Roman gladiators in England.

This may not seem surprising to anyone who studied ancient Roman texts and even watched the modern Gladiator film, both of which present society that fought with animals for blood.

But the authors of the new study say that these bite signs are actually the first known physical proof of the struggle of man-the world in ancient Roman times.

“We certainly have, as part of our type of cultural understanding of the feeling of gladiators and that the gladiators are fighting each other and they fought with large animals all the time,” said the main author of Tim Thompson, a criminal anthropologist at the Maynooth University in Ireland This is happening Host Zero Kӧksal.

“In fact, the evidence is small. For the first time we found physical evidence on the body.”

The discoveries were Published in the magazine PLos One.

Who was he and how did he die?

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

They belong to a man in the twenties or 1930s, who lived during the third century, when Eboracum was an important city and a military base in the north of the Roman province of Britannia.

Scientists suspect that he was a gladiator, because he was found on the grave with many other men, all killed in a few generations, all decapitation just before their death or after their death, and the most -wearing signs of repeated physical trauma from the fight.

Thompson says that the traces of teeth were found on both his hips, suggesting that whatever he bit him, “something really caught this pelvis.”

He says that the “extraordinary” placing the bite sign suggests that it was not a blow to kill.

“I paint a somewhat gloomy picture of what could have happened to this poor person,” said Thompson.

The man, he says, was probably overpowered during the bloody battle through bites that broke through his body, but left no traces on his bones.

“Then, what the lion did, bit him on the hip and pulled this body … To remove and eat the remains,” he said.

The body was also decorated, said Thompson, cut by the neck from behind. It could have been an execution or a coup d'état after injury and defeat in the arena.

“But it is definitely the last blow that took place in the body,” said Thompson.

The ancient Romans were in “nice bloody things”

To identify the tooth signs, Thompson and his colleagues, they created their 3D model and compared it with the bite signs left by various large animals in the zoo.

“We can definitely say that it is a large cat, a large animal. We think it will most likely be a lion,” he said.

Seth Bernard, a professor of ancient history at the University of Toronto, who was not involved in the study, said that it was really exciting to see the physical evidence of the phenomenon of historians from literature.

He says that the role of animals in the battles of gladiators is well documented.

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

There are wall paintings and mosaics depicting gladiators in the fight against various predators. Bernard says that ancient poets described “games in which people are death by hunting beast or playing mythological scenes or quite bloody things.”

“They are people who, you know, on Tuesday afternoon, when they want to have fun, they watch prisoners killed in the amphitheater or slaves killed in amphitheater by large beasts,” said Bernard.

There is also physical evidence of creatures. In 2022, archaeologists found Bear bones and large cats in Colosseum, Rome.

Animals, often starved, so that they are more aggressive, were also against each other and often combined together, said the co -author of the studies John Pearce, a Roman archaeologist from King's College London.

It wasn't always a fight. Animals were also used in executions, said Pearce, with their victims related or defenseless.

“It is a reminder of the central spectacle culture for Roman public life,” he said.

The fact that the remains were discovered near York painted the image of how far the and wide Roman Empire – and with it “darker sides of Roman culture,” says Bernard.

“I mean that there are not many lions in England,” he said. “The transport of these animals must be quite unusual and striking. I think there are many logistics.”

Thompson says that the discovery makes him wonder what else archaeologists can find among the remains from distant Roman settlements.

“If they took a lion from North Africa to York, they took these large animals elsewhere?” He said. “Maybe we have to look at some of these other large settlements, as well as at evidence of gladiator cemeteries.”