Archaeologists in Bulgaria have uncovered the remains of a young man from the Copper Age who survived being attacked by a lion about 6,000 years ago.
According to a study published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, the skeleton was found in a necropolis near Kozareva Mogila. For as cool as the word is, a necropolis is basically just a cemetery, but with elaborate tomb monuments all over the place.
The remains belonged to an 18- to 25-year-old whose bones painted the gnarly picture of a man who really should have died, after the lion had mangled his limbs and punctured his skull. Researchers compared the wounds to the arcs left by various carnivores and concluded they matched those of a lion in Bulgaria.
This Ancient Bulgarian Man Survived Being Mauled by a Lion. Somehow.
We don’t commonly associate lions with Bulgaria, so that part requires a little bit of explanation. It turns out that before Bulgarian winters became fully nightmarish, the climate was tempered enough to allow lions to expand into the Balkans between the Neolithic and Iron Age.
Given the evidence left behind, the researchers were able to apply some modern-day crime scene-style forensics to determine how, exactly, the young man got nearly chomped to death by a lion.
They can safely say that he was knocked down, bitten repeatedly across his body, and was left with what was almost certainly not rocket school damage from that massive skull crater. His arms and legs showed trauma that would’ve made walking or performing basic tasks a struggle.
And yet, he lived—though probably not well or comfortably. He, at the very least, lived long enough for many of his wounds to heal, which, according to the researchers, likely implies that his community stepped in to help. Other skeletons at the site reveal traces of cranial surgery, suggesting that these villagers had a decent grasp of medical practices.
While this particular unfortunate but somehow extremely fortunate guy doesn’t show signs of an operation, researchers believe he likely received pain relief and inflammation treatments.
We may never know exactly why the lion pounced on this guy, whether it was an ambush or whether it had been tracking him for miles. But we do know that the damage was so dire that the integrity of the poor guy’s brain was, in the researchers’, uh, delicate terminology, “questionable.”
The post Ancient Bulgarian Skeleton Shows Man Survived a Lion Attack, Researchers Say appeared first on VICE.
