Teotihuacan ’s Pyramid of the Sun as check from the Pyramid of the Moon . Image credit rating : Aude , Wikimedia Commons//CC BY - SA 3.0
When you see a Leo the Lion , a Panthera tigris or a bear in a zoo , it ’s wanton to leave that the great unwashed have n’t always so easily controlled big carnivores and other grave animal . For a farsighted time , people were simplyprey , but almost every civilization around the world has taken the upper hand over predator at some point , exploiting them for nutrient , amusement , and ritual uses . In ancient Egypt , crocodileswere sacrificed and mummify . On the other side of the Mediterranean , the Romans used variouscarnivoresin gladiatorial battles andhorrific " halftime " show .
In the New World , that point has ordinarily been fixed sometime in the sixteenth century , when the Aztec ruler Montezuma established a zoo in the metropolis of Tenochtitlan . Multiple building and hundreds of workers were dedicate to import , breeding , and caring for animals like Wolf , jaguars , foxes , rattlesnake , and hoot of prey that served as offerings to the gods at the city ’s Great Temple .
Now , arecent studypublished inPLOS Onesuggests that long before the raise of the Aztec Empire , Mesoamericans were becharm and breeding some of the region ’s most intimidating predators and using them as both sacrifices and displays of index . archeologic findings from the city of Teotihuacan fight the earliest example of people keeping captive carnivore in the New World back by 1000 year .
settle 30 mile northeast of New day Mexico City , Teotihuacan was one of Mesoamerica ’s largest pre - colonial city , home to perhaps 125,000–200,000 people . It was an of import political and spiritual center , and the site of three orotund synagogue : the Temple of Quezalcoatl , the Pyramid of the Sun , and the Pyramid of the Moon .
During excavations of the latter two , researchers found caches of ritual offerings throughout the buildings . Among them were carved obsidian , shell and endocarp trade , human sacrifices , and the remains of nearly 200 carnivorous animals , including golden eagles , painter , Felis onca , wolves , and rattlesnake .
Sugiyama et al . inPLOS One
To take more about the relationship between these beasts and the people who apparently keep , cared for , and ultimately pop them , a squad of anthropologists lead byNawa Sugiyamaof the National Museum of Natural History depend for clues about the lives of the animals in their bones . They examined 66 complete skeletons and more than 100 escaped bones and found grounds that many of the animals lived in captivity . Several of the eagle skeletons , for example , all show up the same sign of stress on the inner role of the legs , likely from being tether to perches . Many double birdie , puma , and wolf skeletons displayed geological fault and bone diseases that hint contagion and injury from being restrain in confine spaces and roughly deal . Some of the skeletal system also had bones from other animals inside their rib batting cage . These turned out to belong to rabbits and hares , and many were burnt , intimate they ’d been cooked and feast to the carnivore .
coney were n’t the only affair the animals were use up . A chemical analysis of the clappers reveal high levels of carbonisotopesthat excogitate a dieting arduous in plant like lemon yellow , which these animate being usually would n’t consume in the wild . More than half of one eagle ’s dieting appears to have been made up of maize and other plant life .
The squad also found nitrogen levels in some of the bones that disclose a macabre detail of the creature ’ lives and the rituals that accept place at Teotihuacan . A few of the pumas ' skeletons had “ exceptionally high ” point of a sure N isotope that points to the cats eating not only plants and plant - eating herbivores , but omnivore higher up on the nutrient chain .
communication channel drawing of puma avid hearts from the Tetitla apartment compound , Portico 13 , Mural 3 . picture credit : Sugiyama inPLOS One
These pumas , the investigator think , may have been fertilise meat from blackguard or even human . These sum might not have just been supplementary protein , but part of a ritual . In Teotihuacan , the researchers mark there are numerous depictions of carnivore eating human gist and even accept part in human forfeiture , dressed in military clothing and holding knives . There ’s exchangeable artistry at other Mesoamerican sites , and some Spanish conquistador trace the carnivores house in Montezuma ’s menagerie being feed the cadaver of human beings used in sacrificial rites .
maintain grave marauder as both ritual killing and as means to give homo — and being the first to do so in Mesoamerica — would have been an incredible presentation of power and “ premiere expression of body politic political theory and militarism ” for the ruler of Teotihuacan , the researchers say . But their find make it light that pioneer a displacement in human - piranha dynamics was n’t well-off on the animals or the people .
“ Specimens like the eagle attest to the hardship in learn to keep in line extremely differentiate carnivore , ” the team writes . “ Caring for and keep in line the region ’s most dangerous apex of the sun’s way predators sometimes required the use of brute force as show by an by artificial means high oftenness of healed fractures , violent hurt , off-white misshapenness and disease . ”
