Cannibalism At Jamestown Confirmed For First Time, Details About 14-year-old "Jane"

The speculation about cannibalism at Jamestown has finally been confirmed. Settlers starving during the harsh winter of 1609 resorted to cannibalism at Virginia's Jamestown Colony, the Smithsonian Institution reported on Wednesday. The starving Jamestown settlers dismembered and consumed a 14-year-old English girl.

Jamestown is the oldest permanent English colony in the United States. Scholars have long speculated that factors including a lost supply ship, drought, and increasingly hostile relations with the local Powhatan Native Americans may have made the colonists desperate enough to resort to cannibalism during the cold "Starving Time" of 1609- but this is the first direct evidence of cannibalism.

A recent excavation revealed the remains of a girl  researchers have dubbed "Jane."

Smithsonian forensic anthropologist Douglas Owsley, who analyzed Jane's bones, said she was around 14 years old because her back molars had not yet erupted, and that her bones were high in nitrogen, indicative of a meat-heavy diet such as those found in well-off English households. She was possibly a maidservant or gentleman's daughter.

"There was very clear post-mortem dismemberment that involved chops to the forehead, chops to the back of the head that cracked the skull open," the scientist said.

"A puncture to the left side of the head was used to essentially lever and open the ... head to remove the brain. There are cuts all over the face and on the mandible, inside as well as out."

In 1609, most male colonists who left Jamestown had been killed by Native Americans.Those who remained inside Jamestown's walls were frequently women, children and the ill. Those who dismembered Jane may have been women, Owsley told reporters.  He called the cuts "tentative" and "hesitant", adding "this is not someone who's skilled in terms of kitchen work or butchery, and yet they know, out of sheer need, that this is what they have to do."

It is not known whether Jane was killed or died of natural causes, but there's no evidence of murder. She may have died naturally, then been selected for cannibalism because others in her family or household were dead, and digging into the frozen ground to bury her was not a duty other settlers wanted to take on.

Jane's brain, tongue, cheeks and leg muscles appear to have been eaten. The brain wa probably eaten first, because soon after death, it decomposes.

The girl's remains were discovered last summer by archeologist William Kelso and his team. They said they found a "deposit of refuse that contained butchered horse and dog bones," which they knew only occured during famine, then eventually excavated "human teeth and then a partial human skull."