DELICIOUS: AMERICAN COLONISTS resorted to CANNIBALISM.

I had no idea that this was a theory even in play, but apparently people have suspected for a while that those crazy kids at Jamestown ate each other. Ooph! Now there are some seriously trying conditions. Sound ludicrous? Not to me it doesn’t! And now there is some new info-finding-stuff to support this theory.

Gizmodo:

Historians have long speculated that punishing conditions in Jamestown – the first permanent English settlement in the Americas – may have driven some of its residents to cannibalism. Now, archeologists say they’ve uncovered their first hard evidence of colonial anthrophagy: the hacked-at remains of a teenage girl, apparently butchered for her meat.

Smithsonian Mag‘s Joseph Stromberg has the harrowing details:

The harsh winter of 1609 in Virginia’s Jamestown Colony forced residents to do the unthinkable. A recent excavation at the historic site discovered the carcasses of dogs, cats and horses consumed during the season commonly called the “Starving Time.” But a few other newly discovered bones in particular, though, tell a far more gruesome story: the dismemberment and cannibalization of a 14-year-old English girl.

“The chops to the forehead are very tentative, very incomplete,” says Douglas Owsley, the Smithsonian forensic anthropologist who analyzed the bones after they were found by archaeologists from Preservation Virginia. “Then, the body was turned over, and there were four strikes to the back of the head [see image below], one of which was the strongest and split the skull in half. A penetrating wound was then made to the left temple, probably by a single-sided knife, which was used to pry open the head and remove the brain.”

Much is still unknown about the circumstances of this grisly meal: Who exactly the girl researchers are calling “Jane” was, whether she was murdered or died of natural causes, whether multiple people participated in the butchering or it was a solo act. But as Owsley revealed along with lead archaeologistWilliam Kelso today at a press conference at the National Museum of Natural History, we now have the first direct evidence of cannibalism at Jamestown, the oldest permanent English colony in the Americas. “Historians have gone back and forth on whether this sort of thing really happened there,” Owsley says. “Given these bones in a trash pit, all cut and chopped up, it’s clear that this body was dismembered for consumption.”