The Secret History: Remains of Young Jamestown Settlement Girl Had Been Cannibalized

Reconstructed face of unidentified girl from Jamestown settlement.

Here's something you probably never read in any of your history books in school: Forensic scientists examining the remains of a teenaged girl discovered buried in the Jamestown settlement in Virginia have determined that her remains had been cannibalized!

The scientists from the Smithsonian Institute uncovered gruesome clues that the 14-year-old girl had been hacked at in much the same way a butcher would hack at the remains of a cow or pig. Many of the bones on her body had the unmistakable markings of being cut upon by a knife or axe.

Anthropologists and historians believe that the girl could have died during the famine of the winter of 1609 known as "The Starving Time" , an infamously harsh winter season that left only 60 of the 500 original colonists alive. Rumors of cannibalism during the Starving Time have existed over the centuries, but now the forensic scientists have offered conclusive proof that the colonists probably turned to eating human flesh in order to survive out of desperation.

The scientists believe that the girl died of natural causes, perhaps of starvation and/or disease, and that the cut marks upon her body were rendered postmortem.  The bones, the reconstruction of her head and the story were presented Wednesday at an event at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. The remains will now be displayed at the Archaearium, the museum at the Jamestown fort archaeological site in Virginia, starting this weekend. A sign at the room’s entrance warns tourists that human remains will be on view. There will be no depictions of bodies being butchered, cooked or consumed.

Happy Birthday, America: New Copy of Rare American "Birth Certificate" Discovered

A copy of an extremely rare 500-year-old map that depicts a strange new continent called "America" as a small, boomerang-shaped island has been discovered between the pages of a book in Germany.

The map, drawn by the famous German cartographer Martin Waldseemueller, is credited as the first document to attach the name "America" to the New World. It was thought that Waldseemueller had only made four copies of the American "birth certificate" until the recent discovery of the fifth copy amid the pages of an unrelated 19th century manuscript on geometry at the Munich University Library.

Waldseemuller named the new continent America after the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci, whom he believed had discovered the continent before Christopher Columbus in 1492. A larger copy of the map can be viewed at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, which was a gift from German Chancellor Angela Merkel to the United States in 2007 to mark the 500th anniversary of the naming of America.

German researchers are set to make the map, which is printed in clear black ink on yellowing paper, available to view online beginning July 4, American Independence Day.