Among the gruesome evidence, theteam found cut marks on a skull and the skeleton of a 14-year-old girl, showing that her flesh and brain were removed – presumably to be eaten by the starving colonists during the harsh winter of 1609.

The remains were excavated by archeologists led by William Kelso of Preservation Virginia, a private nonprofit group, and analysed by Douglas Owsley, a physical anthropologist at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington.

The skull bears tentative cuts to theforehead, followed by four strikes to the back of the head, one of which split the skull open, according to an article in the Smithsonian magazine, where the find was reported.

The early American settlers called the era "the starving time," and accounts of the winter of 1609-1610 were so ghastly that scholars were not certain if the stories were true.

George Percy, then president of the English settlement of Jamestown inVirginia, wrote that settlers ate horses, then cats and dogs, then boots and bits of leather, and, finally, one another.

"One of our colony murdered his wife, ripped the child out of her womb and threw it into the river, and after chopped the mother in pieces and salted her for his food," wrote Percy, who then ordered theman executed.

"Now whether she was better roasted, boyled or carbonado’d [barbecued], I know not, but of such a dish as powdered wife I never heard of," added the famed settler John Smith.

"This was that time, which still to this day we called the starving time; it were too vile to say, and scarce to be beleeved, what we endured."

Now, scientists claim the young girl's body is the first forensic proofthat cannibalism definitely happened at Jamestown.

“The desperation and overwhelming circumstances facedby the James Fort colonists during the winter of 1609–1610 are reflected in the postmortem treatment of this girl’s body,” Smithsonian anthropologist Owsleysaid in the announcement.

“The recovered bone fragments have unusually patterned cuts and chops that reflect tentativeness, trial and complete lack of experience in butchering animal remains.

"Nevertheless, the clear intent was to dismember the body, removing the brain and flesh from the face for consumption.”
The English girl’s remains were discovered last summer in a refuse dump containing horse and dog bones, from the state of her molars,she is judged to have been 14 yearsold.
Isotopes in her bones indicate she had eaten a high-protein diet, so was probably the daughter of a gentleman, not a maidservant.
James Horn, a historian with the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, said that the young woman probably arrived on one of the six surviving ships from a supply fleet that sailed from Plymouth, England,in early June 1609.
“Only in the most desperate of circumstances would the English have turned to cannibalism,’’ Horn said.
The devastated colony was saved in May 1610 by the arrival of the settlers who had been marooned inBermuda. They found the 60 survivors as thin as skeletons.