Experts have provided the grisly goods to back up 17th-century accounts of cannibalism during the Jamestown colony's "starving time" — including a skull that shows signs of being chopped at and pried apart.

"Our team has discovered partial human remains before, but the location of the discovery, visible damage to the skull and marks on the bones immediately made us realize this finding was unusual," Bill Kelso, chief archaeologist of the Jamestown Rediscovery Project in Virginia, said in a news release issued Wednesday. Specimens from the Jamestown site were laid out during a Washington news conference.

Written accounts described acts of cannibalism during the winter of 1609-1610, when sickness, starvation and attacks from native tribes in the area put the two-year-old Virginia settlement to its sternest test. Scores of the colonists who crowded inside James Fort died that winter. One of the accounts described a husband who killed his pregnant wife and salted her flesh for storage and consumption. (The husband was executed for the crime.)

There was no reason to doubt the accounts, but in the course of their decades-long excavation, archaeologists were on the lookout for remains that might tell more of the story behind Jamestown's hardships. They found the evidence in the form of a partial human skull and other bones lying in a 17th-century trash deposit. Kelso enlisted the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History to sort out the clues. Colonial Williamsburg and Preservation Virginia helped provide historical context.

'Jane of Jamestown'
Based on an analysis of the bones — including the skull and its teeth, as well as the size of a tibia and bone growth in a knee joint — experts determined that the remains came from a 14-year-old female, nicknamed "Jane." The isotopic distribution of elements in the bones suggested that she consumed a European diet of wheat and meat.

Carolyn Kaster / AP

Doug Owsley, division head for physical anthropology at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, displays the skull and a facial reconstruction for "Jane of Jamestown" during a news conference at the museum in Washington on Wednesday.

Carolyn Kaster / AP

Strike marks are seen on the skull of "Jane of Jamestown" at the National Museum of Natural History.

The grisliest findings were reflected in the wounds to the head: The chief of the museum's division of physical anthropology, Douglas Owsley, identified chops to the forehead and the back of the cranium to open the head. Knife cuts on the jaw and the cheekbone could have been made during removal of the flesh. Other markings suggest that the head's left side was punctured and pried apart.

The scientists' conclusion: Jane was butchered for her meat.

"She was almost certainly dead when she was cannibalized," Jim Horn, Colonial Williamsburg's vice president of research and historical interpretation, told NBC News. "The way the cuts are configured on the skull points to the fact that she was dead. if she was not, there would have been more signs of a struggle, and the marks would have been more irregular."

Based on the bone analysis and the disposition of the remains at the site, researchers believe Jane arrived in Jamestown in August 1609, just months before the crisis. She might have been a maidservant, or the daughter of a colonist. Chances are that she died in January or February of 1610, from either sickness or starvation, Horn said.

"The 'starving time' was brought about by a trifecta of disasters: disease, a serious shortage of provisions, and a full-scale siege by the Powhatans that cut off Jamestown from outside relief," he said in Wednesday's news release. "Survival cannibalism was a last resort; a desperate means of prolonging life at a time when the settlement teetered on the brink of extinction."

When Lord De La Warr and his relief party arrived in Jamestown in the spring of 1610, he ordered the "cleansing" of the ruined settlement. "It must have looked like a charnel house when he arrived," Horn said. That's probably how Jane's remains came to be deposited amid a trash heap in an abandoned cellar, he said.

Jane's legacy
Jamestown went on to become the Virginia Colony's capital from 1619 to 1699. In the late 17th century, the settlement was devastated by a series of fires. At the dawn of the 18th century, Virginia's capital was moved to Williamsburg, and old Jamestown faded away. Decades later, the descendants of Jamestown's settlers played their part in the creation of the United States of America.

Researchers have not matched up Jane's bones with a specific member of the Jamestown colony, and although DNA samples have been saved for future analysis, they say there's little hope of identifying modern relatives for comparative genetic testing. But the excavation continues, and Jane's remains provide graphic evidence of Jamestown's desperation.

Horn acknowledges that the story of Jane has a grisly fascination to it, but he says there's a broader significance as well. "It revolves around what it took to successfully establish European colonies in the New World," he told NBC News. "In the early phase of European colonization of the Americas, most colonies actually failed. They failed for the kinds of reasons that we discovered at Jamestown. ... Most colonies lasted no more than six to 12 months. What we're looking in the case of Jamestown is a remarkable story of survival and endurance."

More about Jamestown:

• 400-year-old seeds found in Jamestown
• 'New World' shows off a new Jamestown
• Colonial armor found in Jamestown pit

An exhibition that tells the story of Jane and the survival of Jamestown, England's first permanent settlement in America, is due to open May 3 at Historic Jamestowne in Virginia. Jane's bones will be put on exhibit temporarily, and eventually they will be "respectfully reinterred," Horn said. The facility has also produced a book and DVD on the subject, titled "Jane." However, details of the discovery have not yet been published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Frank Franklin II / AP file

A reconstructed Neanderthal skeleton, right, is on display near a modern human's skeleton, left, at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

By Jennifer Viegas
Discovery News

For ages, anthropologists have puzzled over Neanderthal and human brains, since they were the same size. If each species had comparable brain power, why did humans dominate?

A comparison of Neanderthal and human brains has revealed it was a matter of allocation: Neanderthal brains focused more on vision and movement, leaving less room for cognition related to social networking.

According to the study, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, bigger-eyed and larger-bodied Neanderthals required more brain space devoted to the visual system and basic body functions, leaving less area for what co-author Robin Dunbar called "the smart part."

He explained to Discovery News that this is "the part that is doing the creative thinking."

Eye sockets measured
Dunbar, a professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of Oxford, and colleagues Eiluned Pearce and Chris Stringer compared the skulls of 32 anatomically modern humans and 13 Neanderthals. The skulls date to 27,000 to 75,000 years ago. The researchers noticed that Neanderthals had significantly larger eye sockets.

The researchers next used the known relationship between the height of the eye socket and the size of visual brain areas in living primates to estimate how much of each brain was dedicated to visual processing. Once differences in body and visual system size were taken into account, the researchers could then compare how much of the brain was left over for other types of cognition.

It's clear that environmental differences affected the evolution of each species. The common ancestor of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens was Homo heidelbergensis. It had a bulkier body, as did the Neanderthals, but Homo heidelbergensis did not possess enlarged eyes.

"The large eyes (of Neanderthals) are purely an adaptation to low light levels, and long dark nights at higher latitudes outside the tropics," Dunbar said.

Flash interactive: Before and after humans

Neanderthals also tended to be shorter than humans, which again was an adaptation to colder climates. Shorter stature reduces heat loss through the extremities. Modern Eskimos exhibit some of this adaptation.

Neanderthals in Europe also "developed a very confrontational and dangerous style of hunting, and were very dependent on a heavy meat diet," Dunbar shared. "Modern humans (in Africa) developed the bow and arrow, as well as spear throwers, which allowed hunting at arms’ length and often focused on smaller prey."

As for what happened to the Neanderthals, some researchers believe that they were simply absorbed into the modern human population. There is evidence that, as numerous humans migrated north into Europe, they interbred with Neanderthals.

Social smarts
Another theory, supported by this new study, is that Neanderthals went extinct because they were less capable of forming larger social networks. Pearce theorized that "smaller social groups might have made Neanderthals less able to cope with the difficulties of their harsh Eurasian environments because they would have had fewer friends to help them out in times of need."

She continued, "Overall, differences in brain organization and social cognition may go a long way towards explaining why Neanderthals went extinct whereas modern humans survived."

Dunbar further thinks that new diseases brought in by humans could have hurt Neanderthals. He said, "It was clear that, by the end, they were struggling to maintain a foothold in Ice Age Europe, having been squeezed down into the southern appendages of Europe (in places like Spain and Italy)."

Clive Gamble, an expert on the archaeology of human origins and a professor at Southampton University, praised the new work. "This paper cracks a big problem in human evolution. Neanderthals had brains as big as ours, yet did not regularly produce the sorts of cultural stuff — art, ornamentation and complicated tools — that we take for granted ... Brains got bigger, but in different ways," Gamble said.

"I've long argued for social differences between Neanderthals and ourselves," Gamble concluded. "It doesn't make us better than them and it doesn’t confirm the age-old prejudices about stupid, brutish Neanderthals. What it does do, quite literally, is make us see them with different eyes."

More from Discovery News:

• Image gallery: Faces of our ancestors
• Humans vs. Neanderthals: How did we win?
• Mysterious new human co-existed with Neanderthals

Copyright 2013 Discovery Channel

Patrick Pleul / EPA

The inability to catch small prey, such as wild rabbits, may have contributed to Neanderthal extinction.

Neanderthals were big-game hunters who feasted on mammoth and rhino but didn’t or couldn’t eat smaller, leaner meat. Their picky diet — or limited hunting skills — could have made them vulnerable when mammal populations shrank and their favorite dinner became harder to find.

A broad survey of animal remains recorded at early human and Neanderthal sites across Spain, Portugal and France gives us new insight as to what humans and Neanderthals ate. One trend stuck out to scientists who assembled the data: Rabbit remains became much more popular at human sites just about the time that Neanderthals disappeared, about 30,000 years ago.

 Given how common bunnies would have been in that area, the trend hints that Neanderthals did not adapt their diet to include them. After all, the evidence suggests, early humans seem to have made the switch.

There’s no data to explain this trend, but there are theories. Neanderthals may have avoided rabbit dinners because they lacked the technology to catch them, says John Stewart, who studies fossil records and ancient climate at Bournemouth University.

“With modern humans, you see technology that allows them to catch smaller or faster-moving prey,” Stewart told NBC News. That  leads to the “strong possibility” that humans were more efficient than Neanderthals at catching smaller but faster animals. Stewart and his collaborators explain their findings in a paper in the Journal of Human Evolution.

Of course, Neanderthals didn’t just live in Iberia. And in n other parts of the world, there’s evidence to show that they were catching seals and fish and mussels, and even birds.

But Stewart believes that the rabbit diet story is an indication of challenges Neanderthals faced all over the world. “I think the rabbit was just a symptom [of their extinction] rather than the cause,” Stewart says. “Neanderthals were more vulnerable because they had less tricks up their sleeve, less breadth of possibilities.”

More about Neanderthal histories: 

• Neanderthal baby spawns viral video
• The real question: Who didn't have sex with the Neanderthals?
• Here's why creating a Neanderthal clone is a bad idea

Via New Scientist

Nidhi Subbaraman writes about science and technology. Follow on Twitter, Google+. 

Lauren Solomon / Nicholas Moore / iStockphoto

Researchers say that dogs' ability to digest starch was enhanced due to genetic changes that probably occurred in parallel with domestication thousands of years ago.

Like humans, dogs underwent genetic changes thousands of years ago to adapt to a diet with more starch, researchers report. They say the change suggests that the rise of agriculture and the domestication of dogs might have gone hand in hand — but it'll take further analysis to confirm the connection.

"All dogs studied have this change, which I'd say puts it at least a couple of thousand years back in time," lead author Erik Axelsson of Sweden's Uppsala University said in an email. "But we cannot prove that it coincided with the onset of agriculture. This is something we are continuing to work on now."

The genetic shift, reported in this week's issue of the journal Nature, emerged from a detailed, genome-wide search for differences between a group of 60 dogs and  a group of 12 wolves from around the world. Axelsson and his colleagues say this is the first such search ever done for dogs.

"Only some years ago, a study like this would have been impossible due to sequencing costs," Axelsson explained. "Now it is relatively cheap. We started this study late in 2009 — that is, these projects take time."

Co-evolution with humans
Dogs are thought to have diverged from their wolvish ancestors tens of thousands of years ago, helped along by their proximity to ancient humans. Some experts would even say that humans co-evolved with domesticated animals. Past research has shown that wild breeds such as silver foxes can be turned into docile doglike creatures over the course of just a few generations.

But what genetic changes accompanied domestication? That's what the dog-vs.-wolf comparison was all about: The international research team found 36 regions of the dog genome that showed signs of selective pressure, either because they were so different from the wolf genome, or because the genetic signature became so common among different breeds of dogs.

Nineteen of the regions had to do with nervous system function — for example, the ability to create new connections in the brain. "These findings support the hypothesis that selection for altered behavior was important during dog domestication," the researchers wrote. Other regions had to do with the binding between sperm and eggs, or anatomical structure.

Then there were 10 genes that related to starch digestion and fat metabolism. "We propose that genetic variants within these genes may have been selected to aid adaptation from a mainly carnivorous diet to a more starch-rich diet during dog domestication," Axelsson and his colleagues said.

The genetic changes enhanced a dog's ability to break down starch by secreting an enzyme known as amylase in the pancreas. Wolves don't secrete nearly as much amylase, and thus they don't tend to eat starchy foods.

Why dogs went for starch
Why would starch digestion play such a significant role in dog evolution? Researchers have previously suggested that dog domestication began when wolves were attracted to waste dumps near agricultural settlements in ancient times.

"A process of natural selection started in this new niche that favored wolves that were efficient at this process," Axelsson said. "Being an efficient scavenger included being less shy, so as not to waste energy on running away when humans approached. This idea is supported by our evidence of selection in nervous system development genes, as they are likely to have effects on behavior.

"A completely new piece to the puzzle is our finding of a more efficient starch digestion in dogs," he continued. "This could mean that efficient scavenging also included having an efficient system for processing starch. That is, only wolves that could make good use of the scarce and mixed leftovers survived to become the ancestors of dogs."

Axelsson noted that other researchers have seen signs of similar genetic changes in human populations, which apparently made it easier for ancient farmers to handle a starchier diet. "The change in humans is less obvious, which makes sense, considering we were omnivores rather than carnivores prior to the agricultural revolution," he said.

Thanks to the rapid advance of gene sequencing, similar studies can now be conducted not only for dogs, but for other domesticated animals as well. Axelsson and his colleagues conducted such a study relating to chicken domestication several years ago, and now that dogs have had their genomes done, cats can't be that far behind. "I would be surprised if people aren't working on that now," Axelsson said.

Axelsson said that he used to have a dog. ("Now, we have kids instead," he joked.)

"It definitely preferred meat, but would happily feast on, for instance, potatoes," Axelsson said. "This, by the way, is probably important to note — dogs still prefer meat, but during their evolutionary history it was crucial for their survival to adapt to a diet that included a lot of starch as well."

More about dog evolution:

• Dogs (not chimps) act most like humans
• Dogs and humans share DNA, thanks to viruses
• Gallery: How science measures up cats and dogs

In addition to Axelsson, the authors of "The Genomic Signature of Dog Domestication Reveals Adaptation to a Starch-Rich Diet" include Abhirami Ratnakumar, Maja-Louise Arendt, Khurram Maqbool, Matthew T. Webster, Michele Perloski, Olof Liberg, Jon M. Arnemo, Ake Hedhammar and Kerstin Lindblad-Toh.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

NGTV / Lion TV via PBS

UCLA Professor Jared Diamond has studied traditional cultures for decades, laying out his findings in the Pulitzer Prize-winning book "Guns, Germs and Steel" as well as "Collapse" and his just-published volume, "The World Until Yesterday."

In the wake of a high-wire "fiscal cliff" performance that wasn't exactly their finest hour, members of Congress would do well to learn a lesson from the tribes of New Guinea and the Amazon: Listen to your elders. At least that's the lesson passed along by UCLA Professor Jared Diamond, the author of "The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn From Traditional Societies?"

Diamond documented the reasons why European invaders overwhelmed less technologically advanced cultures in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, "Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies." He laid out cautionary tales of social breakdown in the follow-up book, "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed." In his newly published book, Diamond draws upon his decades of research in far-flung locales to lay out lessons for us less traditional types.

"Tribes constitute thousands of natural experiments in how to run a human society," he told a capacity crowd Thursday night during the kickoff of his international book tour at Town Hall Seattle.

Diamond says the useful findings from those experiments run a wide gamut, from the benefits of multilingualism to the right way to carry a baby ("vertically upright, facing forward"). But one of his biggest themes has to do with the way older people are treated, or mistreated. He noted that a Fijian friend was shocked to see how often America's senior citizens are shunted aside by the younger generation. And although some traditional societies have their own quirks about dealing with the aged — for example, strangling them when they become a liability — Diamond agrees that American attitudes need an adjustment.

Penguin

"The World Until Yesterday" is the latest book from Jared Diamond, a geography professor at UCLA.

"The lives of the elderly constitute a disaster area of modern American society," the 75-year-old Diamond said in Seattle. "We can do better."

He'd like to see senior citizens restored to the roles they have always held in traditional societies, but in a modern-day context: for example, as baby-sitters in a world where both parents work, or as fonts for the kind of wisdom you can't get through a Web search. He'd even like to see age given more respect on Capitol Hill, where the median age is 57 in the House and 62 in the Senate. That was the theme of my interview with Diamond on Thursday. Here's an edited version of the Q&A:

Cosmic Log: How would traditional societies deal with something like the fiscal cliff? What advice can you give to Congress for dealing with the kind of gridlock that we've seen?

Diamond: "The unrealistic answer is to say that the only senators and House members who are permitted to vote on fiscal-cliff issues are those who are over the age of 70. That's not realistic. But the realistic idea is to say that we should give disproportionate weight to the opinions of older politicians who have experienced a much wider range of financial conditions than have the young members of Congress. That is to say, we should listen to people who have gone through the Great Depression, the bubbles of the '80s, the soaring interest rates of the '70s. They've seen a variety of conditions, whereas younger people have seen only recent conditions, and they don't realize that things can be different. That's what comes out of traditional societies. 

"Most traditional peoples talk about 'tribal elders.' The reality is that the leaders of traditional peoples are always the older people. And the reason is, it's good. They have lots of lifetime experience under very different conditions.

"The same also applies to modern societies: Sometimes I'm asked to talk to hedge-fund groups. I'm struck by the fact that most of the people are in their 20s or 30s. There may be a few people in their 40s, and maybe a couple in their 50s. When you look at the statistics, about half of all hedge funds fail within the first five years, although many of them do spectacularly well for a couple of years. The reason is, the whiz kids are very good at algorithms that make money under good conditions. But they don't realize that conditions can be very different, that there are tough conditions — soaring interest rates, financial setbacks. So they don't have the long perspective. That's an example of how a long perspective is necessary for financial policy, just as it is for governing, for deciding about war and peace."

Q: Is there any institutional reform that can do that, or is it beyond modern society to get back to those ways?

A: "It's not beyond modern society, because if you look around at different modern societies — and I'm talking about rich industrial societies — some of them give a lot more deference and weight to older people than do others. The United States is an extreme in this respect. We are perhaps the modern rich society that has the biggest cult of youth. For example, when was the last time you saw a commercial with an 83-year-old raising a bottle of Coca-Cola? The Coke ads are all about 25-year-olds. That's our cult of youth. But in Europe, there is much more deference given to older people. In China, even more. In Japan, too, and in Mexico and Italy. So there's an area where the United States, in its own self-interest, can learn from the experience of its older people."

Q: I'm struck by one of the comments that a House Republican made during the fiscal-cliff deliberations, complaining about the "sleep-deprived octogenarians" in the Senate. ...

A: "Sure, but the octogenarians have had 80 years to see the advantages of taxes. Taxes are an investment, they're not money taken away from you. They're your own money that's being used for long-term purposes. Our taxes are paying for roads, they're paying for schools, they're paying for armed forces, they're paying for inspectors, they're paying for regulators. The more we put in, the more we get out. Now, this is not to deny that every government wastes some tax money. Nobody has figured out how to spend taxes in a way that there's no waste. But the basic mindset is that taxes bring benefits. The longer you live, the more you see those benefits."

Q: Is there an analog to taxation that has worked for traditional societies?

A: "There is, but it's not until you get to medium-to-large societies. Small traditional societies of a few dozen to a few hundred people really don't have anything like taxation. Once you get to a society of a few thousand people, where there's a chief — big enough that you can't have a face-to-face discussion, but you've got to have a chief — chiefs practice an early form of taxation. They require that the commoners turn over a fraction of their agricultural products to the chief. Part of that is used to support their own lifestyle, and part of that is also held in reserve to redistribute to the commoners in a time of famine. One could say that that's a precursor to state government taxation."

Q: Are there other things on your short list of lessons that could help break the societal gridlock we see today?

A: "Another whole area that's open for discussion is the area of conflict resolution. The American system of conflict resolution in the courts is a system of determining right and wrong, with winners and losers. But in traditional societies, conflict resolution has a different goal. The goal is to achieve and maintain peace between people who are going to have to deal with each other for the rest of their lives. The society is small, so you know everybody. In the United States, a big society, if you have a traffic accident, the other person is likely to be someone you never saw before and will never see again. So who cares whether they're unhappy with the result? But the reality is that anybody who's been involved with the American civil or criminal justice system knows that its goal is not to achieve reconciliation. And the result is emotional agony, often for the rest of one's life.

"It's particularly sad when that agony involves divorcing spouses, or so often it involves brothers and sisters, or parents and children who end up suing each other in inheritance disputes. That's because when you use courts and lawyers, the goal is not to achieve emotional clearance, but the goal is to decide right and wrong. That is another big subject area we could happily talk about for a few hours."

Q: Another big subject area would be how to deal with the emotional scars left by the string of mass shootings we've seen lately. Are there any lessons that can be drawn from traditional societies addressing that issue?

A: "My one-liner there would be the balance between individual interests and communal interests. The United States' laws provide that if an individual wants a gun, that individual is going to have a gun, even if that is bad for society as a whole. Today I'm talking from Seattle, which is 100 miles from the Canadian border. Here we have a neighbor that is as affluent as the United States, but has a different balance — with much more emphasis on communal interests and much less interest on individual rights. Among other things, Canadians do not feel that everybody should exercise their God-given right to carry a gun."

Think there's enough in what Diamond says to get a discussion going? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

More from Jared Diamond:

• Bilingualism is good for the brain
• Why the Navajo have thrived
• How to prevent a pandemic
• Video: Corporations vs. collapse

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.