[HN Gopher] Researchers discover evidence in the mystery of Amer...
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Researchers discover evidence in the mystery of America's 'Lost
Colony'
Author : ryan_j_naughton
Score : 31 points
Date : 2025-06-08 21:46 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.foxnews.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.foxnews.com)
| duxup wrote:
| The experience of early colonists is so fascinating. Some of
| these colonies were very tenuous and seemed very unprepared.
| codingdave wrote:
| Not unlike youth in our current society who leave home then
| bounce around from one place to another until they find the
| spot they want to settle in for a while.
|
| I mean sure, colonists from hundreds of years ago are different
| than young adults of today.... but the tenuous nature, in
| general, of people out exploring the world for a new home is
| unsurprising.
| duxup wrote:
| No I don't think they are anything alike.
| dentemple wrote:
| Even today, with modern information available to us, people
| still woefully underestimate what it would take to live in a
| true wilderness.
| lazystar wrote:
| I've got a great example of this. I'm renting a house that
| provides a gas powered lawnmower for tenants to use, and I've
| elected to just let the grass grow because I have no idea how
| to use the thing
| rpcope1 wrote:
| Are you joking or something? It's just check the gas and
| oil, hold down the brake lever on the handle, pull the
| crank a few times and away you go. Maybe it's old and has a
| fuel bulb or a choke, or fancy and has a transmission and
| the lever to engage it, but it's really not complicated at
| all.
| floren wrote:
| Now look, there's debates to be had about whether or not
| lawns are good idea, or how long grass should grow, etc.
| but there's no excuse for not figuring out how a gas mower
| works. I could tell you here in a paragraph or you could
| watch a 30 minute Youtube which will contain in it
| _somewhere_ the 1 minute of actual instructions you need.
| It 's a pretty damn simple system.
| jf22 wrote:
| The colonists didn't have anything near this level of
| technology though...
| pizzafeelsright wrote:
| Lazy,
|
| You cannot live this way. I can walk you through anything
| related to home care.
| lazystar wrote:
| just anxious. i live pretty remote; if i get hurt and
| cant get to a phone, no one will find me until my lease
| expires. one of the downsides of auto payments i think.
| pizzafeelsright wrote:
| use age1s6cz86s99unkfm2sqy045w5w79n8lyyulwu9qy3gkaeydmexw
| v5qvkh2pp reply with your contact if you want help.
| yawgmoth wrote:
| Adjust the height to the highest setting.
|
| Put gas in it. If there's a soft rubber thing near the gas,
| hit it twice to provide some fuel but no more as you risk
| "flooding" the engine.
|
| Hold down any handle at the top of the mower, often the
| thing will require you to manually hold it down during
| start and all operations.
|
| Look for the starter pull. It's often on the right, on the
| motor or mower handles. It's a piece of plastic attached to
| a cable. Give it a yank with a full follow through. It
| doesn't have to be maximum effort but too gentle won't work
| either.
| GlenTheMachine wrote:
| The Jamestown colonists starved to death literally living on
| the shore of the most productive marine environment on earth.
| They didn't know how to care for the fishing nets, so they
| rotted, and then didn't know how to fix them.
|
| The issue was that many of the colonists were second sons of
| relatively wealthy families, and weren't all that familiar with
| fishing or farming. The first son inherited everything, and the
| second son had to make his way in the world, and colonizing was
| an enticing prospect for making your fortune. Poorer families,
| at the very early stages, weren't sending their sons on these
| ventures because they needed the labor at home.
|
| https://historicjamestowne.org/wp-content/uploads/Subsistenc...
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| As someone who grew up next to Jamestown, I can add some
| context.
|
| John Smith, one of Jamestown's leaders, was not from a
| wealthy or privileged background. "The issue" may have been
| less about class and more about poor organization, leadership
| and unrealistic expectations.
|
| Fishing and farming skills also deserve context. The soil
| around Jamestown was marshy and brackish, unsuitable for
| traditional English farming methods. Yes there were lots of
| fish but they only ran seasonally (sturgeon etc). The
| "starving time" you are referencing was made worse by a
| drought and cutoff trade with the indians
| elevation wrote:
| The soil may have been brackish, but this wasn't their main
| setback.
|
| The Jamestown colonists didn't even attempt to plant crops
| for several years after their arrival. Their first ship
| brought jewelers and smiths to work the gold they assumed
| they'd find, but didn't have a real plan for agriculture.
| The majority died of starvation and disease, but the
| survivors were sustained by meager leftover travel supplies
| from newly arriving ships, and by raiding neighboring
| natives for their corn.
|
| Less than a decade later, separatist Pilgrims landed in New
| England, and by contrast, grew crops immediately, and
| cultivated diplomatic relations with their neighbors. The
| Pilgrims settled in a higher latitude with a shorter
| growing season, but during their first drought they had
| already stored enough supplies to share with local natives.
|
| Jamestown could have been on a similar footing if they'd
| prioritized survival and diplomacy over finding treasure
| for the crown, the chartering company, and themselves.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| >were very tenuous and seemed very unprepared.
|
| Old world politics at the time explain most of this. Some of
| the english colonies were, ugh, rushed and less well funded
| than they would have been under ideal situations.
|
| This is basically the same reason they didn't look too hard to
| see what happened to the Roanoke colony.
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| How would you have prepared, were you in their shoes? Roanoke
| Island was first landed in 1585. The only foreknowledge of the
| area would have been wildly embellished and optimistic reports
| (competing for financing, royal favor and prestige) from the
| likes of Spanish and French expeditions, or Sir Francis Drake.
| This was mostly limited to coastal recon and said little of the
| dangers of malaria, indian politics, seasonality, etc.
|
| For example, the Amadas-Barlowe Expedition (1584) described
| Roanoke Island as "the most plentiful, sweet, fruitful and
| wholesome of all the world," with fertile soil, abundant
| wildlife, and friendly natives
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| If this is the case then there should be DNA evidence as well.
| Presuming that assimilation led to procreation.
| ilamont wrote:
| 400-year-old traces would be hard to detect owing to admixture,
| but if they could find identical-by-descent segments that would
| be very compelling, as the research into Native American traces
| found in Polynesian populations shows:
|
| https://gizmodo.com/native-americans-voyaged-to-polynesia-lo...
| lipowitz wrote:
| If Croatoan ceremonies didn't involve cremation it could be
| quite a bit easier.. I don't really see the article's
| evidence as very compelling. Many things may have been
| collected from the site and ultimately discarded in the trash
| heaps without the proposed integration.
| card_zero wrote:
| There's no descendants, bones, or other source of DNA known to
| belong to the colonists to work from.
| exe34 wrote:
| The way it works for molecular phylogeny is that you try to
| find things that are conserved. E.g. if you find a small
| village in Europe where people haven't moved around much and
| you find a rare mutation that is also present in one other
| part of the US, then you might be able to put some numbers on
| the likelihood that this mutation/gene came from a the
| original place. Find a second gene, find some artefacts from
| the right place/time and you have an emerging picture.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| The English have good records. We could perhaps find the
| decendents of relatives who stayed put and then find their
| "hey you guys seem to have more DNA in common than you ought
| to" counterparts of native american heritage.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| The native population of the area was well mixed with European
| and African genes in the 18th and 19th century. It would be
| very difficult to determine whether there was also mixture in
| the late 16th / early 17th century.
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| TLDR: the Roanoke Colony moved to Hatteras Island.
|
| From a backbarrier island to a barrier island (towards the sea)
| derbOac wrote:
| I have family in the area and my impression from archeological
| and historical news, articles and books from there is there isn't
| really one definitive moment where everyone in the colony just
| kind of up and left to the same place at the same time. If I had
| to bet, there was a kind of gradual process of degradation of the
| colony and some went one way and others went another.
|
| This was interesting to read and it seems kind of definitive, and
| my impression is it's consistent with other things I've read. But
| if I recall correctly, there's also evidence from other sites
| that some from the colony also went elsewhere.
|
| It seems reasonable to me to think that if things were breaking
| down, there might be differences of thought or preference about
| where to go, and that they might have also assumed they weren't
| totally cutting off contact from one another, being in the same
| area.
| the_real_cher wrote:
| Where did they go?
|
| Were there other settlements ?
| bluGill wrote:
| I'm not convinced. The reason the natives didn't have the ability
| to forge iron was more related to there were no good ore deposits
| to work with. If you are intelligent and see a blacksmith work a
| few times you can figure out how to forge iron if given some - it
| is a lot of effort and your first attempts will not be good, but
| if something is broken you don't lose anything by putting it in a
| fire and attempting to fix it. (a camp fire gets plenty hot for
| blacksmithing - just wait for the coals and then blow on them)
| However the lack of quality ores that were easy to get at meant
| that they didn't have any metal working in that part of the world
| and so of course they wouldn't know how to do it. Iron would have
| made the natives life much better if they had it, and they were
| smart enough to figure out how to work it from scratch if they
| had it (they have centuries to learn just like the rest of us)
|
| Which is to say the facts are fit equally well by saying "The
| natives saw blacksmiths work in the colonists. So when aliens
| took the colonists way in a spaceship after they collected the
| iron which remained and learned to forge them into useful tools
| for themselves". Ridiculous of course, but it fits the facts just
| as well.
| vpribish wrote:
| keep that toxic shitbag of a media network off of this site.
| Fairburn wrote:
| Get that fox crap outa our News.
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(page generated 2025-06-11 23:01 UTC)