A recent study in Science Advances is changing the story of how some of North America's earliest European settlers used animals. "While Spanish colonists brought horses to the Caribbean decades earlier, settlement of the English colony at Jamestown, Virginia, was among the first dispersals of horses to the eastern seaboard," the researchers wrote. They analyzed centuries-old animal bones from Jamestown and found that those colonists brought not only horses but also a donkey to the colony—despite the lack of any written record of donkeys in ship manifests or official reports.
The research team, led by John Krigbaum at the University of Florida and William Taylor at the University of Colorado Boulder, used radiocarbon dating and DNA analysis to link these animal remains to Jamestown's "Starving Time" during the winter of 1609–1610, when food shortages pushed colonists to desperation. Evidence from the bones—including cut and chop marks and signs of cooking—suggests that both horses and donkeys were eaten during this crisis. The study notes they detected "previously undocumented levels of intensive processing and consumption of domestic equids ... with most elements split open to extract even the minutest nutritional resources, including dental pulp."
Further analysis of the donkey bones, including tooth enamel isotopes and DNA, indicates the animal didn't come from Britain. Instead, its likely origins were Iberia, West Africa, or possibly even Trinidad and Tobago, suggesting colonists might have acquired the donkey during their Atlantic crossing. As a press release notes, "The team's work is a testament to the vast amount of information researchers can glean from just a small collection of centuries-old animal bones."
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