Article: Columbus's lost crew had an African connection; Chemical analysis of the teeth and skeletons buried at the La Isabela settlement in the Dominican Republic has yielded surprising results, writes Kari Lydersen.(News)

The first planned colonial town in the New World was founded in 1494 when about 1 200 of Christopher Columbus's crew members from the 17 ships that made up his second journey to the Americas settled on the north coast of what is now the Dominican Republic.

Beset by mutiny, mismanagement, hurricanes and disease, the settlement of La Isabela lasted only a few years.

The ruins remained largely intact until the 1950s, when a local official reportedly misunderstood the order from dictator Rafael Trujillo to clean up the site in preparation for visiting dignitaries, and had them mostly bulldozed into the sea. Little remained but the skeletons below ground in ...

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