Anonymous wrote:In addition to many of the other mysteries posted previously, two from history have always really interested me:
1 - What really happened to Virginia Dare and the lost colony at Roanoke? I remember learning about this in grade school.
2 - What really happened to the family of Tsar Nicholas II - most notably the children....Anastasia. Did any of them survive being shot? If not, where did they bury the other bodies?
#2 has been solved. The Russians found the bones of Nicholas, Alexandra, and three of the daughters buried in the woods in 1991. They found the bones of the fourth daughter and Tsarevich Alexei nearby in 2007. DNA testing using comparison samples from known family members conclusively established that the bones of all seven of them were in those graves and they were all killed that night in 1918. Russian scientists were even able to isolate and sequence DNA from Alexei's X chromosome and determine that he suffered from severe hemophilia B. If it weren't for the fact that it arose from a 13-year-old child being brutally murdered, it would be an insanely cool piece of science.