The lost colony of Roanoke Island is a cap­ti­vat­ing mys­tery that many Amer­i­cans learn about as school­child­ren in his­to­ry class. An entire colony of peo­ple seem­ing­ly van­ished in the 1580s, a cou­ple decades after the first per­ma­nent Euro­pean set­tle­ment was estab­lished in North Amer­i­ca. The only remain­ing clue they left behind was the word “Croa­toan” carved on a tree. Var­i­ous the­o­ries abound­ed, includ­ing that they were killed by Native Amer­i­cans, Spaniards, or an out­break of dis­ease, or that the set­tlers assim­i­lat­ed into dif­fer­ent Native Amer­i­can com­mu­ni­ties, but no defin­i­tive answer has been found.