Prehistoric Women Had Stronger Arms Than Modern Athletes

[Judi Lynn]

Bones from Europe show that women worked so hard during the dawn of farming they were almost uniformly buffer than today's elite rowers.

By Nadia Drake
PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 29, 2017

From planting crops and grinding grain to caring for domestic animals, prehistoric women performed so much manual labor that it left its mark on their bones.

A new study looked at remains from Neolithic, Bronze Age, and Iron Age cemeteries and compared them with bones from modern female athletes. The results show that prehistoric women were positively brawny—their arms were almost uniformly stronger than those of today’s champion rowers.

“This is the first paper that compares the bones of prehistoric women to those of living women, and it has allowed us to identify a hidden history of consistent and rigorous manual labor among women across thousands of years of farming,” says study coauthor Alison Macintosh of the University of Cambridge.

The study, published today in Science Advances, suggests that women were a driving force behind the development of agriculture during its earliest 6,000 years in Central Europe.

More:
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/11/prehistoric-women-manual-labor-stronger-athletes-science/

[Judi Lynn]

1. Bone Study Reveals Prehistoric Women Had Insanely Strong Arms

Stronger than elite athletes today.
MICHELLE STARR 30 NOV 2017

The arm bones of women who lived 7,000 years ago show an incredible level of strength - even higher than today's elite athletes. That's according to a first-ever study comparing prehistoric bones to those of living people.

The finding suggests a revision of history - the everyday lives of prehistoric women were filled with hard manual labour, rather than just sitting at home doing lighter domestic tasks while the men slogged.

Prior to the advent of writing, there are no clear records describing how our ancient ancestors lived. We have some artefacts, and rock art, and bones - and, as it turns out, those bones can tell us a lot.

"It can be easy to forget that bone is a living tissue, one that responds to the rigours we put our bodies through," said lead author Alison Macintosh of the University of Cambridge's Department of Archaeology and Anthropology.

More:
http://www.sciencealert.com/prehistoric-women-stronger-than-elite-rowers-manual-labour-anthropology

[Judi Lynn]

2. Strong women did a lot of the heavy lifting in ancient farming societies

Strong women did a lot of the heavy lifting in ancient farming societies
By Michael PriceNov. 29, 2017 , 2:00 PM

Forget about emotional labor. Women living 7000 years ago had to deal with another lopsided workload: farming. Prehistoric women shouldered a major share of the hoeing, digging, and hauling in early agricultural societies, according to a new study. Now, by analyzing the bones of these women, scientists have shown that their upper body strength surpassed even today’s elite female athletes. The findings refute popularly held notions that early agrarian women shunned manual labor in favor of domestic work, and they suggest that then—as now—a woman’s work was never done.

“People haven’t typically focused on females in this society, [but] it’s very important for understanding … the divisions of labor that exist today,” says Hila May, an anthropologist at Tel Aviv University in Israel who studies evolutionary anatomy, but was not involved in the new work. “I wish we could go back and ask people how they lived, but all we have is bone.”

Bones stretch and twist throughout the lifetime in response to repeated stresses like lifting, pulling, and running. When humans switched from a roving hunter-gatherer lifestyle to a more sedentary, farming-focused existence some 10,000 years ago, their bones followed suit: The rigid, bent shinbones of men found in central Europe between 5300 B.C.E. and 100 C.E.—shaped by muscles constantly on the run—became progressively straighter and less rigid as people farmed more and roved less. But women’s shinbones didn’t change much during this same period.

Some have put that down to prehistoric women’s focus on domestic tasks that required comparatively less strength. But Alison Macintosh, an anthropologist at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, thought there might be more to the story. “We felt it was likely a huge oversimplification to say [prehistoric women] were simply not doing that much, or not doing as much as the men, or were largely sedentary,” she says.

More:
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/11/strong-women-did-lot-heavy-lifting-ancient-agrarian-societies

[Judi Lynn]

3. Articles in Time, Newsweek:

Prehistoric Women Had Stronger Arms Than Competitive Rowers Today

http://time.com/5041744/prehistoric-women-arm-strength-bones/


SUPERSTRONG PREHISTORIC WOMEN WERE RESPONSIBLE FOR THE BIGGEST SHIFT IN EARLY HUMAN CIVILIZATION
BY KASTALIA MEDRANO ON 11/29/17 AT 2:00 PM

http://www.newsweek.com/superstrong-prehistoric-women-were-responsible-biggest-shift-early-human-724772?piano_t=1