Bone Study Shows Prehistoric Women Had Really Strong Arms

Scientists have found that prehistoric women had stronger arms compared to women, including semi-elite female rowers.

This discovery was made after inspecting the bones that belonged to 94 women who lived in Central European farming communities from 5300 BCE to about 850 AD.

The ancients’ stronger arms were possibly because the women — who were farmers — engaged in hard work like harvesting, tilling the soil and grinding grain using hands. They also probably started their farm work at a very young age, as per the study which was published in the journal Science Advances on Nov. 29.

The findings reveal that in prehistoric times, the hard physical labor wasn’t entirely done by men.

Women used to work long hours and were a significant "driving force" behind the socio-cultural development of agrarian communities for over 6,000 years, according to the study’s lead author, Alison Macintosh.

Macintosh and her team scanned the shinbones and the upper arm bones of 94 women who lived from the Neolithic to the Middle Ages and also bones of 83 living women in Cambridge. These latter either practiced different sports like running, rowing and soccer or they led a sedentary lifestyle.

The scientists then compared the prehistoric bones with the ones from the modern women.

They found that Neolithic women who lived about 7,000 years in the past had arms stronger by 11 to 16 percent compared to modern rowers — Neolithic refers to the period in prehistory starting around 10,200 BC and ended sometime between 4500 BC and 2000 BC.

As for women who lived in the Bronze age (from about 4,000 years back), their arms were found to have been stronger by 9 to 13 percent in comparism with present-day rowers.

"Now we can kind of see, actually there’s these thousands of years of rigorous manual labor that had been completely underestimated," Macintosh who is an anthropologist at the Cambridge University told the Verge. "It’s really important to be able to understand the contribution of women."

To understand how women and men behaved in the past, and also the roles that each sex played in society, scientists inspect archaeological evidence — like old skeletons.

Bones could be considered a hard drive that contains a whole lot of information on nourishment and also physical activities the person has engaged in throughout his/her life. And if you worked a lot physically, you would end up having not only stronger muscles but also stronger bones.

"Your bones are really an excellent biological record of your life," the Verge quoted Brigitte Holt as having said. Holt is a biological anthropologist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She wasn’t involved with the research.

Studies done in the past on prehistoric bones revealed that once hunter-gatherers shifted to an agrarian lifestyle and settled down, their legs became weaker while their arms became stronger. This happened because they ceased wandering as much as they used to (giving lesser exercise to their legs) and tended to livestock and crops (chores that involved using the hands more).

According to Macintosh, such changes were even more pronounced in men compared with women. Part of the reason for this is that the way men’s bones respond to physical activity is different from how women’s bones would respond to the same.

For this reason, comparing men’s with women’s bones is hardly a reasonable way to gauge how much work men did as compared to women.