- Genographic
Prehistoric Women Had Stronger Arms Than Modern Athletes
Bones from Europe show that women worked so hard during the dawn of farming they were almost uniformly buffer than today's elite rowers.
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,
