A woman from 7,000 years ago suggests that gender was not an immovable barrier

For decades, our vision of European prehistory has been dominated by a fairly rigid idea regarding the division of labor in communities: men were assigned certain tasks and women others. However, bones have a fascinating habit of disproving our prejudices, as has now happened after analyzing some human remains found in Hungary.

What has been seen. This new analysis of human remains Dating back to more than 7,000 years ago, it has revealed an older woman buried not only with typically “masculine” grave goods, but also with marks on her bones that show that she did the same physical work as them. Something that has marked a before and after in gender roles in prehistory.

The rule and the exception. To understand the magnitude of the find, an international research team thoroughly analyzed 125 adult skeletons which came from different cemeteries in Hungary. Here the researchers already knew that there were structured gender norms, since the funerary “law” was very clear, indicating that men were buried lying on their right side and accompanied by polished stone tools.

In contrast, women stood on their left side and their trousseau was usually composed of belts made of shells. Up until this point, everything seemed to fit into a perfect binary system, until researchers came across the skeleton of an elderly woman. And, unlike the rest, she had been buried with polished stone tools, the classic “masculine” status symbol of her culture.

They went further. If the grave goods on this corpse were already an anomaly by the standards of the time, the biomechanical analysis of the skeleton ended up surprising the scientists. In this case, the researchers did not limit themselves to looking at what objects accompanied the dead, but they crossed these data with the patterns of physical activity imprinted on the bones, such as the natural wear and tear of the different parts of the bones.

Basically, the bones adapt and deform according to the postures and loads that we endure throughout our lives and that is why they can give us a lot of long-term information about our jobs. Here the researchers discovered that the men of this community tended to have marks associated with prolonged kneeling and intensive use of their arms, probably due to the use of specific tools or carrying work. Something that women did not have because they did not carry out those tasks.

The surprise. Here the study skeleton that attracted so much attention revealed the same bone marks and joint wear resulting from kneeling as the men had. In this way, not only was this woman buried as a man, but she lived, worked, and moved like one of them.

Neolithic genre. This study brings to the table a fascinating conclusion: Neolithic societies did have marked gender roles and a structured division of labor, but it was not something set in stone that ‘condemned’ a person to a job for being a man or a woman.

As science now points out, the roles were “generalized but flexible.” This means that the fact that this community has decided to bury a woman with the honors of a man, recognizing the role she played in life, shows that in Europe seven thousand years ago there was room for exception.

Images | engin akyurt

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