FARM ARMS
Ancient farm women in Central Europe labored so vigorously at grinding grain, tilling soil and other daily tasks that the women’s average upper-arm strength surpassed that of top female rowers today, a new study finds.
In the early stages of farming more than 7,000 years ago, women engaged in a wide array of physically intense activities that were crucial to village life but have gone largely unnoticed by scientists, conclude biological anthropologist Alison Macintosh of the University of Cambridge and colleagues.
“Women’s labor provided the driving force behind the expansion of agricultural economies in the past,” Macintosh says.
Previous investigations underestimated the intensity of ancient farm women’s manual labor, the researchers contend online November 29 in Science Advances. Those studies compared women’s bones with those of male contemporaries and men today. But due to hormonal and other biological factors, male bones generally undergo faster and more beneficial shape changes in response to regular physical exertion than female bones do. To better gauge how women’s skeletal strength has changed over time, Macintosh’s team compared bones of ancient farm women with those of living women, including different types of athletes.
Evidence that ancient farm women in Central Europe had especially strong arms suggests the women were largely responsible for grinding grain. This task involved using a handheld stone to crush grain on large, curved slabs of stone.
This example of these grinding stones, called a saddle quern, comes from a 5,000- to 6,000-year-old farming site in Wales.
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