Prehistoric women that lived in Central Europe during the first 5,500 years of farming had stronger upper arms than living female rowing champions, according to a new study.

“This is the first study to actually compare prehistoric female bones to those of living women,” said study lead author Dr. Alison Macintosh, from the Department of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge, UK.

“By interpreting women’s bones in a female-specific context we can start to see how intensive, variable and laborious their behaviors were, hinting at a hidden history of women’s work over thousands of years.”

Dr. Macintosh used a small CT scanner to analyze the arm (humerus) and leg (tibia) bones of living women who engage in a range of physical activity: from runners, rowers and footballers to those with more sedentary lifestyles.

The bones strengths of modern women were compared to those of women from early Neolithic agricultural eras through to farming communities of the Middle Ages.

“The Neolithic women analyzed in the study (5400-5000 BC) had similar leg bone strength to modern rowers, but their arm bones were 11-16% stronger for their size than the rowers, and almost 30% stronger than typical Cambridge students,” the researchers said.

“The loading of the upper limbs was even more dominant in the study’s Bronze Age women (2300-1500 BC), who had 9-13% stronger arm bones than the rowers but 12% weaker leg bones.”

A possible explanation for this fierce arm strength is the grinding of grain.

“We can’t say specifically what behaviors were causing the bone loading we found. However, a major activity in early agriculture was converting grain into flour, and this was likely performed by women,” Dr. Macintosh said.

“For millennia, grain would have been ground by hand between two large stones called a saddle quern. In the few remaining societies that still use saddle querns, women grind grain for up to five hours a day.”

“The repetitive arm action of grinding these stones together for hours may have loaded women’s arm bones in a similar way to the laborious back-and-forth motion of rowing.”

However, the authors suspect that women’s labor was hardly likely to have been limited to this one behavior.

“Prior to the invention of the plough, subsistence farming involved manually planting, tilling and harvesting all crops,” Dr. Macintosh said.

“Women were also likely to have been fetching food and water for domestic livestock, processing milk and meat, and converting hides and wool into textiles.”

“The variation in bone loading found in prehistoric women suggests that a wide range of behaviors were occurring during early agriculture.”

“In fact, we believe it may be the wide variety of women’s work that in part makes it so difficult to identify signatures of any one specific behavior from their bones.”

“Our findings suggest that for thousands of years, the rigorous manual labor of women was a crucial driver of early farming economies,” said study senior author Dr. Jay Stock, from the University of Cambridge and Western University in London, Ontario, Canada.

“The research demonstrates what we can learn about the human past through better understanding of human variation today.”

The findings appear today in the journal Science Advances.

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Alison A. Macintosh et al. Prehistoric women’s manual labor exceeded that of athletes through the first 5500 years of farming in Central Europe. Science Advances, published online November 29, 2017; doi: 10.1126/sciadv.aao3893