ArticleScience advances2017
Prehistoric women's manual labor exceeded that of athletes through the first 5500 years of farming in Central Europe.
Article in Science advances, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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20 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- The utility of dried blood spot measurement of bone turnover markers in biological anthropology.American journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council · 2022Pooled it
- Biomechanical evidence for occupational specialization in Mesolithic-Neolithic hunter-gatherers from Zvejnieki, Latvia.Science advances · 2026Article
- Fixed and Fluid: The Two Faces of Gender Roles-A Combined Study of Activity Patterns and Burial Practices in the European Neolithic.American journal of biological anthropology · 2026Article
- Earliest evidence for intentional cremation of human remains in Africa.Science advances · 2026Article
- Evolutionary mismatch between stomach capacity and modern diets: Implications for obesity and metabolic disease.Evolution, medicine, and public health · 2026Review
- Testosterone mediates life-history trade-offs in female mammals.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2025Review
- Contemporary small-scale subsistence populations offer unique insights into human musculoskeletal health and aging.Science advances · 2024Review
- The evolutionary basis of elevated testosterone in women with polycystic ovary syndrome: an overview of systematic reviews of the evidence.Frontiers in reproductive health · 2024Review
- Multiproxy bioarchaeological data reveals interplay between growth, diet and population dynamics across the transition to farming in the central Mediterranean.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- From the Ground Up: A Multidisciplinary Approach to Past Fertility and Population Narratives.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2023Article
- A Comprehensive View of Frozen Shoulder: A Mystery Syndrome.Frontiers in medicine · 2021Review
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- Muscle force interacts with stature to influence functionally related polar second moments of area in the lower limb among adult women.American journal of physical anthropology · 2020Article
- Human athletic paleobiology; using sport as a model to investigate human evolutionary adaptation.American journal of physical anthropology · 2020Review
- Life History Transitions at the Origins of Agriculture: A Model for Understanding How Niche Construction Impacts Human Growth, Demography and Health.Frontiers in endocrinology · 2020Review
- Evolutionary Perspectives on the Developing Skeleton and Implications for Lifelong Health.Frontiers in endocrinology · 2020Review
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- Intensive terrestrial or marine locomotor strategies are associated with inter- and intra-limb bone functional adaptation in living female athletes.American journal of physical anthropology · 2019Article
- Variation in pelvic shape and size in Eastern European males: a computed tomography comparative study.PeerJ · 2019Article
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Abstract
The intensification of agriculture is often associated with declining mobility and bone strength through time, although women often exhibit less pronounced trends than men. For example, previous studies of prehistoric Central European agriculturalists (~5300 calibrated years BC to 850 AD) demonstrated a significant reduction in tibial rigidity among men, whereas women were characterized by low tibial rigidity, little temporal change, and high variability. Because of the potential for sex-specific skeletal responses to mechanical loading and a lack of modern comparative data, women's activity in prehistory remains difficult to interpret. This study compares humeral and tibial cross-sectional rigidity, shape, and interlimb loading among prehistoric Central European women agriculturalists and living European women of known behavior (athletes and controls). Prehistoric female tibial rigidity at all time periods was highly variable, but differed little from living sedentary women on average, and was significantly lower than that of living runners and football players. However, humeral rigidity exceeded that of living athletes for the first ~5500 years of farming, with loading intensity biased heavily toward the upper limb. Interlimb strength proportions among Neolithic, Bronze Age, and Iron Age women were most similar to those of living semi-elite rowers. These results suggest that, in contrast to men, rigorous manual labor was a more important component of prehistoric women's behavior than was terrestrial mobility through thousands of years of European agriculture, at levels far exceeding those of modern women.
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