Skulls from a forensic anthropology lab.
Image: David Hunt, North Carolina State University
Stone Age farmers lived through routine violence, and women weren't spared from its toll, a new study finds.
The analysis discovered that up to 1 in 6 skulls exhumed in Scandinavia from the late Stone Age — between about 6,000 and 3,700 years ago — had nasty head injuries. And contrary to findings from mass gravesites of the period, women were equally likely to be victims of deadly blows, according to the study published in the February issue of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.
Ancient pastoralists
Linda Fibiger, an archaeologist at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, and her colleagues focused on the late Stone Age, when European hunter-gatherers had transitioned into farming or herding animals.
Mass graves unearthed from that time in Talheim and Eulau, Germany, contained mostly males who had died in violent conflicts. As such, researchers had thought women were spared from conflicts due to their potential childbearing value, Fibiger told LiveScience.
But looking only at the aftermath of big, bloody conflicts can obscure the day-to-day realities of Neolithic farmers.
"It would be like only looking at a war zone to assess violence," Fibiger said. "That's not going to tell you what's going on in your neighborhood."
Routine violence
To see what more humdrum days looked like for these Stone Age farmers, the team assessed 478 skulls from collections throughout Sweden and Denmark from between 3900 B.C. and 1700 B.C. They distinguished bumps due to falls or accidents from violent wounds, which might leave evidence such as an "axe-shaped hole in the skull," Fibiger said. [Fight, Fight, Fight: The History of Human Aggression]
Nearly 10 percent of the Swedish skulls exhibited signs of violent injury, and nearly 17 percent of the Danish skulls had such wounds. Men had more nonfatal injuries, but women were just as likely as men to have lethal head wounds — which can be identified because they never healed.
That suggests these ancient herders routinely experienced violence, likely due to raids, family feuds, or other daily skirmishes with competing groups, Fibiger said.
Poor fighters
It's not clear why women were frequent victims of violence.
Domestic violence could be a factor, but proving it requires looking for repeat injuries and wounds to the ribs and torso, Fibiger said. Given that skulls and skeletons are jumbled up at these sites, and many skeletons weren't preserved, that's not possible, Fibiger said.
More likely is that women suffered fatal injuries, because they couldn't fight ferociously in raids, she told Live Science.
Men may have trained from a young age to fight, whereas women were probably tasked with child rearing.
That would have slowed them down, "because you're probably going to try and protect your children rather than being able to properly defend yourself," Fibiger said.
The findings are impressive, said Christian Meyer, an anthropology doctoral candidate at the University of Mainz in Germany, who was not involved in the study.
"It's one of the first that really looks at a really large sample size, and it draws from a larger region," Meyer said.
Analyzing so many Stone Age skulls allows researchers to quantitatively compare rates of such violence throughout Europe at the time.
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6 Comments
Add CommentIs it possible to determine the age of these women. Maybe only older women, past the menopause, were killed
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI don't know why my earlier post should have been deleted (something to the effect of 'ban clubs'), as it was intended to relate the modern propensity to blame violence on firearms rather than the perpetrator - to the stereotypical club-carrying cave-man holding his conquest by the hair.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Domestic violence could be a factor, but proving it requires looking for repeat injuries and wounds to the ribs and torso..."
"More likely is that women suffered fatal injuries, because they couldn't fight ferociously in raids..."
These are absurd denials of the unfortunate role of violence and the propensity for male physical domination of women in the sexual relations of our species. Why is a domestic violence explanation dismissed for lack of proof while an unsupported and IMO unlikely alternative offered in its stead? What evidence indicates that these injured women died in raids?
Contradicting this assertion, the article states that:
"They distinguished bumps due to falls or accidents from violent wounds, which might leave evidence such as an "axe-shaped hole in the skull."" This seems to indicate that those who died of injuries did not die from raids!
This frankly reminds me more of feminist revisionist history than archaeological science. Contemporary domestic violence should not be ignored - nor should it be written out of history on scant evidence!
Happy Valentine's day!
Read the crime reports today and not much has changed.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Equally as likely?" Try "equally likely." Is there any hope left for the world when the cancer of defining deviancy down spreads to scientific writing?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI abhor this kind of extrapolation. First of all, this is a localized dig, the title implies it is a world wide finding. And, ugh, anyways, it is interesting but it smacks of arguments as to whether or not dinosaurs were hot or cold blooded. In other words, there just isn't enough evidence to say much of anything. So sure, blame it on 'abusive stone age men' or 'weak women', ideas never established but found instead inside scientifically proven sitcoms like the Simpsons or the Honeymooners.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe Bible describes one situation where David destroyed everyone in a city. He did not want a single witness left alive. In other situations the women were left alive. In other situations the women and children. In yet other situations, only the fighting age men died. The Biblical record describes a variety of patterns occurring among a stone age culture. (The Egyptians and Philistines had entered the copper and bronze ages and would soon enter the iron ages. Only Saul and Jonathan in Israel had swords. David would get one from Goliath. The rest of Israel would remain stone age for many more years.)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTo take one Scandinavian graveyard and extrapolate all stone age cultural practices from it does not make sense.