Prehistoric women's manual labor exceeded that of athletes through the first 5500 years of farming in Central Europe.

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

SUBMITTER: Macintosh AA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5710185 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature