Tilling soil and grinding grain for hours gave prehistoric women incredibly stronger arms than living female rowing champions, a Cambridge study has found. The findings suggest a “hidden history” of gruelling manual labour performed by women that stretched across millennia, researchers said. “This is the first study to actually compare prehistoric female bones to those of living women,” said Alison Macintosh, from the University of Cambridge in the UK. The Neolithic women analysed in the study (from 7,400- 7,000 years ago) 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 bones strengths of modern women were compared to those of women from early Neolithic agricultural eras through to farming communities of the Middle Ages.

Source: Hindustan Times November 30, 2017 10:52 UTC